It’s a scary time to be a knowledge worker, what with all the predictions that AI will wreak particularly widespread and devastating havoc on this sector of the workforce. And AI technology continues to improve at breakneck speed, meaning the danger could be real.
And yet.
A couple of months back I argued that, whatever efficiencies AI might provide, it can’t replace human…knowledge. I don’t generally quote myself, but I still strongly believe this: “They call it knowledge work for a reason. Communication is how you demonstrate your knowledge.”
I got some validation for this viewpoint in a recent TechCrunch report on a note from private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which looked at the big picture almost four years into the AI boom. When you take out the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla), the remaining firms in the S&P 500 are showing no evidence of improved productivity from AI. TechCrunch quotes from the report:
“In business, intelligence is mostly judgment…. AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.”
So when your company asks the basic question – will this technology help us make money or save money – the answer with AI seems to be no, at least at this moment.
That said, we are seeing signs that AI is replacing jobs. This report from Axis Intelligence Research cites Goldman Sachs data showing a net loss of 16,000 jobs per month in the U.S. during the first half of 2026; 25,000 jobs eliminated by AI, and 9,000 new jobs created due to AI. Axis also cites McKinsey data from last year that estimated 44% of all human work hours are technically replaceable by AI agents (with an additional 13% replaceable by physical robots).
The Axis report also draws on Goldman data that lists the following occupations as most exposed to AI replacement (in order, risk level at least 60%):
- Telephone operators [There were still human telephone operators?]
- Data entry clerks
- Insurance claims clerks
- Customer service reps
- Paralegals
- Software devs
Least endangered jobs included construction workers, nurses/care workers, and delivery drivers (at least for the near term in the latter case).
To me, what this all adds up to is that, if you’re a person with deep knowledge of how to do the thing that your enterprise exists to do, or at least how to execute a critical component of that mission, you *shouldn’t* have anything to fear from AI - *for now*. And if you’re a leader of that enterprise, you’re wasting your time and probably a lot of money if you’re investing a lot of either in trying to make that happen, unless yours is clearly a long-term vision whose near-term focus is on issues like the governance and security needed to underpin successful AI deployment.
The future is unknown, but trying to replace knowledge workers with AI today would be like trying to do online gaming or video streaming on the dial-up Internet of the mid-1990s. The pieces may all exist in some form, but we’re just not there yet, and it may be awhile before we are.
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