Who, Not How
The most important question in the Age of AI isn't how to use the tools. It's who you have to become.
Every wave of automation arrives with a how-to manual. Learn the tool, the manual says, and you’ll be fine. The manuals are not wrong, exactly. They’re just answering the smaller question.
As Jensen Huang put it to workers worried about AI: “You’re confusing your job with the tools you use to do it.” The tools will keep changing. What endures is the person wielding them — and what that person is for.
Every job is made up
Personal secretaries. Travel agents. Video-store clerks. Each felt permanent, prestigious, essential. Each was invented to solve a problem of its era, and each was remade when the era changed. Product work is at that moment now.
The liberating part: if every job is made up, every job can be remade — on purpose. The question isn’t whether AI takes the procedural pieces. It will. The question is which human capacities you choose to build in their place.
Readiness over posture
A lot of energy goes into looking “AI-native” — the right tools in the stack, the right vocabulary in the standup. Posture is cheap. Readiness is the real thing: the fundamentals that decide whether any of those tools actually pay off.
AI Readiness over “AI-native” posturing.
Readiness is who-shaped, not how-shaped. It’s curiosity that keeps asking the better question. It’s the empathy to hear the problem under the stated one. It’s the judgment to know which call is yours to make. None of that ships in a release note.
Start with the person
So before the toolset and even the skillset, start with the mindset: who do you need to be when the procedural work is handled? Answer that, and the how takes care of itself. Skip it, and no tool will save you.