The AI panic made me ask a question I'd been avoiding: what am I actually for at work?

the whole AI panic over the last year quietly forced me to ask a question i'd been avoiding: what am i actually for at work?

went about it wrong at first. i kept asking what can AI do better than me and the honest answer was a lot of it. it writes faster, summarizes faster, researches faster, throws out ideas faster and in some cases codes faster. sitting with that for a few weeks genuinely got in my head, because so much of what i'd quietly thought of as my skill set turns out to be stuff a tool can now do in seconds.

started paying attention to who at work still felt obviously valuable and it wasn't who i expected. it wasn't the most technical people or the fastest producers. it was the ones who could take a pile of messy, half-contradictory information and tell you what actually mattered in it. the ones who could read a room and tell the difference between what people were saying and what they meant. the ones who made a hard call when there wasn't enough information to be sure and were right often enough that you trusted the next one. none of that came from a single skill. it came from some tangle of how they think, what they've seen before, how they read people and how they decide.

AI could hand those people a lot. it couldn't be them.

that pretty much changed how i think about my own job. stopped trying to protect specific skills like they were going to be stolen and started paying attention to which combinations of things are actually hard to copy.

The people who look safest to me right now aren't the ones with one elite technical skill.

it's the ones whose judgment quietly gets more valuable the cheaper information gets. Anyone else noticing this?