AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

Nearly every article I've read about new “AI-era” jobs is describing one of two roles. And I think one of the common job predictions is a lie. So let's break them down properly.

I spend my days consulting Fortune 500 companies on how to win with AI, and that includes navigating the messy world of AI upskilling, reskilling, and job changes. I've sat with CMOs to invent brand-new roles, helped companies stand up innovation units from scratch, helped another rewrite every job description they had to be more AI-forward. And the one trap I watch companies fall into over and over: they read a flashy headline about a new job title, usually straight from OpenAI or Anthropic, and decide they need to hire for that role.

Remember the headlines for Prompt Engineer (which reportedly paid up to $335k)? Or maybe the more recent AI Storyteller paying $255k (which, as far as I can tell, means a good psychological marketer who's watched a few Simon Sinek videos)?

A quick story: back in 2024, I sat down with a media client who was so proud they had hired a prompt engineer to support a team of a hundred writers. I told them, gently, to change that person's job immediately. That role was a stopgap, a very temporary support system that was going to be made redundant in under a year, and no one should be building their entire career on it.

That's the first type of AI job (the bad kind). It catches headlines, the labs hire a handful of people for it, and it gets wildly outsized attention in the market when realistically only a few people ever land the role, and even for the people that do, their job looks completely different twelve months later.

What concerns me is the lie that it creates. It makes it look like only some people need to know how to prompt, when everyone does. Or that only some people need to know how to tell the story of AI, when every product manager and salesperson and marketer needs to be able to do that. I felt the same way about companies hiring a Chief AI Officer in 2023. Naming it as a job lets everyone else off the hook because you’re offloading the responsibility of AI-fluency onto a single point of contact, then over-relying on that person to carry a skill that everyone needs. If I were running a large company, I would not hire for that job.

There's a second type of job that is real and has had legs for years. You can see the AI labs are hiring hundreds or thousands of people for it, funding is lining up behind it, and salaries are increasing for it. Consulting firms and tech companies alike are hiring for this role right now.

If I were an HR leader at a larger company, this is absolutely one of the roles I would hire for. If I were someone pivoting my career, this is the role I would train for.

And it’s the person who cracks the fast-moving big AI wins across the company.

It goes by a hundred names. AI Operations, Agent Manager (I don’t love this name), Internal FDE (FDE = forward-deployed engineer), Forward-Deployed Enablement, AI Engineer, and a bunch of other iterations on ‘AI-word’ + ‘Operator-role’. Some are more technical than others, some sit closer to R&D, some sit in the Office of the COO. Underneath the title, it's the same person: someone who knows how to procure and apply the right AI tools for each task, in a way that creates substantial business value. 

While it is important for every single person at the company to be AI-literate and work with AI, and therefore upksilling to that foundation is critical, there are times when you need an advanced SWAT team of AI operators. People in these roles are flexible enough to drop into any department. They’re high empathy and thrive in either customer-facing roles, or internal support roles. (I will be explaining more about this role and how to hire for it at my CHRO Roundtable on August 3rd.)

This might still be a temporary role (and honestly, every role is temporary when you think about it), but I believe it is more stable than the overhyped Prompt Engineer or AI Storyteller, probably pays more, is more plentiful, and is a much easier role to pivot into than AI Storyteller will ever be.

You have to hear how Instagram, Netflix, and Uber are talking about this role

The people running some of the biggest product orgs are already rebuilding their teams around this AI operator function. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has said Instagram now works in "pods" of "four to six engineers who are a bit more generalist", plus a role they call ‘Product Staff’ that rolls the product designer, researcher, and manager into one.

Is this the age of the generalist? We've hit a moment where expanding past your narrow role - engineers moving into design, into product, into whatever's next - is genuinely powerful. And more broadly, AI is handing generalists one of the biggest legs up we've ever seen. If you're a generalist, this is your moment. Wake up and smell the Claude.

Netflix's CPTO Elizabeth Stone said much the same. She's hiring "more systems thinkers" and "fewer specialists" than she was five years ago, and she's made AI fluency "non-negotiable for all roles", right up to the senior-most levels, even if they’re not writing code.

Uber created a whole new structure around AI operators. Its CTO described handpicking around 30 of the company's most AI-proficient engineers and pairing each one with a domain expert from a business function - finance, legal, ops, marketing, support - in two-week sprints he called Agentic Pods. Sixteen pods across sixteen functions in two months. One pod cut budget decisions across 150 cities from 15 hours to 30 minutes, another shrank marketing web QA from 2 weeks to under an hour.

Instagram now has “Product Staff”. Netflix is hiring systems thinkers. Uber drops these people into Agentic Pods. My Fortune 500 clients call it AI operations. Same type of person.

Entry level jobs are disappearing… or are they?

According to Revelio Labs and Ramp, the companies investing most heavily in AI have actually grown employment by around 10%, and their entry-level headcount is up 12%. The headlines about junior roles getting wiped out aren’t telling the whole story. The hiring data suggests the jobs are changing shape: largely that the tasks expected in these roles are moving up a level.

PwC, combing through more than a billion job ads, found that postings for starter roles now demanding what used to be senior-level skills have jumped 35% since 2019. LinkedIn's Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, calls this same shift - the “grunt work” vanishing in favor of “more senior” work - an opportunity, “a chance to redesign early career jobs to be more meaningful from day one”.

The most forward-looking companies, like Uber above, have figured out that pairing a highly ambitious, AI-forward gremlin (see ‘gremlin’ definition below) with a subject matter expert is the strongest move, and doesn’t deplete their entry-level pipeline. It’s the marriage of the fresh-eyed, flexible, digitally native rethinker with someone who has deep, hard-won expertise. Age is not a hard line here - you can be 2 years from retirement and be the most AI-first operator at your company.

If you're an HR or people leader

1. Rethink every job description you have. If you haven’t done that yet, you are behind. AI can now reliably complete human tasks that take skilled people a couple of hours, and that task length is doubling roughly every 4-5 months. A job description written without exponential change in mind is putting your business on its back foot and setting your new hires up to fail.

2. Find your AI superusers. Follow Uber’s model and identify your AI Operators, aka the people that should be on your AI SWAT team or frontier unit. Find the people getting disproportionate value from AI (ie the people following the next section’s advice). If you’re not sure how to find them, join my CHRO Roundtable on August 3rd where I’ll teach you exactly how to do this.

3. Build new working structures. Lean into the marriage of your AI operators and your subject-matter experts. Run cross-functional lean AI pods in partnership with your CEO or CIO/CTO office.

If you're a people leader trying to build out this role, the CHRO Roundtable is where I’ll be showing you how to do it. Apply for a seat at the CHRO Roundtable on Monday, August 3rd.

If you want to become this person

Being AI-fluent is table stakes. If you’re not there yet, that’s who my extremely beginner-friendly AI-First Academy is built for. Once you can apply the tools to your own work, two things really set the AI operators apart:

1. Go ‘gremlin mode’ with your AI use. This is a term my team and I use daily. It’s relentless resourcefulness, especially leveraging AI. It’s about finding the way to the exponential outcome, no matter what, and working past a local maxima, so you don’t leave something on the table. Ex: everyone else is building one AI persona, you build 80 and run every product launch through it. Ex: everyone else uses AI to clean one spreadsheet, you build a pipeline that cleans your trackers every morning before you wake up. Ex: everyone else uses AI to answer the customer ticket, you have it answer the ticket and spot the patterns across 500 tickets and write the fix.

2. Deeply understand the problems people hit when they try to implement AI. A few starters would be: they don't know where to start, they can't get AI to replicate the specific workflows they already run, they’re not thinking ambitiously enough and are incrementally tweaking processes with AI not rebuilding them, the handoffs between departments are still blocked. Learn to spot those and what your immediate first unblocking move is. Your mission is momentum.

3. Build in public - be your own beacon. You’re more easily found as an AI superuser when you show your work. If you want this role inside your current company, post in your internal channels (create new Slack or Teams channels if you have to), ask your manager if you can show the team how you're using AI, build something that helps everyone around you, and teach the two people at the next desk how to do it too.

4. Back it with a track record people can find. Team up with a SME and run your own AI pod. Work on 1-2 case opportunities, sprint on the project, share its results as a win in your org with numbers to back it up and next steps. Ex: this freight forwarding process use to take 12 hours, now it takes 20 minutes. Ex: this new way of handling customer support tickets means we can now launch that white-glove personal advising service for our top 10% of customers that we’ve been wanting to do and here are the first 4 people I would put on that project.

5. If you're looking to leave or switch companies, post what you're building (nothing that contains private information or IP) on X and LinkedIn every single day. Look for job openings in AI operations on LinkedIn or check out the 100,000+ open AI operations jobs on Indeed. Post daily for 30 days straight, and I promise you, just like I promise every dog that allows me to rub their belly, your life will change.

Stay curious, stay informed,

Allie

APPLY TO JOIN THE CHRO ROUNDTABLE

On Monday, August 3rd at 1:00PM ET, I'm hosting a virtual roundtable with Jacqui Canney, ServiceNow's Chief People and AI Enablement Officer.

If you’re a senior people leader looking to finally understand the role of CHROs in the AI age and shorten your learning curve, I want you there.

The roundtable will be 60 minutes, completely free, and is largely built for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Heads of L&D. 

You'll leave with:

• A plan for updating your workflows and people management in the AI age

• What new and lasting skills to hire for and how to interview for these skills

• The inside scoop from one of the world's leading people and AI executives on how she enabled AI across a workforce - and key mistakes and learnings

• Actionable next steps for your own org, and exclusive AI resources (HR-specific prompts and trained AI skills) from our team

• The opportunity to access to the AI-First Academy for FREE (normally $397), so you have the AI foundations you need to redesign the workforce around what AI can actually do.

We’re keeping the room small so you can point your questions to Jacqui and me directly. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Jump in today.

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