The Offsite: One Question to Take Into Your Week

This Week's Question

If you removed every task from your job that an AI could do adequately — not perfectly, just adequately — what would be left?

Sit with that for a moment. Don't rush to defend your role. Don't catastrophize. Just look honestly at what remains.

For most knowledge workers, what's left falls into a few categories:

• Judgment calls where the cost of being wrong is high and the context is ambiguous
• Relationship work — building trust, navigating conflict, reading a room
• Novel problem-solving where there's no template and no training data
• Ethical reasoning where "what should we do?" matters more than "what can we do?"

Here's the thing: those residual tasks? They're not the leftovers. They're the core. Everything else was always scaffolding.

The Reframe

Most people think about AI and work as a subtraction problem: what will AI take away from my job? The more useful frame is additive: what does AI reveal as the essential core of my work?

The answer to that question is your competitive advantage for the next decade.

This week, try this: every time you complete a task, ask yourself — could an AI have done this adequately? If yes, notice it. If no, ask why not. The pattern that emerges is your professional fingerprint.

See you next week.