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If you have been asking yourself what to do when AI changes your job, you are asking exactly the right question, and this episode has a practical answer. Not a theoretical framework or a list of tools to try. A real, functional way of deciding what to hand off to AI and what to keep.

In this episode, I walk you through the framework I use for navigating this, and it starts with one question: Is a real relationship or my reputation on the line with this work? That single question does most of the sorting.

I break down three buckets for everything you do: AI-ready work you can hand off completely, AI-assisted work where you and AI collaborate, and human-essential work where your judgment, voice, and relationships are non-negotiable. Most people are surprised by how much lands in that middle bucket, and I explain what to do with all three.

I also share why the standard advice to just use AI more can backfire if you are not deliberate about where you stay in the loop. And I talk about how to use AI as a genuine thinking partner, not just a productivity shortcut, so that your work sounds like you, not like a bulleted list with emojis that your clients can spot from a mile away.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

AI can write my emails, analyze my data, and draft my presentations faster than I can. So, what exactly is my job now? Well, that's a question I'm hearing more and more from technical leaders and other types of professionals that I work with, and I think it deserves a real answer because here's the thing: most organizations are not giving people the guidance that they need to answer this question, to figure this out. So I'm going to answer this question for you today.

Now, the obvious question that people sometimes ask is, "Will AI replace me? But I don't really think that's the right question? It's not nuanced enough. It's not specific enough.

And I mean, the easy and pat answer to "Will AI replace me? is if you're not using AI at all, AI will replace you, or somebody who's using AI will replace you. But again, if you've been listening to this podcast or know my work at all, you know that it is not quite that cut and dry. It is more nuanced. So I think the right question to be asking is, what should I be especially good at now that AI is so good at handling the rest?

Now here's what the data tells us. Gallup did a study recently, and they found that only 26 of employees say that their organization has communicated any sort of clear AI integration plan. So they're just not being given any guidance, and half of chief human resource operating officers lack confidence in their manager's ability to guide employee AI use, so the top level of HR leaders don't even think that their own managers can do a good job in rolling this out effectively. So essentially, most people are navigating this space alone, trying to figure out what should they do, what should they hand off to AI is AI going to take their job or some portion of their job?

Now, this gap between organizations not sharing clear guidance with employees and employees needing that guidance isn't just frustrating; it also could be seen as an opportunity. Hang with me here for a second. So the professionals who develop their own framework and think through this now are really the ones who are going to be seen as leaders in their organization, not because they've mastered every single AI tool that's out there, but because they have actually figured out where they need to show up, what they can hand off to AI, and when they should collaborate with AI. So there's a whole process of discernment that goes on in that decision making, and that's what I really want to dig into today and help you with that discernment, so that you know what to keep, what to give to AI, and how to give it to AI, and where AI could be a collaborator and a thinking partner with you.

Now, if you need another way to cut into this, I want you to do this. Think about the last time that you received an email that was obviously written by AI, and you know the bulleted list with emojis and a certain generic cheerfulness that just doesn't sound like any human you've ever met-you knew immediately that that was AI generated. And what did that tell you about the person or the organization who sent it? Well, it probably told you, if not on a conscious level, at least on a subconscious level, that they didn't think the relationship with you was worth their time to actually write the email themselves.

They handed it off, and they handed you off with it. So that's what's at stake when you delegate the wrong things. That's what's at stake when you give over too much of your work to AI, and that can impact your client relationships. For those of you who are client facing, and it can impact your internal relationships, and that's all of us.

We all have those internal relationships. Even those of us like me who work alone, I certainly have the client facing relationships, but I also have some subcontractors and folks who work with me, and you know I don't want them to think that I don't care or that I didn't care enough to write the email myself. Now another way that I find this sneaking into my work, and I'll talk about this a little bit more later on when I talk about collaboration, is that AI tends to be more and more integrated into our email applications, even if we don't really invite it. It seems to be like sneaking its way in, and it wants to correct your grammar and it wants to change the way you write a sentence because it comes up with a more efficient way to write that sentence.

And I question that, and I push back on a lot of those suggestions that it gives me. Obviously, if it comes up with a grammatical error that I made or a punctuation mistake that I made, by all means, please correct me on that. But if it is taking my sometimes flowery language and synthesizing it and simplifying it, then I'm like, no, no, my clients need me to show up as me in my email exchanges with them, not some synthesized version of myself. Okay, now let's start thinking about you and where you need to show up and what you can hand off to AI.

And I want to give you a framework for this, and it's simpler than you might expect. Now, simple doesn't always necessarily equate to easy, so this will require some thought and some discernment on your part. Okay, this is not just simply a list of categories of certain types of tasks you can give to AI and certain ones you should keep for yourself. It's really more about one single question driving it, and the single question is this: Is a real relationship or my reputation on the line with this work?

Now, if yes, you absolutely need to stay in the loop, and AI can help you with some of the things, and we'll talk about what those things are. But the moment that the work touches another person, whether that's a client, a member of your team, your your manager, you need to show up. Okay, you need to be in the loop on that. Now, AI can help with some of the things.

Let's talk about what some of those things are. AI can help be a thinking partner. It can help you prepare. It can help you do research.

It can help you draft an argument or draft an email. Or I might choose to make that draft myself and then ask AI to to do some work on it to help me clarify, improve, and so on, because I like to do the first draft again. So if it's touching another person, AI can help you with a lot of those other tasks, but you really, really need to stay in the loop. Now, if another person isn't going to be involved in this, then you could consider handing this off to AI.

So again, if there is no other person who's going to set eyes on this, so some examples here might be doing research, taking that first pass of research on things that you're going to use in a later draft of something. AI is fantastic at that. Now you know because there is AI slop out there, and there is AI doing less and less hallucinating. But still, AI has been known to make things up.

So, if you are going to hand off research to AI, I absolutely want you to give it some very, very specific guidelines and guardrails so that it is sharing its original sources with you when it's doing research and so on, so that you can follow those things up and cross-check its work. Because if you've heard me talk about AI before, which you probably have if you've been a long-time listener to this podcast, because every once in a while I'll do an episode on AI because it is all around us. You've heard me say that AI is, and it doesn't even matter which LLM you're using, but AI is like a college intern. It's eager.

It's excited to work for you. It wants to do a good job, and it works really fast, and it makes a lot of mistakes. So you do need to again put those guardrails and those guidelines around it so that it doesn't make mistakes for you. But so yes, it can do research.

It can synthesize data for you. In fact, it's fabulous at that. It's fabulous at looking at a spreadsheet and finding trends or finding anomalies in the data. Because if you've heard me talk about looking at those signals that are out out there on the periphery to give us some good indications of what might be coming next.

One of the places that we look is anomalies in the data. Okay, it can help with formatting. I'm terrible at Word and at all the formatting inside of Word because it can do so much. So I can hand some of that off to AI to make sure that the formatting is is right and conforms to certain best practices, it can be good at scheduling things.

That is, if you're having it integrated with your calendar or integrated with other types of things, so it can do scheduling. So there's a bunch of things that it is good for for you that don't touch other people. Now, scheduling could potentially touch somebody else. What I mean by scheduling is really looking at your own calendar and optimizing your calendar for things like focus time or pockets of time when you might set up meetings with external clients or other business partners.

So it's good at looking at your calendar and telling you things about your calendar very quickly, it's also great at searching your calendar if you're looking for a conversation that you had with somebody and how long ago was that or when was that. Again, you can put AI to use to gather some of that data really quickly. Okay, but I really want you to think about this as being a public-facing versus back-office distinction, but it really does go deeper than that. It's not just as simple as what do other people see or touch, and what doesn't get put in front of other people.

It's really more. I want you to think about it from the place of where trust gets built, or if trust gets eroded, okay. So when I think about this for my work, I do a lot of public-facing work. So, for example, the podcast is public-facing work.

A keynote is public-facing work. A training session that I do is public-facing work, and so is a LinkedIn post, and so is an email to a client. Now, you maybe don't have some of those same types of activities in your work, so let's think about what what is that public facing work of your work. It could be a one on one with somebody who's on your team.

Obviously, you're going to be the one who shows up for that. Could you use AI to help you prepare for it? Absolutely, you could use AI in a number of different capacities. Again, in your preparation of all kinds of things, but when it comes right down to sending the email, drafting the meeting notice, AI can help you prepare with some of those artifacts.

But I want you to be making sure it sounds like you when you send it, because that's what builds trust. You, you, your words, how you frame something, how you show up, and again, when we hand that off too much in emails, in meeting minutes, in things that are going to be seen by somebody and looked at, we want to make sure we're still showing up in there. Okay, now there's also a great place for you to collaborate with AI. So again, if you've heard me talk about AI in the past, you've heard me talk about AI being a great thinking partner, and AI is tremendous at challenging your thinking.

I'll give AI an argument like, "Hey, I'm thinking about putting together a podcast episode on this, and this is the particular approach I'm going to take. Poke holes in it, and then it will, you know, again fire back at me and come up with some really interesting challenges to my argument. Sometimes extending my argument, sometimes validating my argument. But when it does validate my argument, I will then push back on it to see if it can't poke some holes in it.

Because we all know AI likes to be very gratifying to us and very complimentary to us. And again, that's not how AI is going to be most useful to you. You don't need it just buttering you up. You need it to challenge your thinking.

You could also engage with AI in a conversation about how you might work best with AI on a particular project before you actually start the work. So almost like a planning conversation that you would sit down and have with a colleague. Like, let's say the two of you are working on a project together. You often will start that project with a, hey, which parts do you want to do?

Which parts should I do? What what plays to your strengths? What plays to my strengths? Okay, let's each do some work and come back, you know, next week and see how far we got.

Okay, so those kinds of conversations happen with your colleagues all the time, but you can have those conversations with AI as well and say, "I want your help in this. Where would we work best together? Which pieces should I make sure I retain? Which pieces do you think you could work on and not sacrifice the personal connection between me and whoever this is going to.

Okay, so again, some things for you to do yourself, some things for AI to potentially help you with. Again, you're not going to put that in front of a client or in front of a coworker without having a significant stake in the work yourself, and then ways for AI to be a thinking partner. Now, I want to give you some actionable takeaways and some things that you can put to work in your work. So the first thing is, I want you to think about taking on this task: audit your work.

So take 20 minutes this week, and just brainstorm. Just make a brain dump of everything you do, and then sort it into three buckets. What is AI ready that you can just hand off? What is AI assisted where you and AI are going to collaborate on something?

And this could be AI does an initial draft of something, and then you do the follow-up work, or maybe it's you do the initial draft of something, and you hand it off to AI to complement your work. So it's kind of like staff augmentation here. And then, what is human essential? This is where your judgment, your voice, your relationships with other people come into play, and all of those things are non-negotiable.

Your judgment, your voice, your relationships with others. Okay, those are the things that you need to retain for yourself and spend the most of your time doing those things. Now, most people are surprised by how much lands in AI assisted, and it's not because AI should own it, but because they need to stay. You like you.

You need to stay in it. You can't just fully hand it over to AI. Now, for some of you, this might mean pulling back some things that you have handed over to AI. Maybe it's like generating status reports or generating meeting minutes.

Okay, AI'S great at a lot of that as a first pass. But again, if this is going to go to your project team, or maybe it's going to go to senior leader who's sponsoring the project and paying for it, and whose budget this is coming out of. By all means, you need to make sure that your voice is in that, and that it does not sound like AI slop or purely AI generated. Even if it's not AI slop, we need it to sound like you.

Okay. The second thing to do is apply the reputation test. So when you're unsure about any task, ask yourself: Is this a real relationship where my reputation could be on the line? So that question isn't whether or not AI is going to do the task for you.

It's whether you should be the one doing it, or whether you should be the one doing the primary amount or the majority of the work that goes along with it, and then identify your irreplaceables. What are some very distinctly human contributions that you're making? What is it that you personally bring to the table? And some of that could be your sense of humor.

Some of that could be how you balance, let's say, the cost of a project against the time that it takes to do something against the we don't want to burn people out. Okay, so a multifaceted decision making format or matrix. Okay, so maybe that's something that you uniquely bring to the table. Okay, then you don't want to farm that out to AI.

You want to make sure that your unique contributions stay in there. So think about where does your judgment come into play. Where is the context? Because maybe you've done similar projects to this in the past, and you know that there's some nuance and some some of that additional underlying context that AI would just wouldn't know.

Maybe it's lived experience because that you know if you're handing this off to you know Rachel in accounting that she's going to get a little under the skin about it. Okay, so that's your lived experience. Then you need to put your own unique spin on this so that Rachel in accounting doesn't get upset with you when you send this report over to her. Okay, so when you're finding those things and the places where you uniquely add value, you want to name those things, write those things down because that's your edge, and that doesn't go away as AI gets better.

It becomes you being more valuable, okay. So those unique attributes, those make you more valuable, more distinct, and more irreplaceable. Okay, so I want you to come up with those things that are irreplaceable. And again, they could be rather abstract, like your sense of humor or your knowledge, you know, deep knowledge of some of your coworkers or clients.

Okay, then the third thing is here is stop waiting for your organization to tell you what to do with AI, because most organizations, even this far into it, we are years into generative AI being deployed in you know writ large, but then also inside your organization, and most organizations still don't have a plan. So waiting for top-down clarity is an absolute losing strategy. So the people who build their own discernment framework, like the one I'm talking about here, are going to be the ones who get asked to help others figure it out, and also the ones who are going to get their work done faster with AI augmenting their work without it sounding like AI because you know where to apply you and you know where to apply AI and you know where the two work best together. Okay, and I want you to be thinking about how you reframe your expertise because your value is not just the things that you produce.

It's not just the reports and the project plans and the widgets and the whatever it is that you create. It's the judgment that you specifically apply to what gets produced. Now AI can generate a presentation, but you need to decide what it means. You need to look at it and decide what got left out, and whether that tells the whole truth that your audience needs to hear.

And again, that audience could be your senior leaders, that audience could be your coworkers, that audience could be a client. So yes, AI could create a presentation for you. I mean, I've done it. It's a blast to watch it happen, and then it's a blast and a joke and a half to sit through and scroll through to see what it created, and then see just exactly how much it missed the mark or how that's not going to work.

Now it doesn't. That doesn't mean it didn't give you some good ideas. I get some fun ideas using AI to generate a presentation. Do I ever put that exact presentation in front of an audience?

Absolutely not! Oh my goodness, no! But it's fun from a brainstorming and you know playing around perspective. But you need to decide.

Okay, your judgment is the expertise. That is what cannot be automated. So you and your discernment about what you're going to do, where your unique qualities come into play, what AI can do, where it's best, and then what the two of you can collaboratively work on-that is your discernment. That that framework right there cannot be automated.

All right, now your call to action for this episode, your put it to work for this week, is to do the audit, audit those tasks, make those three buckets, and see what falls into each of those buckets. So you're going to list out your tasks and sort them into the three buckets. Identify two or three things, maybe more, that are clearly human essential in your role. And again, that can be your personality, that can be your deep organizational knowledge of other folks on your team.

That can be your sense of humor. All of those things go into it. Okay, that is you being clearly human in your role. Okay, those are your things to invest in.

Those are the things to get better at. Those are the things to really fiercely protect. Now, once you do that audit, your the rest of it is going to fall into place for you because you're going to know where you collaborate best. Again, guardrails and guidelines for the things that AI is going to do, either on its own or even in collaboration with you.

Now, if you're a leader who wants to help your team navigate this together and navigate this better. This is exactly the topics that we've been talking about in this episode are exactly what I dig into in in my newest keynote, which is called the human edge in an AI world. We talk about some of these exact same things, and I bring some research to bear on it, and so on. So this conversation that we had just now-that's the conversation that your organization needs to have, and it's one worth having before the stakes get higher, before your clients get alienated by that emoji-ridden email.

Okay, you know you can spot it a mile off, so we need to get ahead of it because most organizations are letting AI get out in front, and that is that's not helpful to anybody. Okay, so the future of work and the future of how we work together with AI will not be only defined by what AI can and cannot do. It needs to be shaped by the choices that we make about what humans should actually continue with and continue to do, and to do especially well, and to even get better at doing. All right, my friends, if this episode hit a chord with you, if this episode resonated with you, please, please share this episode widely with others.

Share this with somebody else who's navigating what to do when AI has changed their job and they're not sure what to hold on to anymore, or if AI is going to take their job. Share this episode widely, so you can find ways to share it from the show notes page. So the show notes are at Janel anderson.com forward slash 283 because this is episode 283. From there, you can find links to share it on Spotify.

You can find the link on for Apple Podcasts, if that's where you listen, you can find the link to watch it over on YouTube. If that's where you like to listen, all right, my friends. Again, please share the episode, and it means so much to me because this is one of the ways that people find me and find out about my work. So appreciate you so much for sharing the episode, and I will catch you again next week right here.

Until then, my friends, be well.

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