Think about the tasks you have recently handed over to AI. Perhaps it drafts your emails, summarizes every report, prepares questions for meetings, analyzes data, or creates your presentations.
You are probably saving a lot of time. But what are you doing with the time you save?
If the answer is simply “more of the same work,” you may be missing the biggest opportunity AI offers. Even worse, you may be automating the very activities that helped you build expertise, understand your clients, develop relationships, and become valuable to your organization.
Which Parts of Your Work Create Your Value?
Most jobs include tasks that need to get done and activities that help you grow. Sometimes they are the same.
Reading a long client report takes time, but it also helps you understand how the client thinks. Writing a proposal can be tedious, but the process forces you to clarify your product or service and why your prospective client should choose you over someone else. Creating a presentation helps you decide which information matters and it helps you remember it better for when you need to present it. Preparing for a meeting allows you to anticipate objections and understand the people who will be in the room.
When AI does all this for you, you may receive a perfectly acceptable final product while missing the learning that comes from the process of creating it.
As you become more experienced in your career, your value depends increasingly on what you contribute beyond standard answers: your knowledge of the organization, your ability to connect seemingly unrelated information, projects or people; your relationships, your creativity, and your judgment.
If you automate every part of the process, how will you develop those capabilities?
Efficiency Can Make You Easier to Replace
Imagine that you used to spend five hours preparing a weekly report. Now AI helps you complete it in 30 minutes. If you continue to deliver the same report, your organization may eventually wonder why the task needs to remain part of a full-time role.
Consider what you could do with the remaining four and a half hours. You could identify a trend nobody has noticed, speak with the people affected by the data, recommend an improvement, or turn the report into a tool that helps leaders make better decisions.
What you do after the automation is where your value resides.
This connects closely with Innovation Is Everyone’s Job. Employees who use their knowledge of the work to spot opportunities can influence the business regardless of their title.
Five Ways to Protect and Increase Your Value
1. Divide your work into three categories.
Identify tasks AI can handle, tasks you should complete with AI, and tasks that require your full attention. Revisit the list regularly as your responsibilities change.
2. Protect the work that teaches you.
Before automating something, ask: What do I learn by doing this? If the answer includes understanding the customer, practicing a critical skill, or forming your own opinion, remain actively involved. And make sure to form your opinion before you ask the tool to come up with its opinion for you.
3. Reinvest the time you save.
Use it to solve a bigger problem, build a relationship, learn about another function, or develop an idea you never had time to pursue. If you remain idle for the extra time you get back thanks to using AI to automate your job, is very likely that your job will soon be taken away from you.
4. Move closer to decisions.
Ask to participate in conversations where leaders set priorities and direction. The farther you remain from decision-making, the easier it is for others to see your job as a collection of automatable tasks.
5. Keep proof of your expanded contribution.
Document the problems you identified, decisions you influenced, and opportunities you created. Promotion Insurance: How to Become Hard to Cut Without Becoming a Workhorse offers additional ideas for making your value visible. We live in an era when bosses are asking their employees to constantly prove their value, something that can be exhausting. But it behooves you to find an easy way to keep track of your contributions and make them evident to your supervisors on a regular bases.
AI should create room for you to contribute at a higher level. Make sure you are using that room. Otherwise, you may become faster at completing work that the organization will soon decide it no longer needs you to do.
