The companies spending the most on AI have the most to gain from convincing you it will take your job.

Most conversations about AI and jobs get framed one of two ways: inevitability or competition. Either the technology improves and your job disappears, or it's you versus the machine, and the machine is faster, and cheaper.

Both are oversimplifications. And both conveniently align with the interests of the companies selling the technology.

There is a lot of hyperbole from the large hyperscalers and AI companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who are projected to spend over $300 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone.

That capital needs a return. And the math only works at scale if human labor is replaced.

When executives warn that jobs may vanish, they're often not forecasting the future. They're trying to keep their investors happy.

If there are no jobs, there are no consumers. And without consumers, growth stories collapse. There's no market for the products these companies are building. The narrative breaks down under its own weight.

I live in the world of technology and software. As someone who's spent my career building and rebuilding software systems, I'm genuinely excited about how accessible coding has become. But I don't believe AI will replace software developers, and the history of our craft backs that up.

Every major leap in abstraction was supposed to eliminate developers. Higher-level languages were going to make assembly programmers obsolete. Cloud platforms were going to replace infrastructure teams. Instead, each wave produced more software, more complexity, and more demand for skilled engineers.

What we're seeing with generative AI is simply the next step in that progression. Nothing more. Nothing less.

If anything, this wave will drive extraordinary demand for higher-quality software, built with greater care, clarity, and discipline. When everyone can generate code, differentiation shifts to the people who understand:

• What to build
• Why it matters
• How to build it well

The scarce skills become problem framing, system design, judgment, and taste.

If you lead teams, your job isn't to figure out which roles AI replaces. It's to figure out how your people become more valuable with it.

I'm bullish on the future. And it's not humans versus machines. It's humans with machines, compounding value. That's not naive optimism. That's how every major technology shift has played out.

I'm curious as to what skills on your team becomes more valuable, not less, as AI gets better?

Originally published on LinkedIn.