Utkarsh Maheshwari- Career Strategy & Advisory

A friendly guide to keep your job in the world of AI (and sanity)

Science fiction from the 80s would have you believe we would have had flying cars by now. And robots doing all the mundane chores around the house. But we got and how we reached here is quite different from the expectations. The start of the 21st century gave us the internet and with it came the .com bubble. When it burst, we all went back to our computers doing what we had to do to get our work done. There were a few winners who monopolized the internet with their innovation (Google and Meta), but then came a piece of technology that decided to take them head on- AI.

The disruption this has caused in the last four years is unparalleled and this has divided most of us into two groups- cynics and optimists. There are a few of us though, out here, in the shadow realm who like to avoid the misfortune of falling prey to binary thinking. The facts, like a developing story, are always building up until you have seen the puzzle building up over a time period big enough to make a conclusion. Big AI (as I like to call this disruption) is a developing story and like a good journalist my job is to observe it unfold in real time and make notes.

So far in this story of AI, one thing is clear. Money is being invested. A lot. By a conservative estimate, the world altogether has spent 1 trillion USD on AI in last 4 years. This is a big number yes, but is it a bubble? Nobody knows. I should also make a note that with every bubble comes the grifters and conmen with all their seduction techniques up their sleeves. We will explore how to spot them later on in this guide.

Alright now that we have established some nuances and facts to Big AI, lets get on with the guide.;

  1. What is AI? AI for our context is an LLM that gives you an output based off probability. It takes in your input and from its large backend DB predicts what the input is about and retrieves chunks of information that then it converts into plain language. One thing it does well is thinking. It does think, but not quite like us.

  2. How does AI think?

    The simplest way to put it is: AI doesn’t actually “think.” Not in the way you and I do. It doesn’t have awareness, memories of its own life, or emotions. What it does have is a very powerful pattern-recognition engine.

    When you ask AI a question, here’s what happens under the hood:

    • It breaks your words down into pieces (called tokens).
    • It searches through a massive statistical map of language that it has learned from billions of documents, books, websites, and conversations.
    • Based on probability, it predicts the next most likely word, phrase, or sentence that fits your input.

    So while it feels like “thinking,” what’s actually happening is very advanced pattern completion. Think of it like predictive text on your phone, but instead of suggesting your next word, it can suggest the next essay, strategy, poem, or line of code.

    That said, the “illusion of thought” is good enough to trick us into believing it is sentient, and that’s where the danger lies. If you anthropomorphize AI, you’ll start treating it like a colleague or mentor. If you keep in mind that it’s a probability machine, you’ll use it as a powerful assistant but still apply your own judgment.

  3. Why is AI a threat? We can train almost any digital existence for an AI model to train on. Photos? Done. Vidoes? Done. Coding? Done. UI/UX? Done. Audio? Done.

This gives AI a superpower we’ve never had to compete with before: the ability to replicate and remix human outputs across multiple domains at machine speed and scale.

In practical terms, this means tasks that once felt “safe” because they were “creative” or “specialized” can now be automated, augmented, or outsourced to a machine. That’s unsettling. The threat isn’t that AI will instantly replace you tomorrow - it’s that AI lowers the barrier to entry so drastically that your unique skill might no longer be rare.

The real danger is not just job loss but value dilution. If 100 people can now do what only 10 could do before, prices drop, expectations rise, and your role shifts. That’s why understanding AI isn’t optional- it’s survival.

4. What has actually happened?

In short: thinking has been outsourced to a probability machine.

And this machine — the LLM — is now capable of handling a large chunk of what we previously considered “knowledge work.” It doesn’t “know” in the human sense, but it can generate contextually relevant, even insightful, responses across a wide range of topics. Why? Because it can assign probabilities to what should come next — be it a sentence, a line of code, a bullet point, or even a business strategy.

So the real question becomes:

Are you better at thinking than the AI in your field?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Both yes and no can be true — even at the same time.

This self-awareness is key. Knowing where you still hold the edge and where AI beats you helps you avoid denial — and lets you play to your strengths.

  1. We cannot beat AI at its own game. We need to hone our uniqueness (and it could be anything ranging from people skills, coding, writing, sketching etc) and offload thinking to AI. If MBTI (personality types is to be believed), only 4-5% of the population has thinking a part of their core personality. They potentially could outcompete AI at their own game but the rest wont fall off the wagon too if they intimately understand the game.

5. You can’t beat AI at its own game — and that’s okay.

Trying to outcompute a machine that was literally built to compute is a losing battle. Instead, the goal is to change the game.

You do that by doubling down on the things that are uniquely human — and uniquely yours. These can be:

Even cognitive strengths, if you’re one of the few whose mind naturally excels at systems thinking, logic, or abstraction (thinkers, INTJs, INTPs, etc.), can be refined into a competitive edge.

And for everyone else? You don’t have to think better than the AI — you just need to know how it thinks, and when to let it take the wheel. The winners in the AI world will not be those who resist the machine, but those who orchestrate it.

  1. Now that we understand how AI works and where AI will go (who knows) lets understand the art of grifting.

Every gold rush brings its own gold-painted salesmen. And Big AI is no exception.

You’ll come across them on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and even in your company’s internal Slack channels — shouting about “10x productivity hacks” and “AI money printers.” They often package recycled ideas in flashy presentations, sell half-baked “prompt templates,” or offer overpriced courses that teach you things you could’ve learned by just asking ChatGPT.

How to spot them:

Healthy skepticism is your best defense. If someone claims they’ve “figured out” AI, they probably haven’t. The real experts are too busy experimenting to go viral. Stay curious, ask questions, and don’t fall for shortcuts that promise “mastery” in a weekend. Ask for real data to back anything up.

A Sanity Checklist for the AI Age

To wrap this up, here’s a short list to keep both your job and your mind in a world that’s changing fast:

✅ Understand how AI works — not the deep math, but the basic mechanics. You’ll use it better and fear it less.

✅ Audit your strengths — what can you do that an AI can’t (yet)? What do people come to you for?

✅ Use AI to amplify, not replace — treat it like an intern on steroids: useful, fast, occasionally wrong.

✅ Build a human moat — communication, ethics, taste, insight, collaboration — skills that don’t scale easily.

✅ Stay fluid — AI will keep evolving. So should your mindset, workflows, and maybe even your career arc.

✅ Avoid the hype cults — AI isn't a god, and it's not the devil. Don’t join the doomer or get-rich-quick camps.

✅ Remember: Tools don’t replace people. People who use tools excel.