I get asked the same question from almost every stage I stand on.
It comes near the end, usually from someone who has been quiet the whole time, and it always lands a little heavier than the rest. "Be honest with me. Am I going to lose my job to AI?"
I don't consider myself a true expert on AI. I'm someone who spends a lot of time in the rooms where these conversations are happening, testing things, paying attention to where it's headed, especially in education and the way it's reshaping work. But I've answered that question enough times that the words come out the same way now:
You won't lose your job to AI. But you might lose it to someone who knows AI better than you.
That's not a threat. It's a description of how the world has always worked.
This was never really about AI
Here's the part people miss when they hear that line. The risk isn't the technology. The risk is complacency.
The person who gets passed over is the one who stops being curious, who decides they've learned enough, who waits for change to come find them. That person was always going to fall behind, with or without AI. A healthy appetite for learning isn't an AI skill. It's a life skill. It mattered before any of this, and it'll matter long after the current wave of tools is old news.
There's one thing I can promise you: change will always happen.
The only real question is whether you meet it with fear or with a little bit of zeal. I'd rather live with an appetite for ingenuity and creativity than spend my energy bracing against something that's coming either way.
Two people, side by side
Picture two people in the same role, same company, same starting point.
The first one looks up. They're curious about what's coming. They experiment. They take a course. They try the tool on something small and personal before they ever bring it into work. They're careful about how they use it, but they're not afraid to fail, because they understand that failing now and then is how you actually learn. They're not even all-in on AI, and that's fine. You can hold real questions about it, including its environmental cost in its current state, and still choose to engage. Optimistic curiosity and honest skepticism can live in the same person.
The second one puts their head in the sand. They've decided AI is unethical, or lazy, or just not for them, and they've stopped there. Not because they studied both sides and landed on a view, but because looking up felt like more work than looking away.
The difference between those two people has almost nothing to do with talent. It's posture. One is willing to evolve. The other is hoping the world will hold still long enough for them to retire into it.
It won't. Being the ostrich is no longer a neutral choice.
What the Pope's encyclical actually says
I'm Catholic, and my faith shapes how I think about all of this, so I paid close attention when Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical this spring.
Magnifica Humanitas, signed on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, is titled "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." If you only read the headlines, you might assume the Pope came out swinging against the technology. He didn't.
The encyclical is careful in a way I find instructive. It says plainly that technology is not "a force antagonistic to humanity" and is not "inherently evil." But it also says technology is never neutral, because it takes on the values of whoever builds it, funds it, regulates it, and uses it. Leo defends the dignity of human work, warns against AI being concentrated in the hands of a powerful few, and writes that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs."
Read that carefully and you'll notice he isn't telling people to reject AI. He's telling people to stay responsible for it. The danger he names isn't the tool. It's human beings handing over their judgment, their dignity, and their care for one another to a machine and calling it progress.
That's the same thing I'm trying to say from a much smaller stage. The technology is not the problem. How we respond to it is. You can abdicate by hiding from it, or you can abdicate by outsourcing your thinking to it. Both are a failure of the same muscle.
How to become the person who pulls ahead
So if you want to be the first person in that side-by-side, here's what I'd actually tell you to do.
Pull your head out of the sand. Look up and see what's happening around you. Become a student of this transformation. You don't have to know everything, nobody does, but you do need to find sources of truth that give you real, factual information instead of hype in either direction.
Then start experimenting. Take a course. Learn a few of the skills. Try AI on something in your own life before you ever bring it into the workplace, and if your employer is giving you room to experiment on the clock, take full advantage of it. Get curious about your own role: what do you actually do all day, and how could this make a piece of it better?
And be honest with yourself. Some of what you do today will be replaced. That's not the end of the story. The work now is to figure out how you evolve rather than how you avoid becoming obsolete.
The mistake I had to learn the hard way
I'll go first on the failure, because I made an obvious one.
When I started using AI, I fell in love with the product. The speed, the polish, the way it could produce something coherent in seconds. I was so taken with it that I stopped checking the work. I found myself defending the things it produced more than I was actually verifying them, sharing outputs and then standing behind them when I should have been questioning them first.
That phase didn't last long, thankfully, because it's a quick way to embarrass yourself. I became a student of checking every result and questioning what came back. That's also when I built what I now call the 4Ds, a simple way to ask AI better questions: Define the problem in plain business terms, Describe the context you'd give a new senior hire, Direct the exact output you want, and Develop it through iteration instead of accepting the first answer. The fourth D is the one that saved me. The first answer is rarely the final one, and you should push back at least once before you trust it.
The race you're actually in
You won't lose your job to AI. But you might lose it to someone who decided to look up while you were looking away.
I'd rather you be the one who looks up. Not out of fear, but because there's something genuinely exciting about getting to grow into whatever comes next. That's the race. It's not really about technology. It's about the kind of person you decide to become in the middle of a lot of change: curious, willing to fail, unwilling to hide.
I just finished round one of training my whole team on the core fundamentals of using AI well, and it went well enough that I'm thinking about opening up something similar for people outside my walls. Nothing formal yet. I'm taking a pulse on who'd want to come along. If learning the basics, for yourself and maybe a small business, sounds like your kind of adventure, send me a note.
But the real invitation is simpler than any course. Pull your head up. Be the one who pulls ahead.
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