The angst about AI’s role in the ongoing layoff saga is hiding a bigger problem: The U.S. is on track for a major, MAJOR labor shortage over the next few years.
So add that one to your apocalypse bingo card. If you have any spots left.
In what seems to be the norm lately, a bunch of really big factors are converging at once to wreak havoc. AI is one of them, but the others have nothing to do with technology. Top of the list: The Baby Boomers are starting to retire in droves, and there aren’t enough entry-level workers to replace them nor enough mid-level workers ready to step up into the managerial-type skills that tend to be cultivated only through experience.
For a while, we were relying on immigration to make up the difference, but <checks news> yeah, that’s not a viable plan at the moment.
If you listen to all the why-we-laid-people-off memos, AI will ride in on a white horse and save us by either filling the worker deficit or absorbing a fair share of the work. Except it can’t. The health care professions, for example, can’t be done by Gemini or Copilot. Same with the trades. Same with the managerial-type skills the Baby Boomers are leaving behind. Human judgment and all that.
And so what’s happened is that today’s knowledge workers were told they’d chosen the path to secure a lucrative future, and now AI disruption is shifting the entire dynamics of the labor force in a different direction. In a way, the displacement is a good thing because it frees up a pool of workers right when we need them most.
But since it’s not easy to suddenly turn a bunch of coders into registered nurses, those folks are caught deep in the middle of the stubborn job market stagnation that’s kept folks out of work for months and years.
The great divide
But wait. There’s more going on in this hellscape.
By now, we’ve all seen the signs. If you want to stay in knowledge work, you cannot — CANNOT — refuse to adopt AI. This is a fast pass to layoff town and a career-limiting move in general. But adopting and using AI for personal efficiency is one thing. Going full-on AI-native is an entirely different animal and quite non-intuitive compared with what we’ve traditionally regarded as knowledge work. The small segment of early adopters in the latter bucket are in high demand. Everyone else is either playing musical chairs for the positions that haven’t been cut (yet), or coming to terms with a sea change in the value of their skill set.
As a result, there’s a growing chasm in the workplace between AI builders and AI users.
By AI builder, I mean the folks who are vibe-coding like crazy, embracing all the frontier technology, and building fleets of agents that bring a whole new meaning to the old Army slogan: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.”
AI users are the folks who are using chatbot personas and skills to summarize documents, write emails, maybe automate a few rote tasks or create a slide deck. They know how to avoid slop and get decent outputs, and don’t have a need or desire to build the infrastructure that enables it.
There’s nothing wrong with either of these tracks, and the workplace absolutely needs both. But in the business zeal to demonstrate Big AI Results, the AI builders are getting all the rewards and attention, and the AI users are being lumped in with the non-AI-users and politely directed toward something akin to those old Sally Struthers commercials touting a career in TV/VCR repair.
IYKYK.
School of hard knocks
Here’s why I think this, too, shall pass, and it gets back to the gap the Baby Boomers are leaving behind.
By definition, the managerial-type skills that tend to be cultivated only through experience can’t be done by AI, or at least not with the technology as it stands today.
AI can use an algorithm to notice an employee’s productivity dropping, but it can’t tell that this is because the employee is going through a rough personal patch. AI can converse with a client, but can’t always detect the difference between polite response and passive-aggressively-polite response. AI can give your leadership team the coolest dashboard in the world, but it doesn’t know when and when not to let the numbers guide the decisions.
This is part of the “orchestration” piece that’s critical for getting those Big AI Results, and it’s just as important as building the darn thing in the first place.
It’s not as easy to upskill, however, and so I suspect part of the labor-shortage fallout will be a wave of highly visible and highly questionable business foibles, not because of AI but because none of the humans in the loop had previously learned the lesson the hard way. This is the same reason more and more schools are banning AI.
Companies will come to this realization (eventually), and the AI orchestrators and builders will work in harmony (hopefully) with no one being a second-class citizen. Ford’s decision to rehire “gray beards” is a good, albeit ageist and sexist-ly named, example.
There’s still one final caveat, though:
Some folks aren’t interested in *either* the orchestrator or builder path, and that’s their prerogative. No one gets dinged for that. Heck, neither do the non-AI-adopters. There are other options, and arguably a better variety in light of the shifting labor dynamics.
All paths, however, share one thing in common: The work you do today isn’t the same as the work you’ll do tomorrow, and you might have to make tradeoffs to find what fits for you personally, financially, and career-fulfillment-wise.
If you’re not sure what that might entail, now’s the time to figure it out. You literally can’t afford not to have a Plan B.
All opinions here are my own. All text is my own, too, including the em dashes. I welcome constructive comments and discussion on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
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