Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI - By Ryan Roslansky & Aneesh Raman
Date read: 2026-05-06How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Written by LinkedIn employees trying to answer what human skills that will be most valuable in the future age of AI. Includes a 30-60-90-day plan to evaluate your key skills against AI.
Contents:
My Notes
Efficiency isn’t our edge. Innovation is.
The 5Cs: Five areas that, when working together, best capture our unique human edge at work: curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, and communication.
AI won’t replace you at work, but someone using AI likely will.
MIT found that 60 percent of the jobs we were doing in 2018 did not exist in 1940. More recently, LinkedIn found that nearly 70 percent of the jobs on the United States 2024 Jobs on the Rise List didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Don’t fight the future; build it. Technology doesn’t just replace old work; it transforms what work can be. Those who resist change see only what might be lost. Those who adapt are able to see what can be gained.
Tomorrow’s software engineers will spend less time writing code and more time understanding what code should be written. Less time debugging, more time collaborating to define problems worth solving. Less time optimizing algorithms, more time navigating the ethical implications of what they build.
Once we stop trying to compete with AI on efficiency, we can seize the moment to use AI to build work around what makes us most human. We can lean into our capability to develop new ideas, innovate new solutions, and imagine new possibilities.
Overall, children from the wealthiest 1 percent of families were ten times more likely to become inventors than those from lower-income households. And the reason wasn’t raw ability. It was ultimately about proximity. Living near inventors directly affected a child’s likelihood of becoming one.
The printing press gave everyone the same book. The internet gave everyone pretty much the same search results. AI gives everyone a tool that becomes theirs, understanding their context, their constraints, and their goals, all while getting better at helping them the more they use it.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO28, recently said he doesn’t think AI will eliminate human jobs unless “the world runs out of ideas.” We may actually be headed for the opposite: an explosion of ideas from people and places that have been blocked out of the arena of innovation.
This framework will help you see exactly where AI will impact your work and where your unique human advantage lies.
Examples of Bucket 1 Tasks: Generating standard reports from data, checking for errors against established criteria, answering frequently asked questions, searching databases, and any task that follows an “if this, then that” pattern.
Ask yourself: Could someone else do this task exactly the same way I do? Does it have clear right and wrong answers? Would a perfect machine do it better? If yes, it belongs in Bucket 1.
Example of Bucket 2 Tasks: It’s having AI draft content that’s technically correct, then using your personal experience to make it emotionally resonant.
Ask yourself: Does this task require understanding context that’s not in the data? Do I need to apply judgment based on experience? Would the best outcome come from combining AI’s capabilities with human insight? If yes, it belongs in Bucket 2.
Ask yourself, Does this require reading emotions or building trust? Does it involve ethical judgment or navigating competing interests? Would a human touch make the crucial difference? If yes, it belongs in Bucket 3.
Think of it as a conveyor belt. Bucket 1 tasks will increasingly disappear as AI gets more advanced. But as they do, new opportunities emerge in Bucket 2, allowing you to use AI to do things that weren’t possible before. And as you master Bucket 2, you create space and ideas for deeper Bucket 3 work that no machine can touch.
“List your best skills, then look where several overlap,” says Ethan. “While you may not be the best at any one skill, you may be among the very best at the combination. That’s the what that no one else can match.”
The economies that pull ahead won’t just be the ones that invent AI; they’ll be the ones that make widespread adoption possible. Just as America’s dominance in the electrical age came from getting electricity into more hands, the age of AI belongs to regions that make the technology commonplace. Access and adoption are what determine winners.
“The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have...No one is going to beat you at being you.”
As AI commoditizes technical skills, your edge lies in your singular experiences, unique judgment, empathy, resilience, and problem-solving. Machines can replicate tasks, but they can’t replicate you.
So how do you find your onlyness? Nilofer offers these two exercises to help you on your way:
- List five stories that have really formed and informed who you are. Then ask yourself, What does that mean for me? What decisions have I made as a result of that?
- If you were in a Disney movie and found a magic wand that could solve anything, what would you fix?
Days 1–30: AI Foundations
- List out your top twelve daily or weekly tasks.
- Bucket each task into one of three categories:
- Bucket 1: Tasks AI can do alone (e.g. routine reports, data entry, scheduling).
- Bucket 2: Tasks you do with AI tools (e.g. strategic analysis with AI insights, creative work with AI as partner).
- Bucket 3: Uniquely human tasks (e.g. building trust, making ethical decisions, reading the room).
- Now, step back and see where you stand across your buckets.
- Assess your vulnerability. Calculate what percentage of your time goes to each bucket. If more than half your tasks are in Bucket 1, you’re vulnerable for real disruption soon: It’s time to either look for new opportunities or find projects in your current workplace that let you expand beyond your current work.
- Bucket 2 is nearly empty, you’re missing the chance to use AI as a tool: Start experimenting with AI this week on at least one routine task. If Bucket 3 is less than half your work, you need more time building irreplaceable human skills: Look for opportunities to take on projects involving things like relationship-building or collaborative problem-solving.
- Restructure your time based on what you learned. Identify which Bucket 1 tasks you can automate or delegate first, then redirect that time to Bucket 2 and 3 work.
- Build your bench of experts to follow.
- Follow five to ten experts you trust across different areas of expertise.
- Find peers to learn alongside.
- Seek out three to five people and reach out to them to see if they’re open to chatting and swapping ideas.
- See what your company or manager can offer.
- Share what you’re learning.
Days 31–60: Building Your 5Cs
- Find something that needs a refresh. Identify one process, project, or challenge at work that feels stale or stuck. Maybe it’s a weekly meeting that’s lost its purpose, a client deliverable that’s gone on autopilot for too long, or a team dynamic that needs fresh energy.
- Spend a week in curiosity mode. Research how others in different industries or roles have tackled similar challenges. Ask three people outside your immediate team how they’d approach it. Ask AI to surface unexpected parallels, such as by requesting examples from five industries you’d never normally look to. Cast a wider net than you normally would. The goal is to collect raw material and expand your thinking beyond your usual patterns.
- Now shift into creativity mode. Take everything you’ve learned and prototype one creative solution. This is where AI can be your brainstorming partner too. Use it to stress-test ideas, generate variations, or build a quick mock-up.
- Pick one relationship at work that could use more investment.
- Start by practicing active listening in your next conversation with them.
- Pause to reflect on where they’re coming from. Before your next interaction, ask yourself, What does this person need from me right now to feel heard, supported, or effective? Is it clarity, reassurance, space, or problem-solving? Adjust your approach accordingly.
- Then push yourself further: Have one difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding. It could be giving feedback that’s hard to hear, admitting you dropped the ball on something, or addressing a tension that’s been simmering. Do it with compassion: Lead with understanding, be specific about impact, and focus on moving forward together.
- Identify one bold action that requires you to be seen: pitching an idea in a meeting with senior leaders, applying for a stretch role, or publishing your perspective on industry changes. The key is that it can’t be anonymous. You’re attaching your name and reputation to it.
- Before you take the leap, do your homework. Tap AI for info and trusted peers for insight. Use AI to pressure-test your logic: Ask it to identify blind spots in your thinking or generate the strongest counter-arguments to your proposal. Then run your refined approach past a trusted peer who can speak from lived experience.
- Then do the thing. Raise your hand. Send the message. Have the conversation. Make the ask. You don’t need permission to be courageous, but you do need to actually do it.
- After you take your bold action, reflect on what happened.
Days 61–90: Transformation—Starting Your Climb
- Question 1: Why Do You Work?
- “It is rare that what motivates someone at twenty will remain constant until fifty or sixty.”
- Set aside thirty minutes of uninterrupted time.
- When you imagine your career five years from now, what does success look like? Not what you think it should look like, but what actually excites you when you picture it. What are you doing? Who are you working with? What impact are you having? What does your day-to-day feel like?
- Now go deeper: Why does that version of success matter to you? What values or experiences are driving that vision? Keep asking why until you get to something that feels true and grounded in who you are, not who you think you should be.
- Look back at your three buckets: Which tasks in Buckets 2 and 3 energize you the most? Which problems do you find yourself thinking about even when you’re not “supposed” to be working? These are clues to your why.
- Get an outside opinion. Share your answers with two people who know you well, one at work, one outside of work. Ask them, Does this sound like me? What am I missing? Sometimes others can see our motivations more clearly than we can.
- Question 2: What Do You Uniquely Do?
- List out all your unique skills. Pull up your three buckets from the earlier exercise. Look specifically at Buckets 2 and 3: the work you do with AI and the uniquely human work. Write down every skill or capability those tasks require. Be specific. Don’t just write “communication”; write “translating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders” or “defusing tense conversations between departments.”
- Narrow down your top superpowers. Once you have your list, identify your top three to five capabilities.
- Now look for intersections. Where do three or more of your capabilities overlap? This is where your what gets strong. As Ethan reminds us, “You may not be the best at any one skill, but you may be among the very best at the combination of several of them.”
- Identify one capability gap that’s holding you back. Use AI to close it enough to be competent, not expert.
- Question 3: Where Are You Going?
- Explore where your why meets your what. Pull up your why and your what from the earlier exercises. Write them out and look at them side by side. Now ask, Where in the world of work do these two things intersect? What roles, projects, or opportunities would let me use my unique skills to climb toward my ultimate goal?
- Make a list of three to five possible paths.
- Learn from people who have already gone down those paths.
- Evaluate your potential paths. Once you have a better sense of which path feels right for you, evaluate it against three criteria: Does it leverage my what? (Will I get to use my unique combination of capabilities?) Does it move me toward my why? (Does it align with my North Star?) Is it realistic in the next six to twelve months? (Do I have the foundational capabilities, or can I go build them?)
- Then, start with the where that scores highest across all three.
- Now make it concrete. What are the next three moves you need to make to start climbing this path? These should be specific actions, not vague intentions.