I work in front of a screen. And I’ve been thinking about how AI will change my work. What does it even mean for my future? It’s completely normal to wonder about this. Most people are convinced artificial intelligence is a threat to their careers. But what they are forgetting is the human value they bring to their work.
Aaron Levie, CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box, recently pointed out that when people watch AI at work, they are most likely seeing it take over the first 80% of a task—the heavy lifting of repetitive processing. The last 20% is where you come in. Your domain expertise, judgment, and relationships. That is what makes you irreplaceable. AI can finally give you the space to add human value at work.
“The extra 20%, it turns out, is all the value creation of that profession. All the expertise and domain knowledge is in that last 20%, not the text that got generated,” Levie said in an interview with Casey Newton of Platformer, the online publication about tech and democracy. I couldn’t agree more.
Your judgment is valuable
Take the work of a lawyer. Junior associates spend most of their week reading precedents, looking for case connections, and summarizing legal statements. That’s the 80% of the work. The long, tedious, trainable, reproducible task. No client hires a lawyer just for that. They expect them to make a better and more persuasive case for them to win. To convince the judge. To save the dying deal. The 20% only you can do. The practical human value. AI work feels like completion, but it’s not. Not even close. It’s good at execution, but the meaning and context are all up to you.
The career anxiety you feel about AI is normal, but it may be misdirected. When people say “AI is taking my job,” they usually mean it’s taking their tasks. Writing code, analyzing long documents, and doing the research. The first pass. And yes, super-intelligent machines are coming for those. If you built your professional identity entirely by executing tasks, that’s hard reckoning.
The good news is, your knowledge from doing and experience is still relevant. All of that makes your judgment valuable. AI cannot replicate that. Domain expertise under pressure must count for something. A cybersecurity engineer knows exactly what steps to take when an attack is live. Making that call in real time with incomplete information changes their approach. Data doesn’t always give a clear answer.
You have to decide anyway. Who bears that decision? Not the AI. It can notice the patterns. But it’s the engineer who must come up with a specific solution to solve the problem.
Most companies are limited by execution capacity. They can’t pursue every good idea because they don’t have the people to execute them all. When AI takes care of the execution, the constraint becomes the quality of the ideas. The clarity of human judgment. And the client relationships they can’t afford to lose. If you still want to hold onto the 80%, you’re running in the wrong direction. You can’t compete with AI on speed. Focus on honing your quality of judgment.
The value and usefulness only a human perspective can fill. Your clients don’t buy your services just for the deliverables; they buy the peace of mind too. And they also like to work with people with a better reputation. Trust is not a digital asset.
In the future of work, the world will reward the 20% more.
The calculator case
When calculators became universal, they didn’t make mathematicians obsolete. They just took over repetitive math, which freed mathematicians to spend more time on quality and better mathematical thinking. The profession evolved upward. The entry-level work disappeared. The high-level work expanded. AI is doing the same thing to knowledge work. At scale. Only it’s happening everywhere, in every field, all at once. Build the kind of expertise that requires better judgment. And relationship capital that compounds over time.
Develop your specific point of view at work. What AI can’t do is replace your original perspective earned through engagement with practical problems over time. Your distinct angle on your field, built from specific experience, failures, and observations is what matters. It’s the experience that makes your presence valuable in the room. The threat from AI is understandable. The pace of change is insane. Some jobs and skills are becoming less valuable. Don’t stay terrified. Fear takes away your ability to think clearly. It makes us hold onto the routine tasks we feel safe doing. But routine tasks are exactly what the machines want.
If you’ve been doing meaningful work for any serious amount of time, you’ve accumulated things AI cannot access. AI is taking the parts of your job you probably didn’t love that much anyway. Even that requires your input. If you feed AI the wrong ideas, it will give you a brilliant, highly optimized wrong answer. The rarest skill right now is the ability to diagnose the actual problem before rushing to fix it. You are still needed for work that requires your specific experience. Don’t underestimate what you’ve already built. You have what it takes to survive AI.