“By All Means, Replace Me.”

Why AI Is Giving Me Back What Matters Most

Originally posted on LinkedIn

“By all means, replace me.”

That’s been the thought echoing in my head through all of these AI conversations at work and in my personal life.

Everything AI is doing for me (drafting emails, writing customer invites, updating documents, rough drafting code, articulating value statements) are not the things that light me up. They’re not the things that truly align with who I am.

Don’t get me wrong: I use AI every day (yes, there’s a much longer conversation to be had about sustainability and ethics... and that’s happening too). But here, at my AI-first tech company, it’s imperative that I use it well and it’s startling how well it understands me and how often it delivers exactly what I need. It’s impressive, even intimate at times.

But the tasks it handles for me? They’re the the things that I’d like to quickly get to the other side of, the things I’d get to eventually, do well enough, but not with passion or considered attention. And while AI helps me move faster, those outputs often get picked apart by leadership or run through another bot for additional evaluation anyway. They were never the heart of my work - the deeper analysis, the third and fourth drafts - this is when things truly start to take shape.

But the true heart of my customer advocacy work happens when I connect with the customer Champions that are doing work outside of my organizations. It’s Champions like Geoffrey Colon who are making predictions about the future and sharing them in his own virtual environment. It’s Champions like Daniel Jackson who are conducting projects with cities and schools and mentoring new creators in Philadelphia. It’s connecting to Nat Nguyen who is a creative director in Southern California, but also volunteers for a nonprofit and samples Korean food with his family on the weekend. Customer advocacy actually begins when you get to know people and you know what they care about and you can show it.

What I Actually Bring to the Table

When people ask what my “resources” are, what I’m good at, what I bring to a team—the answers that come out of my mouth most confidently are almost always the same:

• I’m good at relationships.

• I make people feel trusted, safe, and seen.

• I can make connections between people, between storylines, between resources.

• I show other people what is most sensational about them and I share it with others.

• I care.

I’ve sometimes worried that these skills don’t translate to a resumé or that my so-called “soft skills” are just that - soft. But in this new world where research, analysis, and data crunching are being done by large language models, my soft skills are suddenly what is most human and irreplaceable about me. I care to the point that sometimes it exhausts me. I pay attention. I remember.

AI can simulate some of that. But it can’t actually care.

Care (if you think about it) is the act of stepping outside of yourself to extend goodwill to someone else as though they are you. AI doesn’t have a self (not yet, anyway). When it remembers your birthday, it’s executing a line of code. When I remember your birthday, I’m using a finite amount of my memory and attention to signal something important: you matter to me.

AI Isn’t Replacing Me. It’s Making Space for Me.

The irony is that by taking tedious documentation, data-chasing, and formatting tasks off my plate, AI has created space for me to do more of what only humans can do: care, empathize, and connect.

I’m spending more time:

• Getting to know my customers as people

• Understanding my colleagues’ unspoken pressures and hopes

• Absorbing leadership’s priorities and finding connective tissue between them and the customers I speak to

• Prioritizing in person connection, learning, and events like the one I attended last week at the HOPE Outdoor Gallery. 

I’m tuning myself to others, not because I’m forced to, but because I finally can. And in the age of AI, this kind of attention isn’t just “nice to have.” It’s becoming a strategic differentiator. The more automation we introduce, the more meaning we assign to the finite, human acts of care.

The Future of Work Is Finite, and That’s Its Superpower

AI may one day evolve into something closer to a “self” but right now, it’s precisely our finiteness that gives our gestures meaning. When I choose to extend care, I’m allocating scarce human resources: time, memory, emotional energy. And that’s why it matters. And the people that you work with do notice. It's nice that AI has given me the first real flexibility in my finiteness. 

So yes, by all means: take the data analysis. Automate the decks. Streamline the ops.

Replace me there, because this is the first time that I have a little bit more of what is actually ME to give.

What I want to hold onto is the work that can’t be automated: the trust, the empathy, the connective tissue that makes organizations thrive. AI isn’t making me irrelevant. It’s giving me more space to be fully human.