In the debate about the impact of automation and agentic AI on the American workforce, there are two camps: those sounding the alarm on massive job displacement and those who want to know which specific roles will be eliminated. The difference is stark. Vague warnings will likely only lead to panic and bad policy responses. But, as a country, if we know which jobs are at risk, we can prepare, retrain, and adapt.

When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launched its R1 model requiring far less computational power than their American peers in January, it was only exposing the limitations Silicon Valley had already begun acknowledging. As millionaire investor Marc Andreessen noted, “we’re increasing GPUs at the same rate, but we’re not getting the intelligence improvements at all out of it.” That’s even before factoring in the supply chain challenge of providing enough chips to keep delivering the current rate of unsustainable growth.

When leaders tell employees that automation will free them up for “higher-value work,” often strategic, we must be careful not to sidestep a more complex reality. The transformation to hyperautomation—which Gartner says is now a core discipline for 90% of large enterprises—fundamentally changes how work happens, requiring employees to develop new capabilities while protecting core skills from atrophy.

After the party, the hangover. In the wake of the Great Resignation, Great Regret, Great Reset, and Great Return, the zeitgeist has shifted. Remember when Google let staff hold meetings in caravans and gave out doggie day passes? Then the bubble burst. Layoffs at Meta, Google, and X (formerly Twitter) brought the conversation back to being about what really matters in a workplace—work.