Dr. Pero Mićić
What will you do when 60-80% of today’s jobs disappear due to AI in a few years? This process has already begun, as I have shown in recent episodes. What can you do now to future-proof yourself? What advice can you give your children and friends? How can you support your employees? This is about you personally, but it’s also about your business. Let’s get started right away. Here is your personal roadmap for your future in 13 concrete tasks.
Video: 13 hacks for secure income in the AI economy
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More Information1. Focus on working directly with people
If AI can do all cognitive work faster, safer, better, and cheaper in the future. And if robots can do physical tasks so much better than humans. What will be left to do for us humans? And for you? Smart strategists focus on doing only what the competition cannot do. And there is one thing that AI and robotics will never be capable of. Being human. And who will care about that? Obviously, other people. So our job as a human being will be primarily where you have a direct impact on other people. We will be freed and relieved of work that machines can do as well. In return, we can care for each other much more intensively. And there is an unimaginable number of people who would be very grateful if you devoted more time and attention to them. Incidentally, that is why I believe that our lives might be much more humane in the future than they are today.
2. Train your excellence as a human being
We will work less with and for machines and much more with and on people. This will increase the demands and expectations that your clients have of you as a human being. They will choose excellent people as partners and suppliers. They want to work with people they can rely on. People who are pleasant and inspiring to work with. People who are emotionally intelligent. People who can think logically. Who act ethically. People who are creative and entrepreneurial. These are universally useful qualities and skills that will benefit you throughout your life in a wide variety of roles and tasks. Train yourself in these skills and qualities. You can find a video of mine on this topic linked in the description.
3. Focus on delivering emotional impact
There is a trivial truth in business that most companies ignore. Even the big and professional ones. People don’t pay for a product or service. They only pay for the impact they want to achieve. And such impacts are always judged emotionally, either entirely or at least in part. A simple example: We all enjoy the emotions that music evokes. In the past, we bought records and cassettes for this purpose. Then CDs, then MP3 files. And today we pay for a streaming subscription to Spotify or Apple. We are virtually renting a database. The product has been disrupted several times. It has been replaced by a totally different one. But the effect we really buy, namely the emotions evoked by music, has not changed at all. And this is true in virtually all cases. The emotional effects that people buy are practically eternal. They hardly change and almost never disappear. If you focus on creating emotional effects for people, regardless of a specific solution, i.e., product or service, you future-proof against disruptions.
4. Determine your mission for the benefit of a target customer group and of society
People tell you all the time that you should follow your passion. That’s about half true. It’s more important to focus on creating a specific valuable effect for a specific target group. For real people. That’s your mission. That’s what you should be passionate about. Do you want to cure or prevent prostate cancer? Do you want to enable non digital natives to compose their own music? Do you want to maximize the energy efficiency of bakeries? Increase hotel occupancy rates?
There are five elements to a professional mission our way. Here are the three of them.
- Your target customer group: Who do you want to work for? Which specific people do you want to benefit from your work? These could be colleagues in your company or traditionally external customers. Our example at FutureManagementGroup: We work for business leaders of private companies whose convictions on long-term and strategic thinking are compatible with ours.
- Your impact promise: See my previous recommendation. What impact do you promise your target customer group? What problem do you solve? What desire do you fulfill? Our impact promise is to make our client’s company more future-proof.
- The societal benefit: How is your work useful to society as a whole? Some call this the purpose, but I simply see it as part of a well crafted mission. For us, the social benefit is that companies managed in a future-smart way are more successful and future-proof, which builds and secures prosperity and quality of life.
Can you have multiple missions? In principle, yes. But it would be better to have a single mission, because otherwise you will spread your energies thin across multiple business areas.
5. Determine your unique combination of skills and your unique benefit
No matter which mission you choose, there are certainly other people and companies pursuing the same mission. That’s why you need to have a unique offering from the perspective of your clients and customers. This is called positioning or differentiation.
Your life path is unique in the world. Only you have this exact combination of experiences and skills. Do you speak a rare language? Do you have a special hobby? Do you have a second profession? Even a rare disease? List these special characteristics. Ask friends and colleagues how they see you. Then incorporate these characteristics and skills into your unique definition of you mission. Then you will offer your clients an absolutely unique value proposition.
6. Become a masterful expert in the use of AI
Yes, everyone is using ChatGPT now. Everyone also has Excel or Google Sheets. Most people only use basic arithmetic in simple spreadsheets. And then there are Excel users who can perform real miracles with it. That’s how good you need to become as an AI user.
You won’t be able to fulfill your mission and your work tasks at a high level if you only use AI in an amateurish way. You don’t have to become an AI expert. But you do have to, and I say this so affirmatively on purpose, become truly proficient in the use of AI systems. You need to master everything that can help you fulfill your mission excellently and highly productively. Even if you have employees or freelancers to do it for you.
At the very least, you need to be very proficient in the general systems. So ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and so on. One of them really perfectly. And a second one so you can check the results of the first. If you want to work with customer data in a legally compliant manner and exploit even more potential, work with a platform such as Azure AI Foundry from Microsoft.
All major providers offer really good AI courses free of charge. I have provided links to those in the description.
7. Integrate all of your specialized knowledge into your AI systems as a data grounding
Most providers allow you to feed the bots and agents with your own data so that they can support your tasks with a high degree of accuracy.
Ideally, you would be able to upload your brain into your AI systems. Even better would be to upload the brains of everyone in your team. Then they would be perfect. But since that’s not possible, at least not yet, you have to rely on files with data that contains your knowledge.
Collect everything. Theses for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, concepts, presentations, strategies, contacts, databases, transcripts and notes. Everything that reflects your knowledge and experience. If you work with Notion, you can use your entire workspace as a data basis. Be obsessed with replicating your skills in AI systems. This is an immeasurable asset. It makes you extremely productive and creative. You save time and deliver more useful solutions of better quality.
8. Convert your income from time for money to impact for money
As an employee, you are probably paid by time. Every month, you receive a salary for your efforts. As a freelancer, you probably charge daily or hourly rates. This will no longer work in an economy dominated by AI and robotics. Remember: neither your customers nor your employer really pay you for your time. They don’t need it. They want the fruits of your labor, or in other words: the impact. They only pay by the hour, day or month because the impact is harder to measure or because they make more money that way. With time-based pay, the slow ones get more and the productive ones get relatively less. That’s unnatural and simply wrong. If the best people can do the job much faster with AI or offer much more value in the same amount of time, you should definitely not accept to be paid by the hour.
Ask your AI bot to explain to you the concept of “productized service.” In short, a describable result is offered and delivered for a fixed fee.
9. Don't have one employer, but several or many clients
The implication of AI and robotics will be that over the next ten to fifteen years, 60-80% of today’s tasks will no longer be performed by humans. Yes, there will be new tasks, but they too will be supported by AI to the maximum extent possible. This will lead to a dramatic change. Today, over 90% of people have jobs. They are dependent employees. This has served us well for over 200 years. But if the number of traditional jobs declines in an AI and robotics economy, this economic system can no longer survive.
Being employed has always meant being an entrepreneur with only one client. With a fair employer, this is not a problem. But many only look at their profits and are quick to make layoffs. It has always been an illusion that employment is more secure in the long term than self-employment. To make yourself more future-proof, you need to have several clients rather than just one employer.
10. Become a strategist and architect in your discipline
If you only carry out instructions and execute processes, you are more likely to be replaced by AI. If you develop strategies and make decisions, you are more likely to be needed.
Imagine a team of programmers as a pyramid. This is to represent most types of teams. At the top, or at the front, are the software strategists and software architects. They determine the team’s tasks and goals. They talk to customers and clients. They have the master plan for the software. They assign the tasks. At the bottom or at the back are the programmers, who work alone at their computers to translate the defined functionalities into code. But coding platforms such as Replit, Lovable, or Cursor can already do this much faster and cheaper. And soon they will be able to do it even perfectly.
If the team produces the same amount of code in the future, they will need significantly fewer employees. If the team is to be maintained, with the same number of members, they will have to produce more useful code and find clients who are willing to pay for it. In other words, they will have to grow. Not in terms of headcount, but in terms of output. Simply to maintain revenue and their income.
But not all teams will manage to grow. Simply because demand is not infinite by nature. Therefore, there will be less need for coders who only produce functionally pre-designed code. However, code strategists and architects will still be needed and will continue to thrive in the future.
In addition to working with and on people, the second important role and type of future work is that of strategist, architect, or director. They are the ones who will continue to assign people to perform tasks in the future. But they will increasingly and intensively develop, deploy, and control AI agents.
Therefore, become a strategist, architect, and director as soon as possible. If this is not possible in your current team, start your own team so that you are at the top and front right away. Provided you have the necessary skills, of course.
11. Make yourself well known to potential clients in your specific market
If no one knows about you, they can’t hire you. Obviously. The more specialized and smaller your target customer group is, the easier it will be for you. Then you can address your potential customers directly, for example via LinkedIn. If your target customer group is very large, it’s best to become a specialist authority on social media. This is mainly LinkedIn, X or Substack. Your network of target customers and referrers is a central part of your social capital.
12. Minimize your required income from work
The strategies recommended so far will put you in a good position from which you are likely to earn a good income even in an AI and robotics economy. However, the transformation could be so radical and so fast that I strongly recommend that you build in an additional safety factor.
In an ideal situation, you would hardly be dependent on income from work at all.
Which group of people is the only one without any fear for their income in an AI and robotics economy? It is the owners and shareholders of companies that will benefit greatly from the AI and robotics economy. Put yourself in this position as far as possible by building up ownership of productive and profitable assets. Invest in shares of such companies. I know this is not that easy. I cannot to give specific investment recommendations here. But what I can recommend is to make investing your hobby or, even better, part of your professional work.
The second move should be to either reduce your living expenses as a precautionary measure or put yourself in a position to reduce them significantly when necessary. If your income is always completely earmarked and used up, which is unfortunately the case for most people, then do everything you can to reduce your regular obligations so that you have at least 20% of your income freely available. The more, the better. Either for investing or to cope with a loss of income easily and quickly.
13. Get involved in politics to future-proof our economic system
The transformation of our working world and our economic system is a societal and therefore political task. Virtually no politician talks openly about this. Either they are clueless, which would be bad enough, or they don’t want to say anything unpleasant. Unfortunately, we voters tend to make very short-sighted decisions and vote out those who demand major changes from us. But these changes will be necessary.
You can make a big difference for yourself, your family, and your friends with the recommended strategies. If everyone would implement them, we would master the transformation even without any politicians. However, not everyone will transform in time. Of course not. Because we humans live too much in the here and now. If it is important to you and if you can tolerate the at times horrific political power games, get involved in politics so that we have a chance of the political actors making future-intelligent decisions in time.
In the long term, we will all live in abundance. I am quite sure of that. But the years until then will be challenging. Fear of the future will not help. Only joy for the future will succeed.
That was your roadmap with strategies to make your career more future-proof. If you want to make your business more future-proof, write to me and let’s talk.
We have been developing and implementing future strategies for almost 35 years for the most successful companies, but also for small and medium-sized businesses. You can find interview videos with our clients on our website.
Have a bright future!
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Here you can find the other articles on AI and robotics:
– Humanoid robots: The solution to the labor shortage? (Part 1)
– Humanoid robots: How intelligent will they be? (Part 2)
– Humanoid robots: How will they learn? (Part 3)
– Humanoid robots: How much will they cost? (Part 4)
– AI kills all jobs – and then what? Three scenarios (Part 1)
– Prosperity through AI, but how? (Part 2)
– AI and robotics: Income without work – this is how we finance it! (Part 3)
