For most of human history, new technologies arrived slowly enough that we could adapt alongside them. Whether it’s the telephone that took 75 years to become mainstream or the introduction of cloud infrastructure in the early 2000s, each wave changed how we lived and worked, but also gave us time to find our footing.
AI is bucking that trend.
When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it reached 100 million users in just two months, faster than almost any consumer product before it. That launch catalyzed the entire world into an AI frenzy. It marked the beginning of a new technological era that reached every industry, every role, and every knowledge worker almost overnight.
Based on historical trends, AI should have taken a decade to reach meaningful market penetration, but it did it in two years. And the industry shows no signs of slowing down. Hyperscaler technology companies are investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure to meet demand as adoption continues to rise. The unique thing about AI is that its growth is recursive—it accelerates its own development in a way no previous tool could, resulting in novel innovation literally every single day.
With AI, we no longer have the luxury of time to develop best practices, expertise, and settle into a new normal. And that fundamentally changes something I’ve personally been struggling with: when the ground keeps moving underneath you, you never get to stop feeling like a beginner.
Product Marketer Turned GTM Agent
It’s been eight years since I transitioned into Product Marketing (PMM). But after countless product launches, enablement sessions, and even a specialization in developer-centric cybersecurity products, I can’t help but shake this feeling of incompetence.
Like other industries and disciplines, AI is an active character in my world. Since 2022, prompting an LLM and tooling agents has become a core part of my day-to-day workflow. And I’m not alone.
Data from the Product Marketing Alliance shows that over 50% of PMMs use AI on a daily basis for a variety of activities like market intelligence and content creation. But perhaps the most jarring revelation is that 83% of PMMs use AI for messaging and positioning. That is, the one responsibility which has always been the heart of the job—the most innately human skill of storytelling—has been abdicated to AI.
I’m sure parallels exist in other roles. Building a tailored personal training program, writing code, or drafting a legal brief; AI is acting as an equalizer, flattening skills that used to take years to build. In the process, it’s forcing a reinvention of roles at an unprecedented rate. Every day there’s a new tool, a new capability, a new expectation, and the reinvention starts over before the last one finishes.
The optimist in me tries to reinforce the notion that change creates an exciting prospect for growth. But let’s be real, it’s exhausting. Increasingly, I find myself feeling nostalgic, longing for what the day-to-day of my role used to be, which is impacting my ability to grow today.
New Job Woes
The constant change imposed by AI is akin to the challenge of navigating a new job. When you pursue a new opportunity, regardless of seniority, there’s an initial period of stress and anxiety as you acclimate to the way of working in the new organization. That initial period of onboarding is associated with a decline in happiness.
In his book The Happiness Files, author Arthur Brooks cites a study from the Journal of Organizational Behaviour that tracks the job satisfaction of individuals who take on a new role. On average, people who leave an organization report a 4.5/7 satisfaction rating with their old job. Six weeks into joining a new company, the sentiment shifts and they begin to remember their old job more fondly. Like Thanos deciding, in hindsight, that he’d been too hard on Nebula, we soften toward what we left behind. It weighs on us. And it’s not until we settle into the new gig that our happiness rebounds.
At least with new jobs, there’s a rhythm to it. You leave, you struggle, you adjust, and you eventually find your footing. With AI, that rhythm never completes. It’s not like we’re cycling through the onboarding curve; we’re stuck at the bottom of it. And that’s what makes the research so apropos: adapting to a new job in the AI era means we’re in a state of permanent onboarding.
Stay at the Human End
It would be easy to wallow in our own self-pity and lament the discomfort AI is imposing on our professional lives. But that’s not a practical path forward. What I’ve found to be effective is to focus my energy on the human end of the equation with execution.
For example, a few weeks ago, my team and I hosted a virtual summit that explored the impact of AI on Application Security—shocker. The goal was to build demand for our solution by sharing novel research, thought leadership, and industry perspectives. For one of the sessions, we had the wild idea of hosting an industry analyst for a Hot Ones-style interview where we actually ate spicy chicken wings as we unpacked hot takes on the space.
AI helped us brainstorm the session, draft the abstract, and even prep the questions. But the actual execution? That was 100% human. The ability to bring an idea to life, have the dexterity to go off the cuff, and make a connection, that’s where the real value is, especially in a world that’s flooded with AI slop.
And it’s true for other disciplines as well. Building a workout program isn’t the differentiator; it’s the trained eye of a coach who can spot flaws in movement patterns. For lawyers, briefs are commoditized, but the comfort of meeting face to face isn’t. And for developers, sure, Claude Code can build a PR in a matter of minutes, but the accountability of how that code performs in the real world, that’s all you.
***
In a previous post, I noted that AI is supplanting human cognition. One year later, I’m even more convinced of that truth, and it’s why I feel, as many others in the tech industry feel, a certain disconnection with my vocation. AI is compressing the time we have to acclimate to new skills and forcing a constant reinvention.
But here’s what I’ve made peace with. The tools will keep resetting, and I’ll feel like a beginner there for the rest of my career. What won’t reset is the judgment underneath—the read on a room, the instinct for what a moment needs, the taste to know which story is worth telling. The eight years I spent learning my craft didn’t evaporate because a model can draft a positioning doc. They moved. And the human end is the one place where onboarding actually finishes, because being an expert there still compounds on human time, at human speed.
So no, the answer isn’t to become a luddite and retreat—that goes against the very nature of what it means to be human. The answer is to double down on it. Leave space to think. Engage in dialogue. And execute in person.
