Why Understanding Your Relationship With Work Is Crucial in an AI Age

The last decade in tech has, for the most part, been an employees' market. Catered lunches. Office massages. ZIRP-era salary bumps that bore no relationship to output. Companies competed for talent by making work feel less like work.

Along the way, I think we lost touch with the fundamental basis of employment.

At its very core, employment is an exchange of skills and time for compensation. That's it. And if your employer can find the same - or better - skills for less, you should expect your job to be in danger.

The problem is, this hasn't felt like a real threat recently. Markets have been tight. Talent has been scarce. Companies didn't have a cheaper alternative, so the power sat with employees.

That is about to change.

The Shift Nobody's Ready For

We're entering a sustained period where the balance has completely shifted to the employer. Many of the skills you get paid for today can be replaced - not by someone cheaper in another country, but by software that works 24/7, doesn't need managing, and costs a fraction of your salary.

This isn't hypothetical. It's already happening. AI can draft your emails, build your reports, write your code reviews, summarize your meetings, and produce analysis that used to take you a full day - in seconds. And it's getting better every month.

I don't say this to scare you. I say it because I think it's critical to rethink how you approach work - to give yourself the best chance possible in what's coming.

The Output Trap

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your entire value to your employer is what you produce, you are already competing with AI.

Think about how most knowledge work is structured today. You receive tasks. You produce deliverables. You're evaluated on output - how much, how fast, how good. Whether you're in an office or at your kitchen table, the measurement is the same: what did you ship?

For a long time, that was enough. Human output was the only option, and it was valuable by default.

But now there's an alternative. And it's extraordinary.

AI doesn't get tired. It doesn't have off days. It doesn't need a standup to get aligned. It just produces. Faster, cheaper, and - increasingly - better than humans at the defined, repeatable, output-driven elements of knowledge work.

When you define your value purely by your output, you make yourself replaceable by a better output machine.

This isn't just a remote work problem, though working remotely accelerates it. It's a mindset problem. If you've allowed your professional identity to become "the person who produces X" - regardless of where you sit - you're vulnerable.

The Human Premium

So what does this mean for you?

It means the employees who thrive in the AI age will be the ones who double down on being human - not the ones who optimise for productivity.

The things AI cannot do:

Build trust. Real trust. The kind that comes from navigating difficult conversations, showing up when it matters, being present in moments of ambiguity. Not a Slack message. Not an emoji reaction. Trust is built in the space between people - and that space is shrinking as we digitise everything.
Navigate organisational complexity with judgment. AI is exceptional at well-defined problems. It's terrible at the messy, political, human dynamics that define how organisations actually work. The ability to read a room, sense tension, and act on information that isn't in any document - that's a human skill with compounding value.
Inspire and lead. Nobody was ever motivated by a well-crafted prompt. Leadership is presence. It's energy. It's the ability to make people believe in something when the data says they shouldn't.
Create serendipity. The best ideas, the career-changing introductions, the moments that shift trajectories - these happen in unstructured, human interactions. Hallways, dinners, conferences, the five minutes after a meeting ends. They don't happen in scheduled Zoom slots.
Build community. Humans are tribal. We want to belong to something. We want to be around people who understand our world, challenge our thinking, and open doors we didn't know existed. No algorithm can manufacture that.

These are the things that will command a premium in the AI age. Not your ability to produce a deck or write a brief - AI will do that better than you within a year. Your ability to connect, to build relationships, to operate in the grey areas where human judgment is irreplaceable.

Why We Bet on Community

I don't just believe this in theory. I bet my company on it.

In early 2023, we acquired HIGHER - a community of senior talent acquisition leaders across the tech industry. At the time, most people in our space were doubling down on technology: better sourcing tools, AI-driven outreach, automated candidate engagement.

We went the other direction.

We believed that as AI accelerated the pace of change in talent acquisition, leaders would increasingly need something technology can't provide: a space to learn from peers in real time, to share what's working and what isn't, and to build authentic relationships with people navigating the same challenges.

Today, HIGHER has over 14,000 members. It's become the largest community of senior in-house talent leaders in the world. And the results have validated the thesis: in a world where AI is reshaping the profession in real time, practitioners need a space to learn from peers who are navigating the same challenges. Not articles or webinars, but real conversations with people who are figuring it out alongside you.

Here's what I've learned from building this: community is the anti-AI moat.

You can automate content. You can automate research and analysis and even parts of strategic planning. But you cannot automate what happens when 200 senior leaders are in a room together, sharing problems, pressure-testing ideas, and building the kind of trust that only comes from being physically present with people who understand your world.

The faster the landscape shifts, the more valuable it becomes to have a room full of people navigating the same change. It's counterintuitive: the rise of AI doesn't make human connection less important. It makes it the scarcest, and therefore most valuable, resource in business.

This is true for companies. And it's equally true for individuals.

What Companies Will Demand

If you think this is just my perspective, watch what employers do over the next 24 months.

Companies are already starting to re-evaluate what they actually need from humans. And the answer isn't "someone who can summarize a document" or "someone who can manage a project plan." AI handles that now.

What companies will increasingly demand is:

People who accelerate collaboration. Not through better tools - through better relationships. The person who can unblock a problem in five minutes because they have trust and context with the right people, instead of waiting three days for an async thread to resolve.
People who develop others. Mentorship, coaching, culture-building - these are deeply human skills that compound over time and cannot be automated.
People who can sell, negotiate, and influence. Where conviction, body language, and presence matter more than the content of what you're saying.
People who build networks and communities. Internally and externally. The employee who knows everyone, who creates connections between teams, who brings outside perspectives in - that person is worth more than ten output machines.
People who create environments, not just deliverables. The best teams aren't the ones with the best individual output. They're the ones where people push each other, challenge each other, and build on each other's ideas in real time.

Notice a pattern? These are all fundamentally human, fundamentally relational, and fundamentally difficult to do through a screen.

The Shrinking Pool

Here's what concerns me most.

The people who don't figure this out - who continue to define their value by output, who avoid the messy work of relationship-building, who optimise for efficiency over connection - are going to watch their pool of opportunities shrink dramatically.

Not overnight. But steadily. Relentlessly.

Because every year, AI gets better at output. Every year, the gap between what you produce and what AI produces gets smaller. And every year, the premium for the things only humans can do - presence, relationships, judgment, trust, community - gets larger.

The people who lean into that premium will have options. They'll be the ones companies fight to keep, because their value can't be replicated by software. The people who don't will be competing for a shrinking number of roles against a machine that never stops improving.

This isn't about remote vs. office. It's bigger than that. It's about whether you understand what makes you valuable as a human in an economy that increasingly doesn't need humans for output.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself

I'd encourage anyone reading this to sit with these honestly:

Is my value to my employer primarily based on what I produce - or who I am and how I work? If it's the former, you're in the danger zone. AI is coming for output. It's not coming for relationships, judgment, or trust.
What is the best way to build deep relationships across my organisation? Not surface-level digital friendships. Real relationships - the kind where people go to bat for you, where trust compounds over years.
How can I speed up collaboration with my peers? If your answer involves async tools and better documentation, you're thinking like an output machine. The fastest collaboration happens between people who know and trust each other.
In what type of environment do I learn the fastest? Be honest. Did you learn more in your first year sitting next to experienced people, or in your most recent year behind a screen? The answer matters for your career trajectory.
If AI can do the repetitive elements of my role better than I can, where do I add the most value? If you can't answer this clearly, that's the problem. And the time to figure it out is now - not when your employer figures it out for you.

The Bottom Line

I'm not arguing against technology. I'm not arguing against flexibility. I'm arguing that if you don't understand how profoundly AI is about to reshape the employer-employee relationship, you are sleepwalking into irrelevance.

The employees who win in the AI age won't be the ones who produce the most. They'll be the ones who are the most irreplaceably human.

Build relationships. Build community. Show up. Be present. Invest in the things that no machine can do.

Because the world is about to have more output than it knows what to do with. What it won't have enough of is genuine human connection.

That's your edge. Don't waste it.