Be Nintendo, not Kodak

In 1892, Eastman Kodak was incorporated and started selling photographic film and cameras.

A few years earlier, in 1889, another company was founded: Nintendo. Of course, Nintendo didn't make video games back then. They made playing cards.

The two companies couldn't have had more different trajectories.

Kodak grew until the late nineties. Then, digital cameras caught on. After that, in 2007, the iPhone launched and everyone had a decent camera in their pockets. That was the nail in the coffin.

The irony is that Kodak itself invented the digital camera (in 1975).

But, as is taught in business schools worldwide, they didn't develop that further – they sold film, and digital cameras don't need any film. In fact, selling digital cameras would be bad for their film business.

Kodak saw itself as a film business so they didn't want to do that. But when film became irrelevant, it fell.

Nintendo, on the other hand, didn't stick with playing cards. They moved on to tabletop games, and eventually, video games.

They didn't see themselves as a playing card company but as an entertainment company. A company that makes games. Playing cards may go in and out of style, but games have always been played and always will.

How to not lose your job to AI

I could go on with these examples and write yet another piece on how companies should be focused on their customers' problems and not their own solutions yada yada yada.

But let's do something better.

Let's investigate how to not lose our jobs to AI (or any other big tech trend).

See, when the Hollywood Writers Guild goes on strike because they want to make sure they don't lose their jobs of writing movie scripts to AI, you know something's up.

I don't know if it's next year, or 10 years from now, but all knowledge work is at risk.

There's AI that writes. There's AI that does graphic design. Lawyer documents. Spreadsheets and data analysis.

There's even AI girlfriends!!!

It's not perfect yet, but it's already quite good. Better than some humans.

And it's evolving quickly.

To me, there are two scenarios:

1. AI replaces everyone, and there are no jobs at all anymore (this may mean dystopia or utopia, depending on who you ask).

2. AI replaces some jobs, and those that remain will use AI to be 10-100X more efficient.

In the first scenario, there's nothing to do really, so let's focus on the second (which is also more likely IMHO).

If one person using AI can do the work of 5, 10, or 100 other people, most of those jobs will disappear (and many new ones may be created elsewhere, but that's something for another day).

How do you make sure you're one of the few that keeps yours?

Well, one thing you can do is to not be like Kodak, who stumbled upon the new technology and decided they didn't want to do that because it'd kill their film business.

Instead, be like Nintendo.

Nintendo explored the new technology early and used it to be BETTER at what they've always done: creating games that people want to play.

So, if you work on spreadsheets all day, there's a world where you won't need a spreadsheet anymore in a few years.

But is your job really to create spreadsheets?

Or is it to bring insights to the leadership of the company?

Or, if you do PowerPoint presentations… Maybe those will be autogenerated in a few years.

Yet we all know your job is not to "PowerPoint", but to present compelling stories and narratives that bring consensus in decision-making.

Even if you work in sales – maybe AI will sell better than most people.

But it probably won't create relationships with other people (unless your client has an AI girlfriend, of course).

As technology does more and more tasks that only humans could do before, you MUST move on to doing higher-level stuff: influencing, building relationships, creating visions and hypotheses, telling stories that connect with people.

And then you can use that technology to get more leverage, to be more effective and more valuable.

The alternative is to be replaced by it.

But it won't happen, if you keep working smarter.

-Bruno