How to Stay Irreplaceable When AI Can Do Your Job
Here’s something that should make you uncomfortable: last week, I looked at five documents from a colleague’s team. Strategy decks, reports, product specs. All solid. All polished. I had no idea which human had written which one.
That’s because none of them really did. AI wrote all of it.
For the first time in modern history, being competent isn’t rare anymore. The skills that used to take years to build can now be approximated in minutes. So the question isn’t “Will AI take my job?” anymore. It goes deeper than that.
If machines can do what I do, what actually makes me valuable?
The Trap Most People Fall Into
The instinctive response is to run faster. Learn more tools. Ship more output. Stay ahead.
That instinct will burn you out and leave you behind anyway.
The real opportunity isn’t to be faster than AI. It’s to become something AI can’t easily replace. To become, for lack of a better term, non-fungible.
Think about what that means for a person: if you disappeared tomorrow, there’s no clean replacement. Not because you’re irreplaceable on an org chart, but because your value comes from a specific, hard-to-replicate combination of judgment, taste, experience, and perspective.
Most people are accidentally training themselves to be the opposite. Optimizing for speed. Chasing best practices. Copying high-performing formats. Specializing in tasks AI is rapidly absorbing.
If your value can be fully captured in a prompt, you should be worried.
AI loves that kind of work. That’s the trap.
Cogs vs. Linchpins
Seth Godin drew a crucial distinction years ago that has become even more relevant now: there are cogs, and there are linchpins.
Cogs follow instructions. They do what’s asked, stay in their lane, and optimize for not making mistakes. They’re reliable, predictable, and interchangeable.
Linchpins are different. They’re connectors. They take responsibility without asking permission. They do the emotional labor of creating trust and holding teams together. They make decisions when the instructions are incomplete or wrong.
Here’s the thing about AI: it’s phenomenal at following instructions.
It cannot decide which instructions matter.
That’s linchpin work. And AI doesn’t eliminate linchpins. It makes their absence painfully obvious.
When everyone has access to the same AI tools, the people who stand out are the ones who know what matters to build, not just how to build it. The ones who can read a room, sense when a project is going sideways, and course-correct before anyone asks them to.
The Ultimate Intern Problem
Think of AI as the most brilliant intern you’ve ever met. Tireless at research. Impressive at analysis. Capable of producing work at superhuman speed.
But like any intern, it lacks the wisdom that comes from lived experience. The intuition born from thousands of human interactions. The cultural fluency you develop over years of navigating messy, complicated situations.
AI excels at pattern recognition. It can analyze thousands of legal documents, generate marketing copy, write code that actually works. But it struggles with the spaces between the patterns. The subtle cultural nuances. The unspoken client concerns. The innovative leaps that connect ideas nobody thought to connect.
Look at how radiologists are adapting. The successful ones aren’t being replaced. They spend less time spotting obvious tumors (AI handles that brilliantly) and more time on complex cases requiring judgment, patient communication, and coordination with other specialists. They’ve become more human, not less relevant.
What Actually Makes Humans Valuable Now
Here’s the counterintuitive truth almost nobody is pricing in: we actually need AI.
Population growth is slowing across much of the world. Without productivity gains, economies stagnate. AI arrives at exactly the moment when labor is scarcer and complexity is higher.
Which means the remaining human workers, especially those who can span domains and make real judgment calls, aren’t becoming cheaper. They’re becoming rarer.
And rarity drives value.
Jobs Don’t Disappear. Tasks Do.
Everyone wants to talk about job loss. The real story is task loss.
Secretaries didn’t disappear when email arrived. Executives didn’t disappear when they had to type their own memos. The tasks moved. The roles adapted.
AI accelerates this unbundling dramatically. The people who win aren’t the ones clinging to a narrow set of tasks. They’re the ones who can absorb more scope. When tasks get automated, they adapt rather than panic.
The Skill-Stacking Math That Changes Everything
Here’s a piece of career math that has aged absurdly well in the AI era.
If you’re in the top 25% of two different skills, you’re in the top 6% of people with that combination. Top 25% of three skills? Top 1.5%. The intersections empty out fast.
You don’t have to be the best at any single thing. You have to be unusually good at a specific combination.
The designer who understands constraints. The engineer who can write. The project manager who knows engineering tradeoffs.
Being good at two things is more than twice as valuable. Being good at three? You stop competing in crowded markets and start occupying empty intersections.
AI doesn’t invalidate this logic. It supercharges it. What used to take decades to learn across domains can now be compressed into years, or months, if you know how to use AI as a tutor instead of just a tool.
The Four Things AI Still Can’t Do
Reading between the lines. While AI processes information, humans process meaning. Understanding not just what’s said, but what isn’t said. The cultural subtext. The political undercurrents. The emotional undertones.
A marketing executive I know uses AI to generate campaign ideas, but human insight determines which concepts will actually resonate across different cultures. AI might suggest a brilliant tagline, but only a human knows whether it’ll offend certain audiences or ride an emerging cultural wave.
Building real trust. AI can generate connections. It cannot generate trust. The most irreplaceable people are bridges: between departments, between cultures, between ideas and execution. They’re the ones others call when they need honest advice or someone who actually gets the human side of the problem. This is linchpin territory. The emotional labor of showing up, being present, and making people feel heard. AI can simulate empathy. It can’t actually care.
Making unexpected connections. AI recombines existing ideas impressively. But breakthrough innovation often comes from unexpected connections that emerge from diverse human experience. An architect I know uses AI for initial design iterations, but her real value lies in understanding how spaces make people feel. Her designs reflect something AI can’t access: how people actually want to live.
Navigating ethical gray areas. As AI gets more powerful, the need for human judgment about how to use it gets more critical. The most valuable people are those who can make values-based decisions under uncertainty and help organizations use AI responsibly.
The 3-2-1 Framework
Here’s a simple rule for becoming non-fungible:
3 years building real depth in one domain. The kind of expertise that lets you spot what AI gets wrong.
2 adjacent skills where you’re operationally competent. Not world-class. Functional. Enough to collaborate without translation, prototype without permission, and see connections others miss.
1 clear point of view that makes your combination legible. Not a job title. A perspective. Something that lets people understand what you uniquely bring.
Don’t be a role. Be a combination.
Agency Is the Real Multiplier
The trait that compounds most aggressively with AI isn’t intelligence or credentials.
It’s agency.
The mindset of: I’ll figure it out. I’ll own the outcome. I don’t need permission to start.
This is the heart of what makes a linchpin. Not waiting for instructions. Not asking for approval. Seeing what needs to happen and making it happen.
Give AI to someone without agency and you get more output, more noise, more dependency.
Give AI to someone with high agency and you get faster learning, wider scope, asymmetric impact.
Same tool. Completely different result.
Stop Waiting to Be Picked
Linchpins don’t wait to be picked. They pick themselves.
The tools are available to everyone now. AI included. The barrier isn’t access anymore. It’s initiative.
The people thriving right now aren’t waiting for permission. They’re using AI to learn faster, build more, and ship things that would have taken entire teams a decade ago. They’re treating AI as leverage, not as a replacement for their own judgment.
The Paradox of This Moment
The more powerful AI becomes, the more valuable human distinctiveness gets.
In a world of infinite content, clarity beats volume. Depth beats speed. Trust beats novelty.
The future doesn’t belong to the most optimized humans. It belongs to the most specific ones.
Use AI to speed up execution and expand your reach. But never outsource your judgment, your curiosity, your values, or your voice. If AI speaks for you, you disappear. If AI works with you, you compound.
The question isn’t whether AI will change your industry. It’s whether you’ll become the kind of human that AI makes more powerful, rather than obsolete.
Become someone who cannot be cleanly replaced. Not because you’re indispensable. Because you’re distinct.
Become a linchpin.