Open to Work 

Read this out loud: Open to Work.

What crosses your mind?

“This will not happen to me.”

“I hope … this will not happen to me.”

“No, I will never put this on my LinkedIn profile.”

Open to Work can feel like a sticker you hope you’ll never need. But it’s also a mirror: a reminder that work, especially white-collar work, is not a fortress of credentials. It’s a moving river. Degrees matter. Experience matters. Yet the river keeps flowing, and the banks are shifting.

AI is not arriving like a single pink slip; it’s arriving like a slow remix. Tasks you used to spend hours on: first drafts, summaries, schedules, simple analysis—now happen in minutes. The job title might stay the same, but the job beneath it is changing. For many white-collar roles, this won’t look like replacement so much as transformation: less time producing and more time deciding; fewer keystrokes, more judgment; fewer status meetings, more conversations that actually move the work.

That’s the signal in all the noise: most of us won’t be pushed out so much as pulled forward. Clerical and routine administrative work will feel the earliest tug. Professional roles like finance, marketing, law, consulting, operations, will be redesigned around what humans continue to do best: framing the problem, understanding people, navigating ambiguity, making the call. AI will draft; you will direct. AI will propose; you will dispose.

This is good news and hard news at once. New roles are being created, but they won’t necessarily be handed to the same people who held the old ones. The hinge is willingness: willingness to learn the tools, to let go of old status markers, to measure your value in outcomes rather than hours. “Open to Work” is no longer a mark of misfortune; it’s a posture of openness to change. It says: I’m available to be remixed too.

If you’re reading this with a knot in your stomach, here’s a different way to hold it: imagine your job as a bundle of tasks. Some are easily automated; some are not. Your opportunity is to unbundle and rebuild. Give away what a machine can do quickly and reliably. Reclaim what requires taste, context, ethics, trust, and relationship. Then add something new: data literacy, promptcraft, automation of your own workflows, or the ability to knit AI outputs across teams. The people who do this early will not only remain employable; they’ll become multipliers inside their organizations.

For some, the redesign will reveal a misfit—“this new version of the job is not me.” That’s not failure; that’s direction. The same technologies that compress routine tasks are also opening new lanes: product operations, customer education, AI governance and risk, human-in-the-loop quality assurance, data stewardship, workflow design, change management. The path may not be a straight promotion; it may be a pivot. But pivots are how careers stay alive in moving rivers.

Leaders have their part to play, investing in skills, redesigning roles before cutting them, setting guardrails so people can use AI responsibly. Still, the most decisive lever sits with the individual. Not because organizations don’t matter, but because agency compounds. The sooner you experiment, the quicker you learn where your edge is. The sooner you build a small portfolio of AI-enabled results, the easier it is to negotiate your next role, inside or outside your current company.

So yes, some jobs will go away, and many more will be created. In between those two facts is a choice. You can stand on the bank and hope the river slows, or you can step in, learn its currents, and let it carry you somewhere bigger than your current title. If you find yourself “Open to Work,” read it as an invitation: open to learning, open to redesign, open to the next version of your craft.

Because the future of white-collar work isn’t about being replaced or being untouched. It’s about being remade—on purpose. And that part is in your hands.