I think people are still looking at AI the wrong way.

They keep comparing it to older software revolutions. Spreadsheets did not remove accountants. Photoshop did not remove designers. Nuke did not remove compositors. The tools increased the speed of execution, but the worker still remained at the center of the pipeline.

That is why many people assume this will play out the same way. Humans will simply become “more productive.” Companies will adapt. Jobs will evolve.

I do not think that is what is happening.

The real shift is not that AI can perform individual tasks. The real shift is that the cost of execution itself is collapsing.

For a very long time, knowledge work depended on human beings acting as bridges between systems. A person writes the report. Another person organizes the information. Someone schedules the meeting. Someone translates requests between departments. Someone updates the database. Someone reviews the draft. Someone routes the task to another team.

Entire industries formed around coordination costs.

That made sense when moving information required human labor.

But now we are entering a period where a machine can increasingly perform large parts of that coordination automatically. Not perfectly. Not universally. But well enough that businesses start questioning how many people are actually required to keep the system moving.

That changes the conversation completely.

Right now most companies still use AI as an assistant. Summarize this document. Clean up this email. Generate a first draft. Help debug this issue. It still feels like the human is driving the process.

But eventually businesses stop asking how to make workers faster.

They start asking how many workers they still need.

That is the phase many industries are quietly entering now.

The junior positions disappear first because companies no longer need as many developing workers supporting senior staff. Then teams become smaller. Then certain departments begin disappearing entirely because the coordination layer itself becomes automated.

And eventually some companies stop making sense altogether.

A large number of software businesses exist mainly to help organizations manage information, communication and workflow complexity. But if AI systems increasingly absorb those functions directly into infrastructure, then entire categories of work become unstable very quickly.

I do not think people have emotionally processed this yet.

Many still speak about AI as though it is simply another tool sitting beside the worker. Something like a faster Photoshop or a smarter spreadsheet.

But this feels closer to a shift in the economic value of labor itself.

When execution becomes cheap enough, the entire structure around knowledge work begins changing with it.