The AI talent math is flipping

If you lead a team or a company, read this because the math you are running on AI and headcount right now has a second half you cannot see on the spreadsheet, and it is moving against you.

If you are the one doing the work, read this because the same shift that has your leaders nervous is handing you more power than you have realized, and what you do with it over the next year is going to matter more than ever.

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Yesterday:

Inside a room, someone sits down across the table from their boss. The boss says the hard thing. “I'm sorry. Your position is redundant.” AI does the work now.

It is not just one conversation. It’s one person, then the next, then the one after that. The math is simple and it is everywhere. A tool can do the tasks. The tasks were the job. So the job goes. And the person goes with it.

This is the story we already know. We have read it a hundred times.

Tomorrow:

Inside the same room, only now it’s Tomorrow. Same table. Same boss. The door opens, and the employee walks in and sits down.

They have not come to be let go. They have come to leave.

“I'm laying myself off,” they say. And underneath the words is something the boss can’t quite hear. “I'm laying you off, too.” As the place I used to need. As the leader I used to need. As the security I used to need. I can do this on my own now.

Then the next person sits down and says the same thing. And the one after that.

What changed between those two rooms is the technology. 

Yesterday, value was made inside the machine. The company owned the means of production, the systems, the capital, the machinery that turned a person's skill, combined with the skills of others, into something the world would pay for. Your talent was real, but on its own it was stranded. You needed somewhere to plug it in. So you brought it to the company, because the company was the only place your skill became value. That was the deal. You needed the company more than the company needed you.

Tomorrow, the individual can wear and wield the machine.

The AI is the exoskeleton. It puts the means of production and value creation around a single set of shoulders. The same talent that was stranded yesterday can now build the thing, reach the customer, ship it, and get paid, without the company standing in between. The skill was always yours. What you lacked was the machinery. The machinery just became something you can wear.

Yet, the company is still playing yesterday's hand. It still believes it has a monopoly on the machine. It is doing the old employer-employee power math on a balance that has already started to turn, and it has not noticed yet.

That is what makes it dangerous.

How does a company talk itself onto the wrong side of this?

It does the same math it has always done.

Yesterday's world was the assembly line, and the assembly line took people’s talent and atomized it. It turned a person into a list of tasks and a role into a list of steps, because a list is what the machine could hold. That happened long before AI arrived. By the time a leader looks at a role today, the person in it has already been flattened into tasks. 

So the leader runs the equation they have always run. 

It is the same equation they ran when work first got outsourced, and again every time something could be automated. The question is: Can the task be done another way, for less? That is all the math ever asked. And now the answer is yes. A machine can do the steps. It costs less. It runs through the night. It does not need managing the way a person does. To the leader this is not a hard call. It is a one-for-one trade, and the machine wins it.

But this is the wrong math. The tasks you are automating are the commodity. 

The tasks are the part anyone can now buy, metered by the token, topped up like a utility. That is the exact reason that the tool can do them. So when you swap them out, you are not buying an edge. You are buying the same thing your competitor is buying, from the same shelf, at the same price, off the same meter. You did not cut costs on the way to advantage. You automated your way deeper into commoditization.

That is the error leaders can’t see themselves making. They were measuring the one part of the person that was never worth the most. They could not see the rest, because the rest had never appeared in a spreadsheet.

Today, the boomerang has already headed back. 

You cannot see it. You cannot hear it. But it is coming at you, and it will hit you out of the blue if you are not ready.

Take the same tool that led the leader to make cuts, for example.  It does not only replace the people who left. It now raises the Floor under every person who stayed. The people you kept are not standing still. They are learning the tool, and something is happening to them while they do.

At first they are just faster. Then something changes. They stop using the machine to perform confidence, and they start using it to earn competence.

As I wrote about in my last note, you can rent confidence for twenty dollars a month. Competence you have to earn, rep by rep, until you are not asking the tool what to do but telling it. Until the exoskeleton is not carrying you. You are wearing it. You are inhabiting it.

The very moment that one of your people reaches that stage, the math you did runs in reverse.

Because now they can do on their own what used to take your building, your capital, your name. The thing that kept them was never only the paycheck. It was that they could not create value without you. They relied on you. Not anymore. 

Meanwhile, the savings looked great this quarter. It was on the report. It had your name on it.

The flight risk was less obvious. It does not show up this quarter. The drain starts with one person, then another, and it is already gaining velocity before it grows big enough to see. By the time it shows among your numbers, you are behind it.

We used to have a word for the thing that held them anyway. We called it loyalty. But what was loyalty made of? It was made out of need. You are loyal to me because you need the paycheck every two weeks. You need the benefits. You need this, because out there on your own, your talent cannot become value. That was not devotion. That was a balance of power, and we gave it a warmer name.

That balance is turning over. 

Let’s start with the person who leaves, for example. They do not come back as a rival who takes all your customers. That is the old fear, and it is the wrong one. They come back as a pinprick. They take one customer. The one they understood better than you did.

One pinprick you can absorb. But the tool that made one person dangerous made a thousand of them dangerous, and they are leaving to build at a rate we have never seen before. More than one in three new companies are now started by a single person, up from fewer than one in four in 2019. The pinpricks multiply before any quarterly report is built to detect them. 

And they do not need to be a giant to reach you. Cursor, the AI coding tool, was built by four people just out of school, aimed straight at a product owned by one of the largest companies on earth, and it grew faster than the incumbent it was chasing. Four people. No company building, no permission, no decade of runway. 

There is also a second consequence of the wrong math worth mentioning. This one is the leader's own move played back to them. 

Some companies did the math, cut the people, and they found the tool could not grasp the  whole job. So they went to hire the person back… and the person came back at a higher number than they left on, because now they manage the machine as well as they do the work.

So before you run the math again, two questions.

How sure are you that you will not be hiring that person back? And how do you know the role you are cutting today does not walk back in as the pinprick tomorrow?

If you are reading this and you are not the one doing the cutting, if you are the one in the chair, then everything above is not a warning. 

It is a door. The power moved toward you. 

But it did not land in your lap, and it will not wait for you to notice it. It has to be taken. Taking it is work. I know you  have felt the pull to let the tool do the thinking. But that pull is the trap. Rent the confidence and you have nothing that is yours. Earn the competence, rep by rep, and you are not renting anything. 

Building that competence is no longer optional, because the ground will not stop moving. What made you valuable today is being commoditized under your feet even as you stand on it. So the work is never finished. You do not earn the competence once. You keep earning it, again and again, as the Floor of your work rises.

And here is what waits at the top of that climb: something the spreadsheet never counted. Something valuable. 

Go back to that first room, Yesterday’s room. Yesterday’s math turned a person into a list of tasks that did not just underpay the person. 

That reduction also amputated the part of them that was never on the list. The imagination. The curiosity. The unrealized potential. That was the fuel of every new thing the company ever made, and it was sitting inside the very people the math was built to remove.

That is the part that the leader fired. Not the tasks. The tasks were the cheap part, the replaceable part, the part the machine now runs. What they let go of was the imagination they will need to make anything new, and they let it walk out the door still thinking they had trimmed fat.

Look at what imagination can do once it is wearing the exoskeleton. The tool frees you to spend hours on the thing only you can do: the new question, the new possibility no one has priced yet, nobody has created yet. That is the Canvas. 

That is why Tomorrow’s room is coming into focus more each day.

The person did not leave in spite of being reduced to tasks. They left because the exoskeleton finally let them be the thing the task list never had room for, the thing the assembly line never had room for.

All of this presents a brand new problem for the  leader. If that is what your people can become, then you do not want to prevent it. You want it. You need it. Your organization's economic viability requires it. You want every person in your building wielding that exoskeleton, running the Floor and opening the Canvas, because that, and not the headcount you saved, is where tomorrow's advantage is going to come from.

It is not a threat to be managed. It is a thing to want. It is an opportunity for you and the organization.

Now the hard question. 

How do you get people to earn this inside your walls, and stay, when the door is right there and the exoskeleton fits them anywhere?

Start with your instincts first:

More pay? 

Yes, pay still matters. It always will. But pay was the lever that moved a person who had nowhere else to make their skill pay. You can win the bidding war and still lose the person, because a bigger number is no longer the only thing they are weighing.

More benefits? 

Benefits still matter too. But benefits bought security, and security was worth a great deal when the alternative was your talent stranded and worthless on its own. That alternative changed. Security is no longer scarce, so it can no longer hold a person on its own.

What really matters now is harder, because it cannot be bought in a compensation review. 

I see two things:

The first is meaning.

It is the difference between whether a person is invited into the outcome, or left on the outside of it. Not a bonus for hitting a number. It is whether they feel, financially and emotionally, that they own a piece of what the work becomes. There is a difference between working on something and having made it. Between renting your effort to someone else's outcome and putting your own ideas and your own imagination into the world and watching them land. 

If staying means deferring to someone else's agency, and leaving means acting on your own, then the exoskeleton makes leaving rational, for the money and for the meaning both.

The second is how you are organized.

The assembly line was not only a way to arrange work. It was a way to arrange people into an org chart built to run the assembly line and nothing else. That shape is the very thing a person now leaves to escape, because they can feel their agency, their autonomy, their imagination, and their curiosity trapped and choked inside it. You cannot ask people to bring imagination to a structure designed to strip it out. 

Notice what both of these are. They are not perks. They are not a retention program bolted onto the old machine. They define the machine itself: the shape of the relationship and the shape of the organization. They are the new machine that is emerging.

Which is why this is a question about what kind of company you are willing to become and what kind of leader you are willing to become.

Which leaves one question. When the power between a company and its people has flipped, what is the relationship supposed to become? The old answer was security in exchange for need, more pay, more benefits, a warm word like “loyalty” to explain the arrangement. That answer is spent. 

The new one is not written yet, and it will not be handed to you. You are going to have to decide it, to shape it.

I am not going to decide it for you. But I will leave you with the questions I think you have to sit with, whichever chair you are in.

If you lead:

Do you understand how the relationship between employer and employee has already begun to shift, and how it will only accelerate, into a new balance of power? 

Do you understand the kind of leader you now need to be? 

If you are the one in the chair: 

Are you taking accountability for Tomorrow? Are you leading with agency, claiming the power that AI now puts within your reach?

You can feel your power growing, but that power is on loan. How are you tracking yours? As AI gets easier to wield and the floor of “good enough” keeps rising, how are you growing your power to stay ahead of it?

That is what I am watching for Tomorrow.

– Nish

A gratitude P.S.

Every year on my birthday I publish a list of the things I am grateful for. The list is always as long as the year I am turning. This year it ran to fifty-four. Adrian had one of the slots.

We met three years ago, through a couple of mutual connections, over a conversation about a business he was building. The business talk turned into more frequent calls. The calls turned into the other things, the life stuff, what we had each been through to get where we were. Somewhere in there it stopped being a working relationship and became a friendship.

He is thirty-five. I am fifty-four. Twenty years apart, and it has never once felt like it. What I wrote on the list was that it feels like we grew up playing in the same sandboxes. We are not the same person. But there is something kinetic between us, some charge that pulled us toward each other, and I am grateful for it more than I know how to say. I love his energy. I am a little in awe, and a little in envy, of how much he already knows at his age. And I cannot wait to see what he does with the years ahead, whether that is with me at Brilliant With AI or off on whatever adventure comes next.

So we mark it. Every year, our friend-iversary. This one we spent at one of Daniel Boulud's rooms in New York, a long dinner, a longer conversation, a candle in the dessert.

Men can and should celebrate their friendships. Out loud, with a candle in the dessert.

Good food, shared. Real talk, both ways. Two people who support each other, who push each other and learn from each other and are the better for it. That is the whole thing. That is what friendship is, at least the way I count them.

Grateful for you, Adrian.