Hey there, product development enthusiast!

It’s two and a half years since ChatGPT was launched - the first in a wave of large language models (LLMs) that fundamentally change how we live and work. Unprecented fast iterations of these models and their capabilities, integrations of LLMs with other tools, and the rising agentic application are just further steps towards an artificial general intelligence (AGI) happening at breathtaking speed.

These rapidly advancing capabilities of AI affect more and more areas in our personal life, but even more at work.

What does that mean for the future of jobs and especially for people working in Tech - right now and in the more distant future?

Let’s have a look!

💡Today

⛈️ Jobs in Tech are at risk - that’s for sure.

Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke was amongst the first to promote this:

A lot of others followed and VC investors today tell the same to the companies that they fund. There have been drawbacks as well, e. g. when Klarna, after publicly claiming to fully automate customer care through AI, had to hire humans again.

But don’t get fooled by that. What is impossible today, might be a total commodity by tomorrow. With the race between the big LLM developers OpenAI/Google/Meta/Anthropic in the US, DeepSeek and Alibaba in Asia, and Mistral in Europe, the rate of innovation stays insanely high. I was personally impressed by the new image creation capabilities of OpenAI’s 4o models, which I regularly use.

With that, I created this design amongst others:

Today, AI can help with most aspects of a business. From market research, to product development, to marketing - multi-agent systems can do all parts of the product development lifecycle. Accordingly, companies need less and less people for that.

Especially the entry level positions in many of these roles today can be done by a more senior person with the support of AI. The career paths and systems are about to collapse. You will need very few experienced people with AI to do what a team did before.

And we are still just getting started with AI.

❓️ So what if you are in Tech today? What’s the best places to be at in terms of job perspective? It’s for sure the ones where you learn and build up your AI knowledge.

1️⃣ The obvious choice would be to work for the main players in the AI market, like OpenAI or Mistral. But there are only so many of these players and they can pick really the best of the best employees.

2️⃣ The other place to be in Tech these days is in companies leveraging AI - for their products and their internal processes. If you can help them to do that, you have good job perspectives. There are so many companies who need to level up their game in terms of AI - especially outside of big tech, i. e. in practically all other industries.

3️⃣ As mentioned before, there are two trends caused by AI in the job market: a) Companies can be run with less and less people. b) Career paths in companies collapse as entry level jobs get replaced by AI.
But what got much easier at the same time: Starting a business yourself! As a single person you can use all the above mentioned capabilities and start your own business to disrupt exisiting ones or create new services and products. I expect that to happen much more as traditional employment relationships are anyways not loved too much by Gen Z and younger people (understandably so).

🧱 Product Engineers

Recently, I heard a CEO say the following:

While I can clearly see what he means, that would be quite expensive engineers.

Instead, I see a trend continuing - the elevation of engineers.

In the past, their role evolved from code monkeys like Scrum describes them, to topic owners who take overarching responsibility, e.g. for a feature. As productivity of developers is rising with AI, so should their level of work. Going forward, I expect Product Engineers who focus even more on customers and understanding their needs. With AI support, new features can be prototyped, tested, and brought to customers faster than ever.

From the other perspective, AI empowers Product Managers more and more to implement new prototypes and functionalities. So we might see a conversion of the both and Product Engineers might be a thing very quickly.

🔮 Tomorrow

With all the disruptions of AI, I believe the value of formal education is drastically declining.

Most things AI will be able to explain very easily and in an instant, whenever you need it.

Moreover, the replacement of workers by AI happens first in white collar jobs - the ones requiring more formal education. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei just claimed that AI might eat half of all white collar jobs.

When I think about my kids and what they should do, I see two main opportunites for them, or for anyone who is young today:

1️⃣ As stated above: Learn and start your own business.

2️⃣ Don’t invest too much into formal white collar education, but rather focus on blue collar jobs. I see a clear shift towards these jobs. Robotics are behind compared to the progress we see in AI. Yet still, houses need to be built, kitchens installed, stuff constructed. And they are lacking people everywhere these days. Ultimately, I believe this will also be automated through robotics. But we are not there yet. So blue collar work might be a good alternative to high-education, soon-to-be-replaced white collar jobs. And that shift is already happening.

🌀 The Days After Tomorrow

Upfront warning: Now it gets a bit philosophical.

In the long run, the number game goes against us. With continued efficiency gains, we will simply need drastically less people - for white collar as well as for blue collar work.

What might sound like a nightmare to many, I see as an opportunity. We are approaching a point, where for the first time in human history, we might not have to work to ensure our living. We could free ourselves from that fundamental compulsion and all the pressure, anxiety, and negative effects it comes with. We might approach a society like in Star Trek with an abundance of products and services. A world where people work not because they have to, but because they want. They work what they want and how much they want.

However, there is no straight path to such future. With what we saw as a society during Covid, like conspiracy myths spreading everywhere, populism rising worldwide, and the mechanisms of capitalism to concentrate capital in the hands of few, there is a lot of things to change in order to get to that better future.

But it’s the first time in history that we have this opportunity. Let’s grab it and prove my pessimism wrong!

❕ Footnote

There is one more thing to consider in this disruption of the job market.

As Tech companies need less and less people, there is a visible shift in the market where companies move away from seeing and treating people as their main capital. They remove flexibility they gave to their employees in the past like working from home. They reduce initiatives to foster diversity in the work force. They push harder, expecting their employees to dedicate most of their energy and time to their job only.

While this is likely routed in the insight that they will need less people, it ignores one fact: The best talent still can choose where to work. And just because AI will multiply the impact of people, the best people will still outperform less excellent ones. Even more so in these times, where you are forced to learn new skills, new AI tools, new approaches every week.

So - also, and especially in the age of AI - having outstanding talent will make a huge difference - multiplied by AI.

Thus, I believe you still need to be able to attract the best talent. And that won’t work if you switch the ways of working and leadership back to industrial times.

✅ Wrap-Up

That’s it for today! I hope you liked this somewhat different edition of the newsletter. Please let me know your thoughts - there is so much we still have to figure out!

📬 I read every piece of feedback - hit reply or click the button below!

Got a topic you want me to cover? I’m all ears.

💡Jan’s Knowledge Nuggets

The bonus inspirations this week:

• Book to Action: This post indicated the necessity to learn new skills fast. What did you learn from the last 5 books you read? Can you name the 3 most important take-aways from each? And even more importantly: Do you apply them? I didn’t. The excellent Sebastian Kamilli created a methodology to get actual value from the time we invest into reading books.

• The Future of Jobs Report 2025: It does not yet fully indicate the shift to blue collar work, but this is just now and my post also showed the supportive data above.

• The Agentic Research Society: Speaking of high-education white collar jobs to be replaced by AI: Sai from Google, author of Agentopedia shares how he witnessed AI agents reviewing, debating, and improving scientific papers. Mindblowing.

• Multiply your impact as a Researcher: The fabulous Nikki Anderson shared very useful AI prompts that will make your user research work much better.

• AI is making us dumber: To add some counterperspective: Research indicates that the more we rely on AI, the less critically we think. (Not sure why they picked 666 participants, though 😆)

• Product Management Festival 2025: As every year, Product Managers from around Europe will gather in Zurich in November to learn about the latest of their craft. “AI in Product Management” is one of the tracks. With my discount code, you can get 20% off regular ticket prices: DISCOUNT20JAN