What Happens When You Use AI to Eliminate Your Role?

I hear this fear constantly: "AI is going to take my job."

And you know what? You’re probably right. BUT it’s not in the way you think.

AI is going to take your job -- and give you a much better one.

I know this because I've seen it happen at HubSpot. Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly.

So today, I want to break down:

• What actually happens when someone automates themselves out of a role

• Why this is what companies dream about

• The skill that actually matters

—@dharmesh

What Actually Happens at HubSpot

Let me be very clear about this, and I'll say it with conviction because I believe it with conviction: if you are determined and curious enough to automate your way out of your current job, you are probably going to get promoted into a new one.

That's not a motivational platitude, that's what happens in practice.

Here's the actual scenario:

• If someone comes to me and says: "Dharmesh, I did this thing that’s part of my job, but boring. I thought it was just a waste of time, so I built this agent/automation and automated it."

• My response: "Great. We'll find something bigger and better for you to do. Let's find bigger problems for you to solve and tell me how I can help."

That's what would happen in any reasonable, rational organization, which most organizations are. The idea that someone would say, "Oh well, thank you for automating that and now we're just going to fire you" -- that would be silly. This is a high-leverage person, and this is what we dream about.

At HubSpot, the tools have gotten good enough now that you wouldn’t find a single team or department that's not using AI in some way. Those teams untouched by AI and agents just don't exist anymore. And when people automate parts of their role, we don't eliminate them -- we give them bigger problems to solve.

Why This Is What Companies Dream About

Curious and determined people can do a lot more than they were previously capable of.

And that’s only increasing over time.

Take Heather in HR (who is totally made up for this example).

She wants to automate a particular process, but she's not going to rewrite Workday -- that's not what we're talking about.

What she's going to say is: "Given the tools that I have, and I don't even know anything about APIs, I'm going to build this internal tool for the new employee onboarding thing that will take X hours of human labor out of the process every time we hire a new employee, which happens often enough."

Previously, Heather could only dream of the day that she wouldn’t have to do employee onboarding. Any employee onboarding tool used to be expensive, and not personalized enough for her situation.

But with today’s AI tools, she can build exactly the internal tool she needs, allowing her to expand and focus on other, more enjoyable aspects of her work.

That's the opportunity, and those are the kinds of things that companies dream about.

So the reframing is that it’s not about eliminating roles, it's about eliminating tasks so people can work on higher-leverage, higher-impact problems. And the people who figure that out fastest are exactly the people companies want to hire and promote.

The Skill That Actually Matters and What This Means for You

Things are changing, there’s no getting around it.

The skill that matters is no longer your job title, your years of experience, or even your technical background. The skill that matters is curiosity and determination.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

1. Start small and specific. Identify the parts of your job that are inefficient or that you think could be done better with AI, and make a list. Don't try to automate everything at once -- start with one thing that's painful or repetitive, something that takes time but doesn't require deep expertise.

2. Try to automate it. Use whatever tools are available to you. If it doesn't work the first time, that's completely okay. Put a date on your calendar for six months from now and try it again, because this stuff moves so quickly that what doesn't work now might work then.

3. Share what you did. When you succeed at automating something -- even something small -- document what you did and share it with your team or your manager. Don't hide it. Any reasonable organization will see you as someone who solves problems and finds leverage.

If you're worried about AI taking your job, you're thinking about the wrong problem.

The right question is: What bigger problem could I be solving if AI handled the parts of my job I shouldn't be doing anyway?

And if you've actually been let go because you automated so much of what you did drop me an email and share your story by replying to this newsletter. We can perhaps hi-light your story in a future edition. Maybe across the millions of people that read this, we’ll find an astute organization that is looking for exactly someone like you. Someone that can help transform a team or entire organization with AI.

Trust me, lots and lots of companies are looking for someone that has the curiosity and drive to learn and create leverage.

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)

p.s. And speaking of learning things and building high-value skills, if you haven’t used HubSpot before I encourage you to spin up a free account at GoHubSpot.ai. Whether you work in marketing/sales/ops or you’re considering starting your own company, it’ll be a useful skill to have (there are 290,000 companies that use HubSpot).