AI Is Changing Which Roles Matter

The conventional narrative — that junior roles and execution layers face the greatest AI disruption — misreads what's actually happening in the market. Companies like Shopify are implementing policies requiring employees to exhaust AI tools before requesting additional resources, while Meta experiments with ratios of one manager to 40 individual contributors instead of the traditional 1:10. The roles disappearing aren't at the bottom of the org chart.

Coordination used to mean onboarding new hires, sharing tribal knowledge, and translating decisions across organizational layers. Now employees would rather query an LLM than ask their team lead a question that might make them look inexperienced. Studies show that workers using AI tools reach five-year performance levels within one year of onboarding. When a consultant in Brussels can arrive at government meetings with «initial research and exploratory prototypes» that used to require six months and multiple teams, the coordination function simply evaporates.

The core issue is that organizations exist to make decisions, and AI fundamentally changes the cost structure of everything between decision and execution. If your job is to attend meetings, synthesize information, and relay it to other layers, you're competing against tools that do this faster and cheaper. The question isn't whether the tools are perfect — it's whether they're good enough to eliminate the marginal value of human intermediaries.

When IKEA introduced chatbots for customer care, the bots handled 50% of complaints immediately. Instead of firing the displaced workers, IKEA recognized that many complaints were actually interior design requests and reskilled the entire team into a revenue-generating consulting division. The humans moved from repetitive tasks to premium services that created business value.

ATM introduction in banking provides another instructive case. Everyone predicted bank tellers would disappear, but teller numbers remained stable for decades because humans shifted to explaining products, handling complex issues, and performing relationship-building work that machines couldn't replicate. Teller jobs only declined later when internet banking and mobile apps made physical branches themselves obsolete — a separate technological shift decades removed from ATM fears.

The pattern repeats throughout history: technology changes what humans do rather than eliminating human work entirely. The transition periods remain under-studied, and questions persist about how long disruptions last and how effectively reskilling occurs. But the elasticity of labor markets consistently creates new opportunities even as specific roles vanish.