You can't open LinkedIn without someone shouting, "AI is taking our jobs!" Proofreaders and copywriters? Carried off on a stretcher. Accountants? Dead and buried by half time. Marketers? Getting the manager sacked come Monday morning. Data entry clerks? Already on the team bus headed back to the airport.
If the World Cup has taught me anything, it's that some of us don't need facts to predict disaster. A striker misses one penalty and suddenly your uncle in the family WhatsApp group is giving football breakdowns like he's been coaching the national team since 1988. "Hekaheka nyingi! Sack the coach! Unaona hayo mambo?! We're finished!” And that's exactly the energy people have about AI right now.
You can't open LinkedIn without someone shouting, "AI is taking our jobs!" Proofreaders and copywriters? Carried off on a stretcher. Accountants? Dead and buried by half time. Marketers? Getting the manager sacked come Monday morning. Data entry clerks? Already on the team bus headed back to the airport.
At this point, AI has been hired, promoted, fast-tracked into management, made Employee of the Month, and somehow landed a corner office. No wonder everyone's panicking.
Yet I wonder, is the conversation really about technology or identity? I’ve also asked myself - What exactly am I bringing to the table if a machine can do this in seconds?
For now, my theory is that perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about AI is that it's coming for our jobs. In many cases, it's coming for tasks, and that distinction forces us to reconsider our definition of value.
According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, technological change is expected to displace 92 million jobs globally by 2030 while creating 170 million new ones, resulting in a net gain of 78 million jobs. The same report estimates that nearly 40 percent of workers' existing skills will need to evolve over the coming years.
So, the future is not running out of work. It's simply running out of certain types of work.
Furthermore, according to workforce and automation studies, data entry clerks, medical transcriptionists, customer service representatives, bookkeepers, legal research assistants, stock illustrators, and many others are already seeing portions of their jobs automated. In customer service alone, some companies now resolve roughly 65 percent of routine first-level inquiries using AI systems without human intervention.
And with AI becoming more affordable every year, the question is not whether jobs will change. They absolutely will. The question is: What value can we create once the routine work is no longer ours to do?
When we look back at history, we see that Excel spreadsheets did not replace accountants. Google did not replace researchers. Calculators did not eliminate mathematics. What happened instead was that the nature of expertise evolved.
For the first time in history, an African solopreneur can perform work that once required a team of five. The implication is not that human talent can now be amplified in ways that were previously unavailable to most people.
The future may no longer belong to those who can process information the fastest. It belongs now, to the profesionals who can overcome the temptation to cling to an outdated version of themselves; those willing to evolve, rethink what they have to offer and redefine how they create value in our AI era.
Because value, like identity, is not a fixed thing.
