Everyone’s worried AI will take their job. Wrong question.
The right question: how much of your job was never meant for a human brain in the first place?
Every quarter, our CEO and I would co-write the investor update. Gathering data from across the company. Itemizing the most important updates — a quarter is a long time in the life of a startup. Calibrating the tone. Optimistic but not outrageous. Committal but non-committal. Consistent with what we said last time.
Eight or nine hours of work spread across a week. We called it collaboration. Most of it was assembly.
Now we use NotebookLM to pull updates from across the quarter, synthesize everything, and build the report from past templates. Thirty minutes to assemble. Thirty minutes to review and revise. One hour total.
The eight hours we “lost” to AI? That was never our job. We just didn’t have anything else to do it.
Financial prep was the same. Every month I’d manually break out costs per delivery from our P&L. Month-over-month comparisons. Quarterly rollups. Two or three hours of spreadsheet work.
Now I dump the P&L into Claude, add delivery numbers, done in seconds.
I didn’t lose that work. I was freed from it.
Nobody’s talking about this: most of what we call “work” isn’t thinking. It’s synthesis. Comparison. Formatting. Gathering data from six places and putting it in one place.
That’s not strategy. That’s not judgment. That’s not creativity.
That’s assembly. And you’ve been doing it with the most expensive tool in your company — your brain.
The caveat matters: AI gets you the bones. You still review. You still refine. You add the judgment. This isn’t autopilot.
But every hour you spend on assembly is an hour you’re not spending on problems that actually need you.
So stop worrying about AI taking your job.
Start asking how much of your job was ever really yours to begin with.