I want to be honest with you about something.
A few years ago, I thought I had a decent read on where things were going. I have been in tech for 12 years. I was at Google, watching things change in the AI space, and I felt like I understood what was coming.
Then 2025 happened and even I had to stop and take a hard look at things.
It felt like things just flipped overnight. We were told to adopt AI but no one was actually adopting it. It was just a concept. But gradually I saw things shifting.
Almost everyone was using AI to do their job. Most of the people did not notice until it was already happening to them.
I will be honest I get some version of this message almost every week:
"Is AI actually going to replace me? Or am I overthinking it?"
The Era of Quiet Shift
Let me walk you through what I am actually seeing. I am calling it the Quiet Shift. There are 2 big AI trends I am seeing right now and it affects you if you work in tech or non-tech.
1. Agentic AI over LLM chatbots
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, talking to AI was the breakthrough. You typed, it answered. That back and forth was the whole product, and for 3 years it stayed that way.
Things are different now.
I built an agent last month that reads my inbox and calendar and sends me a summary twice a day. I didn't prompt it this morning. I didn't check on it. It ran on its own, decided what mattered, and put it in front of me on a schedule at 8am.
That's the shift I am observing and it's making with 2X more productive than I was before.
And it's not just me doing this at an individual level. Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft have built agentic workflows into the tools companies already use every day. Teams at HP and 7-Eleven are pulling their own data and getting their own answers without anyone in the loop.
What this means for you
It doesn't matter if you work in tech or outside of it. This shift is going to show up in your job either way. There are a few early adopter like me who are building AI Agents to automate repetitive work but it's a matter of time before it's mainstream. I am sure your company might already be looking at ways to adopt agentic AI.
Think about it like this. Two people are doing the same role. One of them is still using AI like a chatbot. They open a window, type a question, copy the answer, and move on. The other one has set up agents to handle the repeatable parts of their work. Emails get triaged. Reports get pulled. Research gets done in the background while they focus on the parts that actually need them.
The second person is going to be twice as fast as the first. Maybe more. And they're going to look like they have more bandwidth, better judgment, and more time for the work that gets noticed.
If you're still using AI like a chat window, you're a version behind where the work is going to be in the next few year. The good news is you're not far behind. You just have to start investing your AI skillset to be ahead of the curve so there is less catchup for you.
Airtable for for Interview Prep Template
Airtable 🔗 is an AI workflow platform that lets you build automated systems on top of your data. This is one of those tools I wish I had years ago. Instead of spending hours Googling companies, I built an interview prep app where I just drop in a company name and field agents do the rest: analyzing financials, researching product launches, scoping out competitors, pulling together interview tips. It's like having a research analyst on call. It auto-updates before each interview and I can add new companies anytime. You can access the Airtable interview prep template here. Thanks to Airtable for sponsoring this newsletter.
2. Your job title will stay
People keep saying that their jobs will be replaced with AI, but nobody is actually talking about the job description itself, because if you pay close attention, AI is already changing the job description for most roles.
For example, Meta has started piloting a new interview format, Product Manager candidates have to vibe code a working prototype during the live interview. The job title is still Product Manager. The same words on the same offer letter. But vibe coding, something that was never part of that role before, is now part of the job description.
That is just one example and there are a lot more like there. We are still early.
One more example from my personal experience working at Google as a data scientist.
A year ago, if anyone needed to look at data or run an experiment, they came to me. Every single time. I would figure out what they needed, do the work, and send it back. That was just how it went.
That changes gradually.
Most of the people in my team because well-versed in experimentation and they used LLMs where they were confused. They were able pull the run an experiments, analyze the results and make launch decisions. I was primarily getting pulled into advanced work.
In span of months, my teammates and my job descriptions changed. Our titles were still the same.
I hear the same thing from people across different companies, different roles, and different levels. The everyday, repeatable parts of the job are getting picked up by tools and lower-level ICs and even non-tech folks.
What this means for you.
The shift I am describing is probably already showing up in your own work, even if it is subtle. Maybe a tool started doing something you used to do. Maybe a teammate picked up a skill that was not on their plate a year ago. That is the signal. Your job description is moving, and the people who do well are the ones who notice early and move with it instead of waiting for someone to tell them to. Your title is safe. Your work is changing. Both things can be true.
A Final Thought
If there is one constant in tech, it is change. I graduated school 12 years ago, and today 90% of what I do at my job I learned on the job, not in school. The shift happening right now is just the next version of that.
The Quiet Shift is happening across the board. Some of us are already noticing it. If you have not yet, my hope is that this write-up made you recall some small changes in your own role.
If you work a 9 to 5 in corporate, I would start paying attention to these two AI trends closely. You do not have to do anything dramatic about it. You just have to stay honest with yourself about what is changing, pick one thing to lean into, and stay consistent with it.
I am curious which of these two trends are you already feeling in your own work?
Watch this video on how I built I built my inbox AI Agent:
✨ What’s New with me?
Things have been chaotic on my end, but in a good way. In case you missed it, I quit my job at Google. The first few days were rough. I spent most of them in bed feeling sad. But now I am starting to see why I actually made the decision, and it is making more sense to me by the day. There is a lot to unpack on why I left, more than I can fit here. If you want me to write about it in the next newsletter, hit reply and let me know. I also hired my first full-time employee this month, which I am really, really excited about. Things are moving in the right direction and I am excited for the next chapter.