Crossposted from my Substack

Last week, someone at an ad agency told me that they don’t contract storyboard artists anymore. AI image generators can spit out a “good enough” reference image from the same prompts the agency would give to the contractors. Even though AI is not as good as a skilled human in this instance, because the marginal cost of lightly monitoring that function themselves is near-zero, the agency chose to replace the contractors in the workflow.

Most knowledge work roles face a more gradual path. There’s substantial friction between “AI can do some tasks” and realized job displacement. This friction buys time, and if you understand what creates it, you can use that time to maximize your economic agency.

I’ve spent this year building a tool that predicts job displacement timing — it simulates AI capability growth and how it collides with the unique friction at your organization and role. Before I ship the full site + guide later this month, I want to illustrate what I see will be the strongest drivers of AI-related job displacement, and what will be your hardest shields against a reduction-in-force (whether officially attributed to AI or not).

These barriers are a broad simplification, and we won’t talk about them exactly in order, but they’re all interconnected and will collapse at different rates for different roles.

Feasibility Barriers
1. Can the model actually do your specific tasks reliably enough?
Integration Barriers
1. Can your workplace deploy AI at the scale needed to replace workflows?
Political & Bureaucratic Barriers
1. Does everyone in the organization actually want to use AI? How do groups with different political capital collide in their incentives?
Capacity Redistribution
1. Even after adoption, the fate of roles depends on how capacity is redistributed. Some will be amplified by AI, some will see risk of absorption by coworkers or managers.

Chart is a mockup for illustrative purposes and not representative of a true job loss model

Two Types of Displacement

Complete displacement is simple: your entire function gets automated away (the storyboard artist case). You or your company provide a commodified output or service, and once AI passes the “good enough” threshold at a low marginal cost, your service is no longer required. This hits vendors and single-output contractors first; if you’re paid to produce one specific thing, you can’t pivot to “I’...

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