The Jobs AI Will Replace

Do you have the kind of job where an important client calls you up and asks a really important question that makes your head spin?  You know… the kind of question that could be answered with a rigorous 20-minutes-of-googling, an even more rigorous 20-minutes-of-reading-4-or-5-of -those-search-results, and a brutal 20-minutes-of-summarizing-what-the-internet-has-to-say… before you submit it to your boss in a shiny red binder with the label “Top Secret.” 

That job… that hour… is the one everyone is afraid ChatGPT will eliminate.

[Alright Grandpa, the floor is yours. “Now, some skeptics say that kind of job doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. But I’m so old that my baby pictures are lithographs by my great uncle Alois Senefelder, who accidentally discovered that he could duplicate his pictures by writing them in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone.  Anywho, I remember all the jobs that were lost when the corporate world switched from Yahoo to Google.  I remember when they didn’t even call it Google.  It was called zillion.com… because *that* was the biggest number there was… there ever would be. And then that Napster fellow said to Steve Jobs, “don’t call it thefacebook!  You don’t need the “the”... just call it Google.”   And bam!  Every PhD student in the world got a no-show job in beautiful Mountain View, California.  And what did they know about disruption?  They weren’t even born yet!  Once Google became a thing, there were entire departments in banks that disappeared overnight.  Departments with fancy names like “Structured Browsing” and “Derivative Summarization.”  OVERNIGHT!  I remember the news cameras waiting outside corporate headquarters getting shots of disheveled young men, wearing ascots, with onions tied to their belts, walking out holding cardboard boxes filled with their office plants… with names like Chaddington or Manfredlington.  No.  Not their plants.  Who the hell names plants? Focus!”]

Well, I.. for one… want that kind of job– the kind that everyone is afraid ChatGPT will eliminate.  

But that job doesn’t exist.

The Jobs that AI Will Actually Replace

Commercial art.

Sports writing.

Copywriting.

Editing.

Color commentating on live events, including news.

Data entry.

Call center work… or more broadly, any customer service inquiries that require factual answers more than the emotional intelligence (and humanity) that it takes to calm an irate caller… Turing test be damned.

Banking operations.

Legal research.

Most everything a CFO does.

Offshore/waterfall coding.

Non-data-center-related production services.

Most marketing.

Romance novel writing.

Music production.

Film production.

TV and film acting.

All shows on the Hallmark network.

And the Biggest Opportunity AI Represents?

Three words: commercializing proprietary data.

Two ways.  

1) Efficiency creation… because you can’t automate the tribal knowledge needed in the roles above… unless you tap into proprietary datasets… the time-and-motion data that lurks within corporate workflow systems… mostly as data exhaust.

2) New market creation… because the products that data will help create– for instance, in risk management, legal, compliance, pricing, corporate restructuring, performance– and it’s worth calling out that my examples are anchored in what I know… banking… well, those products have only ever been twinkles in business eyes… waiting for the promise of big data… then waiting for the promise of cloud-based data infrastructure… and now waiting for the promise of large language models (LLM).

If you’re one of those business folks, you have some serious learning to do.  And it’s all tied to how to train an LLM with data that matters… yours, not the internet’s.

And let me pop one persistent myth.  The magic of ChatGPT wasn’t accomplished by tech going off and doing tech things.  There was a ton of manual training.  So… don’t throw the dream over the wall to your tech partner.  She’s going to need a lot more than just “data scientists.” 

Together, you're going to have to create jobs that haven’t existed.

Don’t worry.  It’ll be easy.  I asked a GPT-4 model about the roles you’ll need to create that don't yet exist.  They're something called a "404 error."