AI Guides › Playbooks
By Nigel Guy · 7 min read
Most people ask "will AI take my job?" as if the job were one solid object that either survives or doesn't. So they read a headline, feel either smug or doomed, and change nothing about how they spend Monday. Your job is not one thing. It is a bundle of tasks, and technology has been unbundling that bundle for decades — spreadsheets took the ledgers, search took the filing, and now language models are taking the first drafts.
The rule: never judge your job as a whole. List last week's tasks, sort each one by what it really involves, and only defend the ones that genuinely need you.
Labour economists have measured work this way for over twenty years. Autor, Levy and Murnane's 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics argued that computers replace work that follows explicit rules — routine manual and routine cognitive tasks — and complement non-routine problem-solving and complex communication. Much of the change they measured happened inside job titles that stayed the same.
The AI companies now report usage the same way. Anthropic's first Economic Index report (February 2025) matched Claude conversations to the US government's O*NET task database rather than to job titles. At that point it found roughly 36% of occupations used AI for at least a quarter of their tasks, and only about 4% for three-quarters or more. Those figures describe one product's usage at one moment, not a forecast — later reports exist and the numbers move — but the shape is the useful part: AI arrives task by task, not job by job.
So "will AI replace my job?" is the wrong question. The useful ones are: which of my tasks are already cheap to hand over, and what is left when they go?
Every task on your list falls mostly into one of three kinds. "Mostly" matters: label by where the effort actually goes, not by the most impressive moment in it.
| Label | Kind | What it looks like | How exposed it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| H | Hands | Physically being there: fixing, lifting, inspecting, caring for someone in the room | Least exposed to AI chat tools; robotics is a separate, slower story |
| S | Screen routine | Digital work with a pattern: copying data between systems, formatting, chasing, scheduling, searching, filling templates | Most exposed — often automatable today with ordinary tools |
| J | Judgement | Deciding with incomplete information, reading people, owning a call, writing something only you can stand behind | Partly exposed: AI drafts and checks, but someone still has to decide and answer for it |
The beginner trap sits between S and J. Writing a first-draft report feels like judgement because it uses words. If most of the effort is assembling, summarising or formatting, it is S with a J ending — and a tool can take the bulk of it.
You need one week of honest memory, a blank document and about forty minutes.
Redo the ledger every six months or so. Tool-readiness changes faster than your job title does.
Priya is a fictional lettings coordinator at a small agency. Part of her ledger:
| Task | Hrs | Label | Tool today | What she adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typing viewing notes into the CRM | 3 | S | Now | Nothing much |
| Drafting tenancy renewal emails | 4 | S→J | Partly | Knows which landlords need handling gently |
| Chasing references | 3 | S | Now | Nothing much |
| Property inspections | 6 | H | Not yet | Being there, spotting damp |
| Settling a deposit dispute | 2 | J | Partly | Owning the decision, calming both sides |
Ten of these eighteen hours are Now or Partly. Her core sentence: "I'm the person landlords and tenants trust to see the property and settle disagreements fairly." Her first handover: chasing references, because it is fully routine and a mistake is easy to spot and fix.
Paste this into any capable chat assistant. Fill in your job title, a short description of your workplace, and your task list with hours.
You are an experienced work analyst helping me see my job as a set of tasks rather than a single role. Be direct and strict; flattering answers are no use to me.
My context:
- Job title: [YOUR_JOB_TITLE]
- Sector and size of organisation: [SECTOR_AND_SIZE]
- Tools I already have access to: [TOOLS_YOU_CAN_USE, e.g. Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, a CRM]
- Last week's tasks, one per line, with rough hours:
[PASTE_TASK_LIST_WITH_HOURS]
If the task list is missing, has fewer than 8 lines, or has no hours, stop and ask me for it before doing anything else. Do not invent tasks.
Work through these steps in order:
1. For each task, assign one label: H (physical, needs a person present), S (routine screen work that follows a pattern) or J (judgement: deciding, reading people, owning an outcome). If a task is mainly formatting, searching, summarising or producing a first draft, label it S even if it ends with a decision.
2. For each task, rate tool-readiness today as Now, Partly or Not yet, judged only against tools that genuinely exist and that someone in my position could realistically get. Name the type of tool, not a specific product, unless you are sure it fits.
3. For each task, give one short phrase on what a human still contributes. "Little or nothing" is an acceptable answer.
Reply in this shape:
- A table with the columns Task | Hours | Label | Tool today | What a human adds
- Underneath it, the total hours and what share of them falls under Now or Partly
- A single sentence naming the part of my work that only a person can do
- A recommendation for which one task I ought to pass to a tool before any other, with two sentences of reasoning and one sentence on how I could verify what the tool produces
Rules: do not predict whether my job will exist in future, do not give career or legal advice, and say "unsure" rather than guessing when a task is ambiguous.
Before you answer, check: every task has exactly one label and one rating; the percentage matches the table; no task I did not list appears in the table.
Fill in: your title, sector, the tools you can actually use, and last week's task list with hours. Strip out client names and anything confidential before you paste.