Are you making yourself redundant?

(If you're doing any of these things the answer might be "YES")

“AI’s not here to take your job”, said a lot of people who have no idea what AI is here to do and are therefore completely unqualified to make such a statement.

It’s very comforting, but we’re not exactly living in boom times at the moment and a lot of people seem to be “in consultation” with their employers or “out of consultation and also out of a job”.

Now maybe you won’t be directly replaced by an AI in the near future. But are you using AI to make yourself redundant? Here are six things you might be doing that could harm your long-term job prospects:

1. You're letting your employer record all your calls

Letting your employer record every single call using an AI notetaker? You’re giving away your IP on a silver platter. Every word, every insight, every nuance of how you talk, think, and persuade - captured, structured, and ready to train the system that could replace you.

Have you actually consented to this? Have you read your contract? If your employer won’t let you opt out, ask why. If you're not in control of your own data, you might be handing over your career without even knowing it.

2. You've become a copy/paste jockey

Using ChatGPT to write something, then pasting it into your email, your deck, your doc - without editing, questioning, or improving it? Congrats: you're now indistinguishable from anyone else with an internet connection. AI doesn't make you smarter if you're just rubber-stamping its outputs.

What matters is what you do with the content. If you're not bringing insight, context, or critique, you're just automating yourself out of relevance.

3. You're not learning about AI

Hoping this all blows over? Still pretending prompt engineering is “just for the techies”? You’re already falling behind. Your job might not be replaced by AI, but it might be replaced by someone who’s using it better, faster, and more strategically than you.

Curiosity is the differentiator now. You don’t need to become a coder - you need to become a partner to the machines. If you’re not even trying, you’re choosing obsolescence.

4. You're training your replacement without realising it

Every time you write a how-to doc, record a Loom video, or build a no-code automation - you might be building a system designed to run without you. That’s fine if you’re the one designing the system. But if you’re just documenting tasks and hoping that makes you indispensable, think again.

You want to be the person building the machine, not the part the machine replaces.

5. You're only learning what your job needs today

You used to explore new tools. Ask questions. Suggest experiments. But now you're just trying to keep your head down and stay employed. Problem is, that's not safe.

The future belongs to people who ask, “What else could this do?” If you're waiting to be told what to do, or you're only learning the skills that keep your current job afloat, you're shrinking your role instead of growing it. AI rewards curiosity. If you’ve lost yours, you're losing the plot.

6. You're measuring yourself on productivity, not impact

"I’m doing so much!" Great. So can AI. The question is: should you be doing all that? And why?

The people who’ll thrive in an AI-shaped workplace aren’t the ones who complete the most tasks. They’re the ones who solve the right problems. If your main metric is how fast you can get through your to-do list, you're optimising for the wrong thing - and making it easier to be replaced by a script or a workflow.