Here's a thing that surprises people.
The ATM arrived in the 1970s. Everyone predicted the end of the bank teller. By 2010 there were more tellers in the United States than there had been before the machine.
The economist James Bessen worked out why. ATMs made a branch cheaper to run. So banks opened more branches. Each one needed fewer tellers, but there were far more branches, and the tellers' jobs shifted from counting cash to selling and solving.
The task died. The job changed. The number went up.
What's the pattern?
"Computer" used to be a job title. Rooms of people, mostly women, doing calculations by hand. The machine took their name and their task. It also created every job in software, which nobody in 1940 could have described.
That's the honest answer about AI jobs. The specific titles aren't knowable. The shape is. When something gets dramatically cheaper, we do far more of it, and new work appears around the edges of the cheap thing.
Writing is getting cheap. Analysis is getting cheap. First drafts of everything are getting cheap. So expect far more of all of it, and expect the valuable human work to move to the edges: choosing, verifying, deciding, being accountable, and being the person who was actually there.
I say the job is not the goal. This is why. The jobs will change names. The goal, useful work done by people who care, doesn't.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Follow what's getting cheap. Whatever AI makes nearly free in your business, you're about to do ten times more of. Staff for the ten times, not the cut.
Grow the edge roles now. The verifier, the person who owns the decision, the one who explains it to the customer. Those are the teller jobs of this wave.
And stop asking "what job will this replace." Ask "what will we do far more of, and who will need to be there when we do."
The ATM story isn't reassurance. It's a map. The tellers who did well were the ones who became something the machine wasn't.
What's getting cheap in your business, and who's ready for ten times more of it?
Related: Will AI replace middle managers?
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