Adrian Owen Jones has a strategy for making yourself irreplaceable in the age of AI

For much of the general public, it wasn’t long ago that artificial intelligence was considered a vague and distant threat, something reserved for sci-fi novels, tech conferences and TED Talks. That, of course, is no longer the case.

AI is here, and it’s almost certainly already in your workplace, doing tasks humans used to do. And with its rapid adoption has come a growing uneasiness among professionals who spend their days “looking at a computer,” as Andrew Yang recently put it in his widely circulated essay forecasting “the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs.”

Adrian Owen Jones, a partner at Baton Rouge’s Success Labs, sees that anxiety up close.

Through her firm’s executive coaching and consulting work, she’s fielding more questions than ever from business leaders wondering what AI will mean for their organizations and for their own careers.

“We’re seeing it across industries,” Owen Jones says. “More and more people are saying, ‘I need help figuring out how to navigate this.’ People are looking for answers.”

So what answers is she giving them?

Don’t panic, but don’t pretend it’s not real.

Owen Jones doesn’t sugarcoat the severity of the coming disruption.

“I think the gist of his statement is true,” she says of Yang’s prediction that up to 50% of the roughly 70 million white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be eliminated in the next several years.

She believes coastal markets will likely feel the brunt first, with effects gradually moving inland. Louisiana, she notes, may be somewhat insulated for a time because the industries that prop up its economy, like manufacturing, are highly dependent on physical labor. But ancillary white-collar functions in the same industries—HR, accounting, procurement, legal—are all vulnerable.

“I think we’re starting to get the mist,” she says. “I think our feet are going to start getting wet in the next two years, and I think we’re going to be waist-deep fighting the current in the next five. I think a lot of people are going to be completely underwater in the next 10.”

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