“How do I AI-proof my career?”

I get asked this question constantly—in workshops, at conferences, in DMs from worried professionals. The anxiety is understandable. Headlines about AI capability advances come weekly. Every profession seems potentially exposed.

I don’t have a magic formula. No one does. But I can share a framework for thinking about career resilience that goes beyond platitudes.

First, Accept What You Can’t Control

You can’t control AI’s rate of advancement. You can’t control what capabilities emerge or when. You can’t control how your industry or employer responds. You can’t control whether your specific role is disrupted.

Spending energy worrying about these things isn’t useful. Focus on what you can control: how you develop, how you adapt, how you position yourself.

Understand Your Actual Exposure

Not all roles face equal AI exposure. Assess yours honestly:

Task decomposition: Break your role into component tasks. For each task, ask: Can current AI do this? Could near-future AI? Is this routine cognitive work or does it require judgment, creativity, or physical presence?

Value identification: What aspects of your work create the most value? Are those aspects more or less exposed to AI?

Substitution vs. augmentation: For exposed tasks, is AI more likely to substitute entirely or augment human capability? Many roles will be augmented rather than eliminated.

Timeline assessment: When might exposure materialise? Some disruption is imminent. Some is years away. Some may never come.

This analysis shouldn’t be paralysing. It should be clarifying. Understand what you’re facing before deciding what to do.

The Three Development Strategies

Based on exposure assessment, three strategic directions make sense:

Strategy 1: Deepen What’s Distinctly Human

Some capabilities remain distinctly human—at least for the foreseeable future:

Complex judgment: Decisions involving ambiguity, incomplete information, competing values, and uncertain consequences. AI can inform these decisions but can’t make them.

Relationship and trust: Building genuine human connections, navigating political dynamics, establishing credibility. These are fundamentally human.

Creative vision: Not just generating variations (which AI does well) but having creative vision—knowing what’s worth creating and why.

Ethical reasoning: Making value-laden decisions about right and wrong, fair and unfair, appropriate and inappropriate.

Physical presence: For roles that require being somewhere—healthcare, trades, hospitality—physical presence remains necessary.

If your work involves these elements, deepen them. Become better at judgment, stronger at relationships, more skilled at creative vision. These capabilities will remain valuable.

Strategy 2: Become Excellent at Working with AI

AI fluency is becoming essential across almost all knowledge work. The gap between people who work effectively with AI and those who don’t is already significant and growing.

This means:

Develop strong prompt engineering: The ability to get useful outputs from AI systems. This is surprisingly skill-dependent.

Learn to evaluate AI outputs: Critical assessment, fact-checking, quality judgment. AI produces confident-sounding falsehoods. You need to catch them.

Understand appropriate use cases: Know when AI helps and when it doesn’t. When to trust it and when to verify.

Stay current: AI capabilities change rapidly. Continuous learning is required.

The best position in many fields will be humans who combine domain expertise with AI fluency—able to do things neither humans alone nor AI alone can do.

Strategy 3: Move Toward the Value

As AI changes what work is valuable, move toward the new value centres:

Upstream: Defining problems, setting direction, making strategic choices. AI can help execute, but humans still define what to execute.

Downstream: Implementation, integration, dealing with real-world messiness. AI generates outputs, but integrating them into organisations and lives remains human work.

Oversight and governance: As AI does more, overseeing that work becomes more important. Someone needs to ensure AI is doing the right things in the right ways.

Where AI creates opportunity: AI enablement, AI training, AI product development, AI consulting. Growing demand creates opportunity for those who can meet it.

Watch where value is moving in your field and position toward it.

Practical Development Actions

Strategies need actions. Here’s what actually helps:

Build Learning Habits

The most important meta-skill is learning itself. In an environment of continuous change, people who learn quickly and continuously have advantages. Research from McKinsey consistently identifies learning agility as one of the top predictors of career resilience through technological disruption.

Develop habits:

• Regular time allocated to learning
• Diverse sources and perspectives
• Application of learning to real work
• Reflection on what’s working

Learning agility predicts adaptability better than any specific skill.

Maintain a Portfolio Career Mindset

Don’t think of your career as a single job. Think of it as a portfolio of capabilities, experiences, and connections that create value in various configurations.

Build:

• Skills that transfer across roles and industries
• Relationships in multiple professional communities
• Experience with diverse types of work
• Reputation that travels with you

This portfolio provides resilience against disruption to any single position.

Invest in Human Connection

As more work becomes automatable, distinctly human capabilities become more differentiating.

Invest in:

• Building genuine professional relationships
• Developing emotional intelligence
• Strengthening communication skills
• Creating community and belonging

These investments pay returns regardless of how AI evolves.

Stay Financially Flexible

Career transitions are easier with financial flexibility. If you need your current income to survive, you have less ability to take risks, retrain, or wait for the right opportunity.

Where possible:

• Build savings that provide runway
• Avoid lifestyle inflation that locks in income requirements
• Develop multiple income sources
• Invest in optionality

Financial flexibility is career flexibility.

What Not to Do

Some common reactions are counterproductive:

Don’t bury your head. Ignoring AI won’t make it go away. Engage with the changes rather than avoiding them.

Don’t panic. Panic leads to bad decisions—quitting stable jobs impulsively, investing heavily in flavour-of-the-month credentials, spreading anxiety to colleagues.

Don’t chase every trend. AI advice evolves weekly. You can’t pivot every time a new article appears. Act on well-reasoned strategy, not headlines.

Don’t assume you’re immune. “My job can’t be automated” is often wishful thinking. Be honest about your exposure.

Don’t give up. The future isn’t determined. Your actions matter. Fatalism is neither accurate nor helpful.

The Honest Truth

I can’t promise that following any strategy will guarantee career security. The honest truth is that we’re navigating unprecedented change with significant uncertainty.

What I can say is that the strategies outlined here—deepening human capabilities, developing AI fluency, moving toward value—are sensible responses to current conditions. They position you well across multiple scenarios.

And they’re within your control. That’s worth something when so much feels uncertain.

The Mindset That Helps

Beyond specific strategies, a certain mindset helps:

Curiosity over fear. Approach AI with curiosity about what’s possible rather than just fear about what might be lost.

Agency over victimhood. You have choices. Your development is up to you. Don’t wait for your employer or the market to tell you what to do.

Adaptation over resistance. Change is coming regardless. Adapting positions you better than resisting.

Growth over fixed. Believing you can develop new capabilities matters. Fixed mindsets become self-fulfilling limitations.

Long-term over short-term. Career resilience is built over years through consistent investment. Don’t expect quick fixes.

Starting Now

If you’re reading this and wondering what to do:

Today: Audit your current role for AI exposure. What tasks are most and least exposed?

This week: Experiment with AI tools relevant to your work. Build familiarity through use.

This month: Identify one distinctly human capability to develop. Create a development plan.

This quarter: Build or strengthen relationships with people navigating similar challenges. Community helps.

This year: Execute a deliberate development strategy. Don’t just drift.

The future is uncertain. What you do about it isn’t.

Start now.