AI is ushering in an era of mass toe-treading at work

Some workplaces are more territorial than others. In newsrooms, for example, most reporters guard their own “beats” jealously and give toe-treaders short shrift. I suspect we are a special case, but even so, the majority of organisations have a pretty clear idea of who is responsible for what — and who isn’t.

But for how much longer? On-the-ground reports from a range of workplaces suggest the traditional boundaries of many occupations are beginning to weaken as people use AI to perform elements of one another’s jobs. For the most part, this isn’t because managers have redesigned workflows and responsibilities. Instead, this mass turf-trampling is happening messily and organically — to the benefit of some and the detriment of others.

A recent analysis by OpenAI found that people frequently use ChatGPT for work tasks which lie beyond the traditional boundary of their own occupation, such as troubleshooting software issues, drafting marketing materials and calculating financial data. In a sample of about 800,000 work-related messages, around 17 per cent were classed as “cross-occupation”, which meant they concerned tasks associated with a different role to the user’s own. A further 22 per cent concerned tasks related to their own occupation, with the rest classified as “generic” ones such as writing emails or scheduling meetings.

There may well be speed and efficiency advantages in no longer having to track down an expert colleague for help with something like a software issue, albeit possibly at the cost of a less collaborative and conversational culture. (And provided you don’t wade into mistakes the specialists eventually have to fix anyway.)

But in some workplaces, these occupational boundary shifts are leading to deeper changes. When researchers Jana Retkowsky, Ella Hafermalz and Marleen Huysman conducted an ethnographic study into an advertising team in a Dutch media company, for example, they found that generative AI had changed the workflow profoundly.

Before AI, a senior creative would brainstorm ideas and come up with some rough concepts for clients to choose from. After that, a number of different professionals, from graphic designers to photographers, would be involved in the collaborative and creative to-and-fro which eventually resulted in the finished product.

After AI, the senior creative could use Midjourney to create a seemingly fully formed, beautifully polished concept right at the beginning of the process. The other professionals’ jobs were now reduced to trying to execute the AI-generated pitch.

Retkowsky told me it was a tricky dynamic for colleagues to discuss, but that those conversations could lead to new ways of doing things that kept everyone involved.

“It has to be talked about, which is awkward, since you are effectively telling a colleague they have taken over parts of your work,” she said. “That is harder still when the person taking it over is excited about it. The creative directors loved the new autonomy of being able to visualise their own ideas, and they were not encroaching on anyone deliberately.” But, she said, teams that avoid the awkward conversation could “end up pushing people out”.

Another piece of forthcoming research, this time on video games companies, finds a similar phenomenon of “overlapping roles” in which AI is enabling artists to code and programmers to make artwork. Damian Grimshaw of King’s College London, one of the authors, said that while people had become “very obsessed” with the impact of AI on the vertical lines between juniors and seniors, he thought it “equally important just how much overlapping there is going on now which is horizontal”.

Of course, occupations have never been fixed bundles of tasks. Indeed, one paper from 2020 found that a substantial share of the long-run change in work had actually happened within job titles, rather than because some died out and others appeared or grew. And when occupations do disappear, sometimes it is because everyone else absorbs that work into their own daily jobs. Just think of typists.

But while shifting job boundaries is not new, that does not mean it doesn’t feel destabilising to be on the wrong end of those changes (and exciting to be on the right end of them).

There is a lot of focus right now on employers’ plans for AI. But if you are worried about your job being automated, the more proximate threat could be that colleague with a Claude subscription and a manic glint in their eye.

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