> The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an ho

> The company said that using A.I. tools had cut back on the time that its in-house lawyers spend generating standard contracts — to about 10 minutes from an hour No-one got replaced. Just more efficient. > its communications staff uses the technology to classify press coverage as positive or negative. Classify more press coverage! Great! Humans get more effective. You need less people classifying press coverage, you'll hire fewer of those people and more people doing the higher-level work that is now possible. This is about job-role compression: people do more things once the specialty parts of a role are done by others & AI. Three present day examples: 1. small-company office managers now also manage the SaaS tools and staff email accounts. That used to be a whole IT department but it shrank and shrank to now be one aspect of the office manager's daily work. Notion, Slack, etc subscriptions cover the costs of those companies operating the systems, keeping them secure, adding features, making their admin UIs usable etc. But: the amount of work to maintain your company's installation will never go to zero. 2. illustration skills: to illustrate a fictional storybook for my niece's birthday, I am using Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111 and img2img - eg. [1]) Giving photos of her and her family a cartoony, "Pixar" look lets me write a fun narrative. It is exciting and powerful because pre-AI I would have to go back and forth with a trained illustrator. That would take months and be wildly expensive. Learning to draw myself is several years with huge opportunity cost. So I can make something solo that previously needed more humans and a ton of communication overhead. That said - we don't have AI (yet) that can "make me a storybook about my niece, here's a bunch of photos". So I am guiding the process. 3. software engineering with LLMs. You skip a ton of typing - but once you reduce the typing, suddenly the proportion of time thinking, architecting, reading code, and deciding what to ask for next goes way up. Job-role compression makes humans more valuable: for example coding with LLMs frees you to think higher-level. Any leader saying otherwise has either an ulterior motive (press?) or can't see the truth. If it's the latter, plan your escape. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac_WQSy2ek8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac_WQSy2ek8