It's travel season for me, and currently spending a few days in NY before going to France, then to Switzerland and then on to Asia for the summer. This is a wonderful time of year for us as we travel and do fun summer things, but it also presents complications with work and time zones. Luckily, I've been doing this so long, I'm used to it and I usually give weeks of notice to team members, clients, whomever else needs to know.
As part of my daily scrolling while waiting to crank out some work before getting on a red eye from NYC to Paris, I came across a thirty-page report on my LinkedIn feed, built on the network's own hiring data across the EU. I almost kept scrolling. Then one finding stopped me, and it is the reason I am writing about AI-augmented jobs instead of whatever I had planned for today.
The jobs holding up best are not the ones AI barely touches. They are not the ones most exposed to it either. They are the ones in the middle, where a person uses AI and still brings the judgement, which is also what I am finding in my 8 to 9 hours grinding through different agents. The report calls these augmented roles, and they are outperforming both the highly exposed jobs, which it calls disrupted, and the insulated ones AI hardly reaches. Same pattern in the EU, the UK, the US, and India.
We can start with what looks like the bad news, because most people stop there. Across the EU, hiring is down about twenty-six percent from before the pandemic and fifteen percent year on year. Grim, on paper. But the report is clear that the drop is mostly macro. Low executive confidence, tight money, geopolitical noise. Not robots clearing out the office. The roles with the highest AI exposure did not fall any faster than the roles AI barely touches. The mass replacement everyone keeps writing about is not in the numbers, at least not yet. As I posted after listening to the Scott Galloway podcast, I'm also not buying the AI hype. AI is going to need a human driving it, and it's likely to become a more sophisticated tool than when the Internet disrupted markets and all of the other hype bubbles that have come before it. [CHECK: add link to the Galloway segment and his reasoning, which we believe.]
What is in the numbers is the split. Pair AI with real human skills and your work is more resilient, not less. And it holds strongest among experienced people. One figure that sticks out: in France, entry-level hiring in these augmented roles fell about fourteen percent, while the same roles overall fell about two. Experience plus the tool is the most durable combination going right now.
I read that and thought, this is the exact thing I have been doing on purpose. I am not technical. On my best day I am a generalist who is decent at a lot and excellent at almost none of it. On my own, twelve months ago, I could not have built what I build now. Paired with an AI agent, I ship work a whole team would have needed months for. The machine does not replace my judgement. It carries the parts that used to eat the day, and leaves me the parts only a person can do.
The clearest proof is not me, though. It is the person I build for. We did not replace the CFO I work with. We built an AI controller that does the repetitive, mundane parts of the monthly close so they can spend time on the work a business actually pays for: the judgement, the structure, the decisions. When it missed half a bank statement one month, the fix was not less human involvement. It was more, in the right place. The AI did not take the job. It made the human the strongest version of it. That is augmented, in one real person, in one real month.
For anyone reading this at fifty-two, having done well in a career they no longer love, half-believing the headlines that say AI is coming for them. The people getting hurt are not the ones using AI. They are the ones doing work AI can already do who refuse to touch it. The report's word for the thing that protects you is adaptability, and underneath the jargon it just means skill transferability: how easily you can move what you already know into the next thing. Generalists who have done many jobs have it. Someone who has done one narrow task for thirty years has less of it, through no fault of their own.
I did not choose my own pivot. Grief made it for me, and I have written about that rebuild elsewhere. But the thing that rebuild or reimagination, reinvention of my own skill set and the life I wanted taught me is the thing this report is now measuring at the scale of a continent. The way through is not guarding the old role with both hands. It is taking what you already know, pairing it with the new tool, and becoming something the old version of you could not be.
That is the whole of what I sell now. Two operators and a stack of AI agents, making a small team more capable instead of replacing anyone on it. If you run a lean business and you are trying to work out whether AI means firing people or making the people you have twice as capable, the data points one way. Augmented beats disrupted. Bet on the people who use the tool, and a fractional role can help with that. A lot more than you might think according to this report.
I have been writing this build in public for ninety-odd days and it has not produced a single inbound lead yet. The augmented bet is not magic, and it is not fast. But the direction in the data is the direction I am already pointed, and on a foggy June morning outside New York City, that is enough to keep me going.
A hiring report from a professional network is not gospel. But when the numbers say the people who pair AI with their own judgement are the ones still standing, and that happens to be the exact thing you have spent a year building, you take the small confirmation the morning hands you, finish your coffee, and get back to writing, prospecting, shipping.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects (AI outbound agent now live) | Team: Me + part time Jan (CTO)
Day 91 of 365.