Miss the good old days when everything was fine as long as the economy was good? Today we need to fight our inner FOBO… our Fear of Becoming Obsolete.
We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we have far more to worry about these days than just the economy, where only 16% us are bullish about our economic future:
An overwhelming majority expect some form of economic turbulence in the coming months. Escalating geopolitical tensions, combined with unpredictable politics is making the world feel unstable, and that nagging feeling that a long-overdue global economic recession is surely looming, is weighing on our minds and causing many of us to spiral into a swirl of negativity. Today’s uncertainties are far more than economic. Political uncertainty, economic fears and the threat of AI taking over jobs has created a triumvirate of tension that is impacting our very psyches, dampening our excitement for the future and hovering over us like a dark cloud.
Be paranoid—we should be… as almost half of today’s employees are worried about AI in the workplace
When you think about all the stuff we wanted to do with RPA but couldn’t, which we can now do with agentic software, it’s getting easier and easier to realize that big chunks of our jobs can be replicated into software. As we advance along the AI continuum, the fear of being left behind is accelerating:
AI can either significantly enhance or completely automate tasks, such as pulling information from one screen to another, mining data and information to address issues, performing deep research, planning campaigns, reports, presentations, etc.
However, we are still aways from where we can confidently state that significant AI-driven automation has been achieved. Our recent study of 550 AI decision-makers across the Global 2000 details that almost half of us are simply miles behind in being ready to embrace GenAI, while only 15% are actually embracing it:
Fear AI making you obsolete… it’s smart to be AI paranoid. Embrace it and it may just open new doors for yourself. Ignore it, and someone more AI-literate than you is waiting to step into your job.
Let’s cut to the chase: If you give in to your FOBO (Fear Of Becoming Obsolete), you know you’re sitting on a ticking time bomb. Most F500 CIOs are under intense pressure to deliver genuine AI capability to their peers and bosses (per the 15% above), and executives who are failing to get with the program are under increasing scrutiny, as highlighted by a recent LinkedIn poll of over 1100 tech-centric executives:
Despite the realization that AI is here to stay and will have a significant impact on the future of the workforce as we know it, a large portion of investments around AI adoption are purely reactive rather than proactive; most are made without a clear understanding of where and how to apply AI for maximum gains – efficiency or cost – resulting in haphazard applications and unrealistic expectations. And what happens when these pilots fail to deliver or are unable to scale? Heads roll, projects are scrapped, and valuable time and resources are lost, bringing us back to the square one where cost-savings becomes number one priority while focus on innovation is lost.
Bottom-line: You can’t control geopolitics or the economy, but you can become an AI warrior to maximise your value and break out of your current predicament
You can blame your company’s culture or your management’s cynical approach to cost-cutting as being the key reason behind failed AI experiments, but ultimately, you need to train yourself to be an AI warrior, unafraid of the battles ahead, to stay relevant, creative, collaborative, and completely irreplaceable. You can’t control today’s volatile economics and politics, but you can control your relevance to your own organization, or to other firms if your current firm is fading into the past. So, invest in AI education – or go fund it yourself if your organization is too cheap. Make sure you understand these emerging GenAI and agentic tools tools, such as Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Moveworks, Beam etc, and how they can help you create content, analyze data, write code, design graphics, design cross-system orchestration, create action validation workflows.
Posted in : Agentic AI, AGI, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, ChatGPT, GenAI, Generative Enterprise
