“AI won’t eat your job, but it will eat your salary.”
Sangeet Paul Choudary captures the distinction that matters: “Agents are goal-seeking, and that’s what makes them different. While most technology aims at task substitution, agents go beyond tasks to seek goals.”
This is the organizational rewiring in action. When agents are goal-seeking rather than just task-executing, they don’t just slot into existing roles — they reshape the structure around them. The question isn’t which jobs disappear, but how the whole organization changes when parts of it become autonomous.
Doug Finke pushed back in the comments: whether it eats your job or your salary, the outcome feels the same. Fair point. But the structural implications are different — salary compression changes incentives differently than elimination.
Originally posted on LinkedIn.