A New Baseline for Human Work

The workplace is being transformed faster than at any point in modern history. Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a support tool—it is becoming an active agent that can plan, decide, and execute.

What we once imagined as “someday” is already here: AI agents can draft legal arguments, generate financial models, manage customer service flows, and even coordinate supply chains. And yet, here’s the striking fact: less than 1% of companies have implemented full AI agents.

That means the disruption we see today—disappearing entry-level jobs, collapsing career ladders, entire departments reorganized—is only the beginning. The next wave, when AI agents become mainstream, will reshape the labor market in ways we are only starting to understand.

Which Jobs Are at Risk?

AI’s reach extends far beyond repetitive or manual tasks. It’s now capable of replacing or heavily augmenting roles once considered untouchable:

• Legal and Compliance: drafting contracts, analyzing case law, summarizing regulations.

• Finance and Accounting: preparing reports, reconciling transactions, detecting anomalies.

• Marketing and Communications: generating campaigns, optimizing content, segmenting audiences.

• Customer Support: fully automated 24/7 chat, email, and voice resolution.

• Operations and HR: scheduling, onboarding, training, and workflow optimization.

In short: entry-level and mid-level “knowledge work” is directly in the line of fire. These were the stepping-stone roles where people learned, practiced, and climbed toward expertise. Without them, the traditional career ladder collapses.

Intelligence Has Become Cheap

For centuries, human intelligence was scarce and therefore valuable. You paid a lawyer, an analyst, or a researcher because they had the skills you didn’t. Now, with a laptop and an AI subscription, baseline intelligence is abundant.

This changes the equation:

• Companies don’t need as many junior staff when AI can perform 70–80% of routine work.

• Young workers face fewer opportunities to build skills through experience.

• Senior professionals are pressured to justify their value above what AI can already deliver.

We’re entering an economy where the floor has risen. AI sets the baseline of competence. The real question is: who can consistently rise above it?

Living Above the AI Baseline

Being “above the baseline” doesn’t mean being superhuman. It means adding what machines can’t:

• Judgment and Oversight: catching AI errors, hallucinations, and misapplied solutions.

• Creativity and Vision: generating ideas that aren’t recycled from existing data.

• Empathy and Leadership: motivating people, building trust, understanding human nuance.

• Authenticity and Narrative: in law, art, design, or writing, the story of the human behind the work matters.

AI can provide the draft, the option, the suggestion. But excellence comes from humans who can question it, refine it, and create meaning from it.

The Risk of Falling Behind

For those who stay only at the baseline, life will get harder.

• Routine tasks are vanishing. Roles like junior analyst, paralegal, or entry-level copywriter are shrinking rapidly.

• Competition is multiplying. With AI, anyone—even without training—can produce “good enough” outputs, making average work nearly worthless.

• Inequality is widening. Workers with access to education, mentorship, and AI literacy will thrive; those without will face insecurity and displacement.

It’s not just an economic issue—it’s a generational one. The young, who most need stepping-stone roles to build careers, are at the greatest risk of being shut out.

Why Human Excellence Still Matters

Even with powerful AI agents, human excellence is non-negotiable.

1. AI hallucinations are inevitable. No system is perfect. Someone highly skilled must oversee, spot, and correct errors presented with confidence.

2. Liability is unresolved. When AI outputs cause harm, who is accountable? Companies are realizing that blind automation is a legal and reputational minefield.

3. Clients and audiences value human touch. A lawyer who persuades, a designer with taste, an artist with a story—these are experiences no machine can replicate.

4. Innovation requires friction. Great ideas often come from debate, mistakes, and human intuition—not from perfectly optimized outputs.

AI may be everywhere, but human excellence is what keeps it trustworthy, meaningful, and safe.

The Twin Challenges: Social and Educational

This transformation exposes two urgent challenges:

• Social: Without intervention, AI adoption will amplify inequality. Those without resources or access to training will be left behind.

• Educational: To thrive, people need AI literacy, critical thinking, and lifelong learning. Navigating the future of work means knowing not just how to use AI, but when to challenge it, and when to reject it.

If we fail to address these, we risk creating a society divided not just by income, but by cognitive and technological capacity.

The Future We Want

The optimistic view is real: AI can amplify human excellence. It can free us from repetitive tasks, give us more time for creativity, and open new professional horizons.

But this future is not automatic. It requires:

• Policies that protect workers and support reskilling.

• Companies that balance efficiency with responsibility.

• Education systems that teach AI literacy and human-centered skills.

In short: a redesign of work where AI empowers without excluding, and where excellence—not just automation—defines success.

Call to Action: Build a Human-Centered Future of Work

The future of work is not about man versus machine. It’s about whether we rise above the AI baseline and ensure opportunity for all.

That’s why we invite you to sign the open letter for responsible AI to ensure opportunities in the workplace. Let’s demand policies, tools, and practices that amplify human excellence, protect career pathways, and guarantee that no generation is left behind.

Because the future of work is not just about survival—it’s about dignity, meaning, and the chance to thrive in an age of intelligent machines.