The operators AI can’t replace

How to use your humanity as a competitive edge

Maybe the scariest thing about AI isn’t what it can do. It’s what it reveals about us.

Perhaps we're afraid that when you strip away the administrative work, the technical pieces, and offload that to an LLM or an automation, what you're left with is uniquely you—and maybe that's terrifying. That if the systems and templates and deliverables can be automated, we'll be exposed. 

The modern workplace has conditioned us to flatten ourselves, to perform, to leave our emotional depth and intuitive intelligence at the door. We were taught to be efficient, buttoned-up, professional, brand-safe. Head down. Do your job.

We built armor to survive the workplace—and now we’re afraid to take it off. We buried our humanity so deep, we can’t remember where we put it.

But this moment—the AI moment—asks something different. It asks us to be our most human. It asks for the very parts of ourselves we were told to bury to survive in the modern workforce: our instincts, our empathy, our nuance, our weirdness.

What if we've hidden that side of ourselves so well, we can't even access it anymore?

That's the fear that's harder to name. If AI can do the technical part, and the only edge I have left is my humanity… what happens if I can't find it? What happens if I've spent so long trying to be "good at work" that I've lost the thing that made me irreplaceable in the first place?