You walk into a grocery store, and you see employees playing on their phones. You go into the convenience store to pay for your gas, and the cashier rolls their eyes and never looks away from their phone when they ring up your snacks.
You see videos of factory employees who sit down and barely put effort into the tasks taking place on the assembly line. You ask an associate at the business you are trying to buy something from for help, and they act like you just inconvenienced them by simply requesting from them to do what they are being paid for…
To those people who don’t care; AI is coming for your job first.
It was all the way back in 2015 when Jason Criddle started his first SaaS company, SmartrCommerce, and predicted automation and performance based work on the horizon, and now we are here.
The first peoples’ jobs automation is coming for are the ones who don’t want to work in the first place. Standing at a protest and holding a sign may reignite that passion, but I can promise you, AI is not coming for anyone who wakes up in the morning and can’t wait to start their day.
From the person who greets you with excitement when you walk through the door, to the mechanic overextending themselves to getting your car back on the road, all the way to the employee of the month who intentionally remembers their customer’s names, these people will always have a job to do, because passion is what makes or breaks character. It’s not the job. It’s the person.
How do you protect your source of revenue in an automated world?
Anyone can do a job greatly, and they can do it with a smile on their face… or they can choose the latter, and do as little as possible to get by. Only one of those people has a rewarding future. And to those who still feel that ambition, fire, and drive within you, I would start learning how to utilize AI to make your brightness shine even further than it carries now.
So, is a robot coming after everyone’s job in the next few years? Not just yet. But it will come after the jobs of those who don’t care to become better at what they do. Because AI will not only greet you with a smile, it will work through thousands of processes, tokens, and algorithms to calculate how to make a customer happy. All without ever looking down at a phone.
The real safeguard in this new age is adaptability. Those who treat AI as a tool rather than a threat will not only secure their careers but also multiply their value. By learning how to partner with technology—using it to streamline tasks, deepen creativity, and amplify human strengths—you create a future where your skills cannot easily be replaced. The difference between being replaced and being indispensable will lie in how willing you are to evolve.
