I have the unusual experience of spending my working life building and scaling artificial intelligence while going home to two teenagers trying to imagine their place in the future it’s creating.
They’re just starting to figure out what they want their lives to look like, and their questions are shaped by a world changing by the day. Those questions are also way more practical than you’d imagine. Is university worth it? Will a particular career still exist? Do I need to learn to code?
Being an AI founder makes me optimistic and realistic. I see both what AI can do and what it can’t. It has also changed the career advice I give my kids.
I can’t tell them which jobs will be safe, but I can help them prepare for jobs and careers that don’t stay still. Here are the three things I keep coming back to.
1. Learn to think and then use AI to get better, faster
I tell my sons that getting an answer isn’t enough. They need to know whether it’s any good and what to do with it.
I have a simple test when it comes to AI for schoolwork: Can they explain the answer, challenge it, and apply it in a different context without the tool? If they can, AI has helped them learn. If they can’t, it has helped them produce something that looks like learning. When that happens, I make them redo the work in front of me.
But I don’t want them to be afraid of these tools either. AI can give their generation individualized coaching and practice that mine never had.
I’m already seeing the upside at work. Before a new salesperson ever speaks to a prospect, they can spend a month talking to AI agents. They can try an opening, get challenged, adjust, and try again. By the time they make that first call, they’ve had a volume of rehearsal and feedback that would have been difficult to give an entry-level employee even a few years ago.
But there are limits to what it can teach you. Once, I worked for a brilliant boss, who had a heart of gold and could also be hell to work for.
On the pinboard behind his desk were two pictures: a donkey’s backside and a pair of grandparents. When he reviewed my work, if he pointed to the donkey, I’d gotten something technically wrong. If he pointed to the grandparents, I’d made it so complicated nobody could understand it.
I walked out of that building crying more than once during my first few months. But that experience became career defining. Eventually, I understood what was driving the brutal feedback. He had incredibly high standards, wanted me to meet them, and was invested in making me better. And, when I knew that, I was able to learn from him. AI can critique your work all day long, but it can’t replicate the context and trust built through a relationship over time.
2. Look for work where humans are still needed
I don’t pretend to know which careers are AI-proof. And asking a 16-year-old to predict what AI will be capable of when he’s 26 would be absurd.
Instead, I encourage my kids to look at the problem underneath the job by asking these questions:
- Will this problem still matter in 10 years?
- Which parts will technology make easier and what will still require human judgment?
- Is this an industry that is changing, being invested in, and becoming more important?
My own career has kept me close to physical infrastructure, where things rarely go exactly as planned. Take highway maintenance, for example. A crew can arrive expecting to carry out one job and find that the conditions on the ground aren’t what the plan anticipated. Weather has changed, a hazard has emerged, or equipment or materials aren’t where they need to be.
People on the ground have to assess what they’re seeing and figure out how to keep the work moving safely. Technology can help, but someone still has to look at what’s happening and decide what to do next.
That’s one reason I’ve encouraged my sons not to dismiss skilled trades and apprenticeships. We’ve spent too long implying that the only ambitious route is a conventional university degree followed by an office job.
3. Become increasingly employable
To me, employability is becoming the person other people want on their team when circumstances change. The colleague who spots a problem, brings a sensible recommendation, and follows through is never out of fashion. Neither is the colleague who shows up every day with a smile and a can-do attitude.
To become this person, you have to choose opportunities because they build capability and teach you to do something you can’t do today.
One of my own career-defining moves was taking my first CEO job. It wasn’t a role a headhunter was likely to hand me. Hiring a first-time CEO is a risk because, by definition, you haven’t proved you can do it yet.
So I had to build the skills around the job before I sought the title. I went outside my comfort zone as a consultant and learned how to help raise capital and build a strategy for where a business should go next. Those experiences gave someone a reason to take the risk on me.
It also changed how I think about career progression and why I tell my sons the best career move won’t always look like a step up.
The future of work can look pretty gloomy when you’re 16, although sometimes I wonder how concerned my sons really are. My eldest is choosing a university right now and, despite all his questions about the future of work, he seems more concerned with going to the same place as his best friend. Some things never change.
But I don’t want my sons to think their only option is to wait and see what AI does to their careers. I agree with Dex Hunter-Torricke that we all need to lean in and decide how we want AI to be part of our world, rather than leave those decisions to a small number of people.
My sons aren’t powerless in all of this. They get a say in what comes next.