AI does not decide who stays. The same thing always did.

I spent the merger in the room where the lists got drawn. Two lists, at the same time: who goes, and who must not go under any circumstances.

Nobody landed on the second list because of a skill written down on a form. They landed on it because somebody in the room could name exactly what broke if they left.

That was true before anyone in the building had touched an AI tool. It is still true now that everyone has.

The restructuring conversations happening this year get blamed on AI, because AI is the easiest thing in the room to point at. Easier than admitting the logic underneath it was always this simple, and always this brutal. A compliment protects nobody. A dependency does.

So when people ask me whether AI is coming for their job, I do not think that is quite the right question. The right question is the one that was always right. If you left tomorrow, what specifically would break, and does anyone in the room know it well enough to say so out loud?

Most people cannot answer that about their current role. Fewer people even try, because the organisation has been answering it for them since the day they started. Somebody else decided what you were for. Somebody else wrote the line under your name, if a line ever got written at all.

That is the actual risk. Not the tool. The fact that the description of what you are for has never once been in your own hands.

A practice of your own changes exactly one thing about this, and it is the thing that matters. You write the line. You decide what you are for, who it is for, and what breaks if you are not there to do it. Nobody has to protect you onto a second list, because there is no list. There is one name on the door, and it is yours.

That does not make it safe. Markets are markets, and nobody can promise you a client. But it moves the actual decision, the one that used to happen in a room you were not in, into a room you are.

If you are trying to work out what that would look like for you specifically, that is the whole of what the diagnostic below does. Ten minutes, on your own history, free.