Will AI Eliminate Your Job? Maybe. But It Also Might Give You a Better One!

My prediction is straightforward: Twenty five to thirty percent of the jobs people will hold five years from now, do not even exist today.

I prognosticated the perpetuation of AI before it was scaring the luddites, and well before it was auto completing anyone’s emails. I wrote about it crushing lawyers’ billable hours in Attorney at Law Magazine more than two years before ChatGPT arrived on the scene. When ChatGPT finally launched, my response was not awe or alarm. It was more along the lines of

“Well, it took you long enough!”

When Chat was released, I wrote an article clearly stating

“Um yeah. Remember what I said before? This.”

Now to the question that keeps dinner party conversations tense and LinkedIn threads unhinged.

Will AI eliminate jobs? Of course it will.

So did cars. Blacksmiths did not survive the Model T. Neither did carriage makers, stable hands, or anyone whose business model relied on horses having strong opinions. Technology has always been an apathetic modifier of the labor market.

AI is no different.

But here is where the panic mechanics get it wrong.

AI is not ONLY a destroyer of jobs. It is a prolific producer of new ones.

Our new Market Analyst and AI Manager starts next week. Yes, you read that right. AI Manager. That job did not exist a few years ago. Other than in large corporations, it barely exists now. Yet I can already tell it is going to be indispensable. So I'm not waiting. Why?

Everyone at my firm uses multiple AI platforms every single day. We feed them dozens of prompts. We receive floods of responses. Some are brilliant. Insightful. Reusable. Others belong in the digital equivalent of a waste basket.

Someone has to separate the gold from the garbage.

Part of her role will be curating content. Building a centralized, searchable intelligence bank that compounds value instead of having my people reinvent the same prompt wheel or sifting through thousands of threads. Imagine having the very best prompts and responses for every blog post and article you want to write, and every challenging situation you face in business, at your fingertips!

What else will she do? Change our website so that the SEO content is augmented by GEO (content that is found by AI bots instead of search engines).

Use AI to completely overhaul the Street Smart Law Blog.

Use AI to go through our CRM and identify opportunities that now exist due to the recent changes in our business model.

And much, much more.

That’s just one early example of AI creating entirely new professions.

And this is only the beginning.

Here are just a few of the roles that are emerging right now or about to become painfully obvious.

AI Knowledge Curators. Like our AI Manager, this role will become common.

AI Acquisitions Analyst & Trainer. There are already over 100 AI products that are specific to the practice of law. There are tens of thousands for other businesses. In my opinion, at least 70% of the AI platforms out there are useless to humanity (and in some cases, even dangerous to law firm clients!).

However, several are absolutely reliable, hallucination-free and will save clients 30% or more on legal costs. Do attorneys know the sawdust from the mahogany? Nope. Will they know how important updates are and which will require adoption? Nope. Can they train the troops on all this? Nope.

Someone’s getting a job.

AI Ethics and Risk Officers. In law, finance, healthcare, and other regulated industries, this role will not be optional. Someone has to know when efficiency becomes liability.

AI Media Manager. Our AI Manager will be making dozens of high-value, AI generated videos. She will have AI go through external media and find events relevant to our profession, summarize them and then provide article and blog post outlines for us to use in publications. This will become a common rile unto itself.

My prediction is straightforward: Twenty five to thirty percent of the jobs people will hold five years from now, do not even exist today.

The real divide will not be between humans and machines. It will be between those who adapt and those who cling. Between curiosity and complacency. Between professionals who compound with technology and those who compete against it.

AI is not coming. It has already unpacked and rearranged the furniture.

The only remaining question is whether you plan to fight it, fear it, or figure out how to make it work for you.

Frederick Shelton is a Legal AI and Agentic AI Consultant to law firms and lawyers. He can be reached at fs@sheltonsteele.com