Career Positioning in the Era of Cheap Cognition

A compass for building a premium position in the synthetic world

Figure 1: Caravaggio’s “The Calling of St. Matthew” (c. 1600) illustrates the asymmetry of accountability. While others remain focused on the transactional execution of task (counting coins), Matthew is singled out by a beam of light—the “Premium Position” of judgment and responsibility.

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If your current role disappeared tomorrow, would your value disappear with it? That question is already being answered across the job market — quietly, unevenly, and faster than most people expect.

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Many professionals look at the future with both hope and fear. They sense that the AI transition is already underway and that, sooner or later, it will affect them directly.

At the same time, we’re witnessing a clear millennial work crisis: professionals in their 30s and 40s trying to start over, reinvent themselves, reprioritise their values, and rejoin the game on their own terms. This shift touches all of us directly — me included — whether we’re fully aware of it or not. Fear spreads faster than good news, and it’s difficult to stay neutral in the face of such a disruptive wave as rapid AI development.

Cast the first stone if you haven’t already discussed AI replacing your job — or parts of it — with your peers. Even a close colleague of mine, a surgeon, told me she isn’t affected.

Not yet,

she added.

Not yet.

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This is not a problem of a single job market or industry. It’s a macro-scale shift that will significantly reshape work across multiple industries worldwide. These feelings are valid. The internet is polarised between overhyped AI success stories and, on the other extreme, narratives portraying artificial intelligence as a political tool designed to make the rich richer and doom everyone else. The perspective that matters sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle.

If you’re passively waiting to see how the situation unfolds, that’s already a mistake. Watching is not a strategy.

And paradoxically, those most exposed may not be the skeptics, but the professionals intoxicated by flashy AI functionality. The ones embracing it everywhere, celebrating efficiency, and outsourcing their thinking without considering long-term consequences. They may be the first to experience redundancy. This isn’t an argument against enjoying generative tools or technological breakthroughs. It’s a call to be deliberate — to understand the depth of what’s changing and where it leads.

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What can professionals do to stay relevant?

Career positioning is a first checkpoint. It helps verify whether you’re becoming irreplaceable — or whether your role can already be performed by a cheaper, tireless machine that never asks for time off or sick leave. Irreplaceability isn’t a skill you acquire; it’s a position you build. A strategic advantage that allows you to proactively create opportunities aligned with market demand.

“Staying relevant” isn’t a skill problem. It’s a structural one. That’s why so many professionals are being forced to reframe their careers entirely. This isn’t about collecting new degrees or chasing the latest tools. Employers have become more selective than ever, because they’re no longer looking for execution alone. They’re looking for something deeper.

There are several reinforcing layers that will heavily influence relevance in the coming years.

Within your career infrastructure — everything you’ve built, or failed to build, over time — a few dimensions stand out.

Domain depth: understanding the nuances of your niche. Years of lived context, pattern recognition, institutional knowledge, and the ability to translate complex regulations into actionable use cases. This doesn’t compress easily.

Relational capital: trust, credibility, and professional networks built over time — colleagues, partners, integrators, even competitors.

Judgment leverage: moving from doing work to deciding how work should be done, and what work is worth doing. Closely tied to experience.

Problem definition power: having influence upstream of execution. If you fulfill briefs, you’re replaceable. If you shape them, you’re harder to remove.

Together, these create contextual irreplaceability. Professionals embedded deeply in systems, relationships, and decision flows develop a form of career insurance. Human factors matter here. Trust and relationships built over years cannot be replaced by even the best AI model. These are often the people who “know where the bodies are buried.” Their removal creates organizational friction — sometimes trauma — that leaves a noticeable gap over time.

That said, irreplaceability isn’t absolute. We have to be honest.

Many companies will willingly trade a portion of nuance and quality for a significant reduction in cost. There is an economic threshold beyond which “good enough” wins. This is not something an individual can control. The real question becomes: at what point does it stop making sense to pay a premium for human judgment?

This is where compounding matters.

Domain depth strengthens judgment. Judgment grants authority. Authority shapes strategy. Strategy is difficult to replace. Meanwhile, execution-focused professionals — even highly efficient ones — possess none of these layers.

As AI commoditises execution and speed, the relative value of judgment, relationships, and context increases — but only for those who built them early. For many, this shift is already happening. This essay may not be an early warning. It may be the last one.

What’s next?

Once your career position is clear, different questions emerge. Should you stay or move? Specialise or generalise? Seek clarity or lean into ambiguity? Take on hard, ill-defined problems or safe, well-scoped ones?

For those early in their careers, signaling matters. Don’t signal efficiency. Signal responsibility. Curiosity. Ownership of outcomes, not just outputs.

AI is reshaping value propositions across a highly selective job market. This is a long-term transformation that requires a radical mindset shift. Career safety no longer comes from doing one thing well. It comes from structuring your career intentionally while embracing uncertainty rather than resisting it.

There is no golden answer. The right path depends on your priorities, risk tolerance, and definition of a good life.

As the world shifts and values are reprioritised, it’s worth pausing to ask a deeper question:

What do you actually want?

I asked myself that question during an extended leave from my corporate role. For the first time, I had the space to dissociate my identity from my title, explore new interests, and meet people building lives within the same reality I was navigating. That period gave me the clarity — and the courage — to quietly reposition myself and take deliberate steps toward a different future. This is why I started writing in the first place.

Define what you want. Build toward it deliberately. Not on Monday. Not tomorrow.

Start now redefining your position in the so called synthetic era.

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This article is part of my Human Logic Series, exploring how to build a career AI can’t replace. More frameworks on Instagram and future deep-dives in upcoming newsletters.