The £65,000 Question: Is Your Career Safe from AI?

A graphic designer's income collapsed from £65,000 to near-poverty in a single year. Her story is a stark warning for professionals everywhere. As AI's capabilities accelerate, the question is no longer if it will affect your job, but when.

For 15 years, Leonie Tucker built a successful career in the film industry. As a lead graphic designer for major players like Apple TV, she was a sought-after professional, earning a comfortable living. Then, almost overnight, the work dried up.

The culprit was not a recession or a Hollywood strike, but the silent encroachment of artificial intelligence into her creative field.

"Everything I've ever worked for is this industry, it's now been ripped away from under my feet," Tucker told The Telegraph. "I'm very qualified and sought-after in this job. Now, I'm on Universal Credit."

Her story is a sobering case study of a phenomenon that is quietly gathering pace across the professional landscape. It is a narrative that we at Project Flux believe every project delivery professional needs to hear.

The Erosion of the Professional Class

What happened to Leonie Tucker is not an isolated incident. It is the leading edge of a wave of disruption that experts have been warning about for years. Much of the design work that was once the exclusive domain of skilled professionals can now be accomplished in post-production using AI, at a fraction of the time and cost.

The Scope of the Challenge

This is not just about automation of repetitive tasks. AI is now capable of performing complex, creative, and cognitive work that was once considered uniquely human:

• Creative Fields: Graphic design, copywriting, and content creation

• Technical Work: Software development, data analysis, and system design

• Professional Services: Legal research, financial analysis, and consulting

• Administrative Roles: Customer service, scheduling, and documentation

AI is rapidly acquiring skills that were once the bedrock of many professional careers.

Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel Prize winner, says: “If AI is used ultimately as an automation tool and nothing else, or mostly as an automation tool, it will create an underclass because it will automate a lot of jobs, and it will make a lot of skills redundant as a result.

When highly developed skills become commoditised by technology, the economic value of those skills plummets. The result is a downward pressure on wages and a hollowing out of the professional middle class.

The Rise of the 'Permanent Underclass'

Some of the world's leading economists are now sounding the alarm about the potential for AI to create a "permanent underclass." This is a group of people whose skills have been rendered obsolete by technology, leaving them with limited prospects for meaningful, well-paid work.

Warnings from the Experts

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has warned that on the current trajectory, "it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything." He fears this could lead to an "unemployed or very-low-wage 'underclass'."

“2026 will be the year of adoption. 2027 will be the year where we will see the early, more significant labour market impacts that can be felt. Then the big, worrying macro impacts will probably still take a bit longer,” says Carsten Jung at the IPPR.

The risk is not evenly distributed across the workforce. Administrative and clerical roles are highly susceptible to automation. Data processing tasks involving routine analytical work face significant disruption. Customer-facing services are increasingly handled by AI chatbots and agents.

A Disproportionate Impact on Women

Further research suggests that the impact of AI-driven job displacement will not be felt equally. A recent study found that of the 6.1 million workers in the US whose jobs are at high risk of disruption from AI, a staggering 86% are women. This is because many of the roles most susceptible to automation are female-dominated.

The Gender Dimension

• Administrative Roles: 75% female, highly automatable

• Customer Service: 70% female, prime target for AI chatbots

• Data Entry: 65% female, already being displaced

• Clerical Work: 80% female, facing rapid disruption

This adds another layer of complexity to the challenge. We are not just facing an economic disruption, but a social one, with the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities.

What Can We Do?

The picture painted by these experts is a concerning one, but it is not without hope. We feel that the key to navigating this transition is to focus on the skills that are uniquely human: critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic leadership.

Building Resilience in Your Career

For project delivery professionals, this means a fundamental shift in focus.

• Developing strategic thinking means moving beyond execution to strategic planning.

• Enhancing leadership skills involves focusing on team motivation and organisational culture.

• Building emotional intelligence develops the ability to understand and influence people.

• Mastering change management means helping organisations navigate technological transitions.

• Cultivating adaptability means staying curious and willing to learn new skills continuously.

The project managers of the future will be leaders, communicators, and strategic thinkers, capable of guiding teams through complex and uncertain environments.

Conclusion: A Call to Action

Leonie Tucker's story is a wake-up call. It is a reminder that the ground is shifting beneath our feet. We cannot afford to be complacent. We must be proactive, we must be adaptable, and we must be willing to embrace a new way of working.

The AI revolution is not something that is happening to us; it is something that we can shape.

By focusing on our uniquely human skills and by embracing a mindset of continuous learning, we can not only survive the coming disruption but thrive in it.

To understand how AI is reshaping the future of work and what it means for your career, subscribe to the Project Flux newsletter.

All content reflects our personal views and is not intended as professional advice or to represent any organisation.