A colleague told me last week that his company had just brought in a consulting firm to help develop its AI agent and process automation strategy. Thousands of employees. Massive operations. And the first thing this firm will do is map every process, identify what can be automated, and estimate how many people will no longer be needed.
What’s missing from that brief? A plan for those people.
They Will Replace You Without a Plan
I have seen this play out over and over. Companies will spend months designing their automation roadmap, choosing the right AI tools, and calculating cost savings. They will build detailed timelines for rolling out AI agents across departments. But when it comes to the people whose jobs will disappear, the plan is almost always the same: figure it out later.
Don’t get angry at them. Most leadership teams didn’t see this coming, and almost nobody did. But when investors looked at AI, they saw the math instantly. Fewer people, lower costs, higher margins. Your company will follow that math. And when the time comes, you’ll be a conversation, a package, and a door. The career transition program and the retraining budget with your name on it rarely make it into the plan.
The mapping itself is not complicated. A consultant opens an org chart, lists every recurring task under each role, and marks it keep, automate, or cut. You could run the same exercise on your own week this afternoon. The only real difference is who decides what happens to you once the marks are made.
Learning AI Won’t Save You From This
I see a lot of people rushing to learn AI tools, thinking that’s the shield. But think about it for a moment. AI-specific job postings are surprisingly scarce, and that makes sense. AI is autonomous by design. It doesn’t need a large team of humans guiding it. So “I know how to use AI” is weaker career insurance than people think.
Open any job board and search “AI specialist” against “project manager” or “sales.” The AI-only postings are a trickle next to everything else, and that gap is the point. A system built to run with minimal supervision does not need a department of people supervising it.
The real question is what you will do when AI takes over what you do today.
Pause. Think. Build Your Own Plan.
Since nobody is building one for you, this one is yours. And the good news is that people are already finding paths forward.
Some are moving to trades and hands-on work. They are making good money, and they are not grinding 14-hour days to survive. Others are repurposing their careers toward nonprofit, vocational, or purpose-driven work. A growing number are going independent, using AI itself to build low-capital businesses that would have required a full team three years ago. The creator and gig economies have outgrown the side-hustle label. They are becoming a legitimate path.
And some will still be needed inside corporations. If that’s you, start looking for the blank spaces. The roles that aren’t defined yet. The problems nobody is solving. The places where your experience meets what’s coming next.
Re-hire Yourself Before Anyone Else Decides
If you plan to stay inside, here is the move I keep coming back to. Do the mapping yourself, before the consulting firm does it for you. Look at your own week and find the half that AI and automation will absorb anyway: the status updates, the recurring reports, the meeting follow-ups, the inbox triage. Fire yourself from that half.
Then re-hire yourself into a bigger job. Put the hours you get back into the work that stays human: the decisions, the people, the cross-functional problems nobody owns yet. Walk into your boss’s office with the freed time already pointed at something the business needs. That’s a very different conversation from the one HR has scheduled.
This is what I built my live cohort around. Productive, Not Busy is a five-week program for managers who lead a team and still carry their own deliverables. We map your work, automate the mundane parts, and measure the hours you get back. The last session is called Rehire Yourself: how to tell your boss and your team, and how to put the freed half into your next career move. Everyone starts with the free Productivity Assessment, so we know which of the 4 Productivity Vectors to work on first.
That is the whole order of operations: decide what to automate before a consulting firm decides it for you, free up the hours, and point them at the next version of your job.
Whatever direction you choose, choose it now. Before the consulting firm delivers its report. Before HR schedules that conversation. Now. Because the plan your company isn’t making for you? That’s yours to build. The difference between those who land well and those who don’t comes down to one thing: who started early.
If you want a head start, grab the free productivity resources at santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips. And if you’re ready to go deeper, explore templates and tools at the Productivity Hub, or browse my self-paced courses.