What is your competitive advantage in the Age of AI?
Rethinking career strategy as machines reason and act with human-level expertise
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Work is a significant part of our lives, and it fuels learning and monetary rewards essential to funding basic needs and beyond. While strategically managing a career has always been important, the ubiquitous access to artificial intelligence (AI) is a driving force that radically changes work and economics. Virtually every trade and professional line of work is being impacted by AI.
GitHub Copilot accelerates software code generation and productivity by 55%. Will this reduce or increase the demand for software engineers?
AI tools such as OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini can quickly create lesson plans for students and respond with expert-level answers 24x7. How will that change education and professions such as teachers and professors?
Text-to-video creation, such as OpenAI Sora, has the potential to radically change the design and production of movies and creative video works. How will that impact creators?
The cost and access to AI developer tools, computing, and AI models continue to fall rapidly, reducing the bar for organizations to automate repetitive human tasks and tap into expert knowledge on demand. How will this eliminate certain jobs while creating new ones?
Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) - an AI for physician-patient conversations - outperformed clinicians in a randomized study. How will this influence the medical profession and how patients receive care?
As an AI Business course instructor at UC Berkeley and an AI practitioner, I see how AI radically changes the landscape. As a coach, I see cases where AI reshapes fields and requires people to grow expertise to remain competitive. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about these questions:
How is AI influencing your field and line of work?
What is your competitive advantage, given current AI capabilities?
How will you adapt to remain competitive and in demand as AI surpasses human intelligence for some tasks and agents automate end-to-end workflows?
It is reasonable to assume that AI capabilities will advance rapidly and become integrated into daily experiences while costs decline. AI will also augment human tasks, making people more productive and creative.
How will you compete?
Strategy - how to compete
The world’s greatest thinkers have concluded that competitive advantage is derived through uniqueness. In the book Understanding Michael Porter, Porter's prescription is to be unique, not best. For Porter, competitive advantage is about creating superior value.
“If you have a real competitive advantage, it means that compared with rivals, you operate at a lower cost, command a premium price, or both” - Michael Porter
Using Porter's Five Forces framework, we can evaluate how AI changes industry structure.
Substitutes are products or services that meet the same basic need as the industry’s product in a different way. In certain human tasks, AI is acting as a substitute. Low switching costs to AI further accelerate the use of substitutes.
New Entrants - entry barriers protect an industry from newcomers. When switching costs are low, AI can use economies of scale and network effects to displace or augment human tasks.
Suppliers - if you position AI as a knowledge supplier to an industry, it can become stronger, given its reasoning breadth and ability to integrate and automate a complex value chain of thought and actions.
In the book Mastery, Robert Greene outlines the strategies for finding Life’s Task and the key to mastery is being unique.
The Darwinian strategy - “The game you want to play is different: to instead find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate.” This strategy reinforces making connections between fields of knowledge. “Ultimately you create a field that is uniquely your own.”
There are many other examples I could share here. The key point is our value proposition - the knowledge and tasks we perform uniquely are at the heart of cultivating a strong competitive advantage in your field. In today’s work, this must include adopting AI to perform your job in new ways that are quicker and cheaper.
Rethinking your career strategy
Deciding where and how to apply our most precious resources - time and energy - dramatically influences life’s outcomes. Given the rapid advances of AI, it’s time to rethink your career strategy.
How are you using AI to augment your work?
What aspects of your job will get eliminated through AI?
How will the demand and price for your services change in the era of AI?
What is your competitive advantage - something unique that AI cannot easily replicate?
One way to open up your mind to how AI can amplify and eliminate tasks in your current job is to build an OpenAI GPT. This does not require programming expertise, given that it’s built using prompts and instructions for the AI to reason and perform tasks. Think about the tasks you perform at your current job that can be automated and others that will augment your expertise.
What tasks can a GPT automate and then re-allocate that time to high-order tasks?
How can you use the GPT to broaden and deepen your expertise?
How can you orchestrate your GPT with publicly available GPTs in the OpenAI store to perform workflows?
In the context of combining AI and human knowledge, what is your competitive? How can you easily explain that to others?
Proactively evaluating the implications of AI in your field will enable you to create more value and mitigate the risk of being made irrelevant unexpectedly. If there is one thing you need to be good at, it’s learning how to change. Master of Change by Brad Stulberg is an excellent book on how to change when everything is changing including you.
👀 Thanks for reading and listening to Graymatter. I would love your help sharing my work with others!
I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas.