How to Stay Indispensable When AI Changes Everything
The gap between people who are leaning into AI and people who aren’t is going to be very wide, very quickly. Hiring managers are already noticing who gets this and who doesn’t.
A lot of people are underestimating what’s happening. More importantly, they’re underestimating what it means for their own careers.
Not in a doom-and-gloom way. More a “the window to get ahead of this is open right now and it won’t stay open forever” way.
Companies don’t want to replace their people with AI. What they want is to win. To not do everything you can to win is to put your business’s existence at risk. The commonly held belief in tech right now — and I think it’s right — is that the businesses that use AI to its fullest stand the best chance of doing that. Whether you agree with it, whether you think AI is a disaster for the world, doesn’t matter. The choice to ignore it is still a choice. And it’s a risky one.
The people who help their companies do that will be the most valuable in any organisation over the next few years. Everyone else? I honestly don’t know. But doing nothing isn’t a strategy.
What actually makes someone good at AI-powered work
The real value of AI isn’t in the quick chat or the tidied-up email. It’s in going deeper — building workflows, automating repetitive work, creating things that weren’t possible before. That’s where the gap opens up between people who use AI and people who are actually good at it.
I’ve been thinking about what separates the two, and it keeps coming back to four things. The last one, taste, is the most important. But it’s also the one you can’t shortcut to. You need the others first, because without real knowledge underpinning it, taste is just opinion.
1. Deep knowledge of your domain
This one seems obvious but it’s underestimated. AI is only as good as what you bring to it. If you don’t deeply understand the problem you’re solving, the customer you’re serving, and what good output actually looks like in your field, you can’t guide it to produce something worth having. The years you’ve spent in your role are not a disadvantage here. They are the base to build on that can make you indispensable. Someone new to a field using AI will produce something that sounds plausible. Someone with deep experience will know immediately why it’s wrong.
2. Deep knowledge of your product or business
Separate to your domain, you need to know the thing you’re actually working on. For me that’s Stora. Know why it’s built the way it is, where it falls short, what your customers actually need versus what they say they need. Without this, you’re guiding AI with incomplete information and you probably don’t know it.
3. Technical curiosity and problem-solving drive
Not engineering skills — curiosity. The willingness to try something, break it, figure out why, and try again. We’re moving into a world where everyone builds their own tools. Connecting systems, automating workflows, creating things that didn’t exist a year ago. The people who thrive won’t be waiting for someone to train them. They’ll have already gone and figured it out.
I say this as someone who learned something completely new about how to publish this article fifteen minutes before I published it.
More on that later.
4. Taste
This is the one that separates people who use AI well from people who just use AI. Taste is your ability to look at what AI produces and know whether it’s right or wrong. Not just technically, but in quality, tone, accuracy, and whether it actually solves the problem.
It comes from experience and from caring about the quality of what you put in front of people. If you don’t have it, you need to develop it. Without it, you’ll consistently accept output that isn’t good enough and not know the difference — and other people will notice before you do.
Over the last year I’ve had countless moments where someone on my team has shared something with me that immediately felt off. Not because they were doing something wrong in principle (they were using AI, which is fine) but because they either hadn’t thought about what they were sharing, or didn’t yet have the experience to know it wasn’t good enough.
They’d put AI output in front of me without the domain knowledge to judge it first, expecting me to parse it and find the value in it. They thought what they’d shared was fine. In most cases it made me think less of the work and them, not more.
Using AI without the foundations doesn’t just produce bad output. It produces work slop. And it signals something about your judgment to the people around you.
The more experience and knowledge you accumulate, the sharper your taste gets. There’s no faster route to it than doing the work seriously for a long time.
What creating new value actually looks like
New value means better output, lower cost, or both. Better output means the work is higher quality, or it moves a metric that matters. A conversion goes up, a customer outcome improves, a process that was broken starts working. And when I say cost, I mean time too. In any business, time is the most expensive thing we spend.
If you’re doing something repetitive, time-consuming, or manual, the question isn’t “how do I do this task?” It’s “how do the next hundred times this task happens, it happens better?”
Most people never make that shift because they’re too busy doing the task. The people who do are the ones who end up building something really valuable, for their company and for their own career. You don’t need a grand plan. You need enough awareness of a real problem to know where to start, and the stubbornness to see it through.
Share what you’re learning
The people who get ahead of this curve have both a responsibility and a self-interest in bringing others along. Building a reputation as someone who understands AI and shares that knowledge openly is one of the best career moves you can make right now.
Write about it. Talk about it. Post what you’re learning — and what isn’t working. The people hiring in the next few years will be looking for exactly this. Visibility matters. Being generous with what you know matters. We’re all figuring this out at the same time, and the people who are open about the process will be who others want to work with.
Which brings me to how this article actually got made. Because that’s me doing exactly this, right now.
How this article got made
I brain-dumped a fairly unstructured rant of these talking points into Claude, then worked back and forth with it to shape a proper draft. I didn’t write every word. But I directed every word, and I knew when something was off.
That only works because of the four things above. I’ve spent 20-plus years across the tech and SaaS landscape. Building and scaling businesses, hiring across almost every function, watching whole categories of software get created and disrupted. That experience is what let me see these issues coming. It’s also what gives me enough taste to judge the output. To know when a paragraph sounds like me and when it doesn’t, when an idea lands and when it’s just filling space.
And I’m a serial tinkerer. I wrote about using AI and voice dictation to write blog posts about a year ago. I’ve moved on considerably since then. I know from years of using AI assistants that I don’t need to worry about formatting. I can dump rough notes and trust the AI to structure it while I stay focused on the thinking. I know I could take a document straight out of Claude, drop it into my personal site via Claude Code, and have every heading and bold text marked up perfectly without touching the HTML. I actually figured that last one out about 15 minutes before publishing this article. I just had the curiosity to wonder if it would work, tried it, and it did. A new skill in minutes that will save me time in future.
Two years ago I didn’t know how to do any of this. I just kept experimenting.
Start somewhere. Figure out what works. Talk about it. Repeat.
One last thing worth saying. I’m aware I’m in a position of some privilege here. As a founder, I have more agency over how I spend my time than most people on my team do. But I’ll say this: I’m not asking anyone to do something I’m not doing myself. I spend my own free time on this. Not because I have to, but because I think the cost of not doing it is too high. Self-awareness has never mattered more than right now. Knowing where you are in this, what you understand, what you don’t, what you’re still working out, is the starting point for all of it. I’m somewhere in the middle of figuring all this out, same as everyone else. I’m sharing it because I think it might be useful, and because writing is how I work out what I actually think.
You can judge it however you want. What matters is making an effort.
If you want to talk about any of this
I’ve been deep in this for a while and these conversations are useful. For the people I have them with and for my own thinking. If you’re trying to figure out where to start, what tools make sense for your role, or just want to think it through, I’m happy to talk.
