I spoke at USC Marshall this week about AI and the job market and shared the same advice I gave my daughters: Blaze a new trail.
I was an analyst at Goldman Sachs in the early 90s. The firm was still private, nimble, and much scrappier. Because the career path was less defined than it appears today, there was room to focus on the destination and optimize the system to get there faster.
For me, that meant rewiring computers to speed up workflows, building a CRM in Visual Basic to manage deal communications, and even sourcing a fee-generating sell-side engagement that helped salvage a troubled buy-side transaction.
That same destination-focused mindset will be required to succeed in the rapidly emerging AI economy.
If your primary value is processing information or building slide decks, the job market is already routing around you.
Consider a top investment banking Analyst. In a busy month, they roughly produce:
600 PowerPoint slides
1,500 emails
8 Excel models
2,000 Slack messages
6 internal memos
50 sets of meeting notes
In the language of AI, that’s roughly 500,000 tokens.
At today’s AI prices, generating that much “intelligence” costs about $1.05. Meanwhile, the salary alone of a top first-year Analyst is roughly $20,000 per month. That is a four orders of magnitude drop in the cost of producing knowledge work.
This is a complete game-changer, and nobody has any idea how this will play out. However, I posit that mastering these three things will improve the odds of succeeding:
Accept that the old trail is gone
The traditional apprenticeship model is disappearing. If you follow the path that worked for the previous generation, you may be following a trail that no longer leads anywhere.
Learn to manage agents
AI-native work is not about writing better prompts. It is about orchestrating multiple AI workers researching, modeling, and drafting simultaneously. The constraint is no longer your hands. It is your ability to master next-level multitasking.
Double down on human skills
With the grind outsourced, the advantage shifts to judgment, communication, and trust. The future belongs to people who can persuade, lead, and build relationships.
The market does not care about tenure or ability to grind. It cares about impact. Learn to orchestrate the work product, not just produce it. Think strategically. Build trust. Be commercial.
The old trail is a dead end.
Be the architect who commands the machine, and the human who understands the destination and leads the way there.