The short answer
Probably not the whole job. What is clearly happening is that parts of many jobs are being automated, which changes what the job consists of rather than removing it. Predictions of total numbers have a poor track record in both directions, and anyone quoting a precise figure for your occupation is guessing.
Tasks change before jobs do
Most jobs are a bundle of tasks. AI is currently good at some of them — first drafts, summaries, routine correspondence, sorting information — and poor at others.
So the visible effect is a change in the mix. The drafting takes less time, the checking takes more, and the part requiring judgement or a relationship becomes a larger share of the day.
That is a real change and worth preparing for. It is a different thing from the job disappearing, which is what the headlines usually imply.
PIXEL / THE COACH
I am good at the first ten per cent of most jobs and hopeless at the last ten. Unfortunately for the headlines, the last ten is usually what the job is actually for.
Why the predictions disagree so wildly
Forecasts vary enormously, and the reason is that they are measuring different things. Some count tasks that could technically be automated. Others count jobs likely to be automated in practice. Those are very different numbers.
History also complicates it. Automation has historically removed some roles, changed many more, and created others that nobody forecast. Cash machines did not end bank employment, though the prediction was reasonable at the time.
And adoption is slower than capability. Organisations move at the speed of their processes, their training and their nerve, not at the speed of a demonstration.
Where the pressure is showing first
- Most exposed
- Routine writing, first-line support, basic research, simple data tidying.
- Changing shape
- Professional work with a large drafting component — law, marketing, parts of software.
- Least exposed
- Anything physical, anything needing presence, and anything where accountability is the product.
The shape of what employers report rather than a forecast. Exposure is not the same as replacement.
What is actually worth doing
Learn the tools in your own field well enough to have a view. The people finding this comfortable are not the most technical; they are the ones who tried it on their real work and formed an opinion.
Get good at the part it cannot do. Judgement, context, relationships and accountability are all becoming more valuable, not less, precisely because the drafting got cheap.
And be able to explain how you checked something. In a world of cheap plausible output, the person who can say why they trust a document becomes the useful one.
What to actually do
- Pick one task you do weekly and try it properly, not once.
- Notice which parts you had to fix. That is your actual value, written down.
- Learn to explain your checking process. It is becoming a skill in itself.
- Treat confident predictions about your industry, in either direction, with suspicion.
The honest uncertainty
We do not know how this lands. Neither does anyone else, including the people selling the tools and the people warning about them.
What we can say is that the change is currently at the level of tasks, and that adoption runs slower than the demonstrations suggest. The skills that survive are the ones that were always hardest to hand over.
See it for yourself
Reading about it only gets you so far. This one is written to show you the thing described above, rather than describe it again.
Break my job into the tasks it actually consists of. Say which you would be genuinely useful for, which you would be risky for, and which need a person.
Then paste it into whichever assistant you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Not sure which? Meet them all.
If you remember nothing else
- Parts of jobs are changing faster than whole jobs are disappearing.
- Forecasts disagree because they measure different things.
- Adoption runs slower than capability, because organisations do.
- Judgement, context and accountability are becoming more valuable, not less.
- Being able to explain how you checked something is now a skill.
Where this came from
- UK Government, The impact of AI on UK jobs and trainingchecked 26 September 2026
Anything here that turns out to be wrong is worth telling us about. Figures that move — prices, sizes, energy use — are kept in the registry with their dates, rather than written into the prose where they would quietly go stale.
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