ITK: Is AI taking your job?

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Welcome back inside the kitchen. 🔥

Today, we are focusing on AI’s role in the workforce. That includes keeping an eye on your job and also looking at the perhaps biggest trend in enterprise AI.

This week’s take: When people ask, “Is AI going to take my job?” they usually only ask half the question.

There are two questions you should ask when trying to figure out if AI should take your job.

The first question people ask is important, but quite obvious:

That’s where most of the conversation goes. Can AI write code? Can it answer customer support tickets? Can it make lesson plans? Can it draft legal documents? Can it design ads? Can it analyze spreadsheets? Can it write articles?

That question matters, of course. If AI cannot do the work at all, then it probably is not replacing anyone anytime soon.

But I think the second question is just as important, and most people completely miss it:

Most jobs are not just bundles of tasks. They include relationships, expectations, trust, accountability, status, care, judgment, and incentives.

Take teaching. Could AI explain a math problem? Yes. Could it quiz a student? Yes. Could it summarize a reading? Yes. But do parents and students want education to become mostly a chatbot? Maybe in some contexts. But in many cases, people still want a teacher who notices when a student is discouraged, who understands the classroom, who can discipline fairly, who can care about the student as a person. This is precisely why a New York school recently abandoned its plan to implement a robot teacher in the classroom. Not because it couldn’t do the job, but because nobody wanted it to.

Or take medicine. Could AI help diagnose symptoms, read scans, or suggest treatment options? Absolutely. But do patients want to hear life-changing news from a machine? Do hospitals want the liability of fully replacing doctors? Do people trust AI enough with fear, pain, uncertainty, and death? Those are different questions.

The mistake is thinking that once AI can perform a task, replacement automatically follows. It doesn’t. Sometimes people want a human involved even when a machine is technically capable.

But before you pop your champagne and celebrate how safe your job is, it’s worth noting that the reverse is also true — and this is where things get uncomfortable. AI does not have to be better than you to threaten your job: it only has to be good enough for someone with power to prefer it.

That “someone” matters.

So it’s worth asking: who is incentivized to replace you with AI?

Your boss may want lower labor costs. A company may want faster output. Investors may want higher margins. Customers may want cheaper service.

So when you ask, “Will AI take my job?” don’t only ask whether AI can do the work. Ask who benefits if your work becomes automated, cheaper, or easier to outsource. That is the real pressure point.

A therapist, teacher, pastor, nurse, manager, writer, designer, salesperson, or professor may all say, “But my work requires human judgment.” And they may be right. But the next question is whether the institution paying for that work agrees. Do they care about the judgment? Do they recognize the value? Are they willing to pay for it?

Some jobs are protected not because AI can’t do parts of them, but because people still value the human relationship. Other jobs are vulnerable not because AI is amazing, but because the people making decisions care more about speed, cost, and scale than the human part of the work. This is why the question can feel so confusing.

So the ethical question is not just, “Can AI do this task?” The better question is, “What parts of this job do we still believe deserve a human being?”

That question forces us to be honest.

Because if the only value of a job is speed and output, AI will probably win more often than people want to admit. But if the job depends on trust, care, responsibility, taste, moral judgment, lived experience, or real relationship, then replacing the human may cost more than it saves.

So when asking the question, “Will AI take my job?”

Don’t just ask, “Can AI do the job?” But maybe more importantly: Who wants it to?

(This is for educational purposes only… not investment advice)

This week’s take: There is a huge misconception right now about how fast big companies can actually use AI.

We see incredible demos of AI chatbots writing code, summarizing documents, or creating images in seconds, and it feels like every business should be automated overnight.

In reality, most major enterprises are stuck in neutral. A massive company might have decades of scrambled customer data scattered across outdated internal databases, strict privacy rules, and rigid legacy software. You can't just plug ChatGPT into a bank's back-end or a hospital's patient system and hope for the best.

This creates a massive “AI translation gap.” Businesses are desperate to use AI to save money and move faster, but they don't have the specialized engineering talent to build the secure, custom bridges required to make it work.

This is the trend I have my eye on.

$EPAM ( ▼ 2.37% )

EPAM isn't a company that sells simple off-the-shelf software or basic help-desk support. They are elite tech architects — the digital construction crew that Fortune 500 companies hire when a software problem is too complex for an everyday IT team to solve.

Instead of being threatened by AI, EPAM is positioning itself as the crew that actually brings AI to life inside major corporations. Their recipe for success comes down to three practical advantages:

Think of AI like a high-performance jet engine. Most companies are still trying to figure out how to bolt it onto a bicycle. EPAM builds the custom aircraft around the engine so the business can actually fly.

And companies will pay almost anything to fly higher than their competitors.

Hi — I’m Hunter, a PhD candidate whose work has appeared in major academic journals and popular tech outlets. I founded FryAI to make staying ahead of AI clear, accessible, and fun.

📧 Email me directly if you have any questions or want to chat!