There are five trends reshaping how work will happen over the next decade: the leverage of artificial intelligence, the demise of credentialism, the globally-distributed team and flexible work, the rise of personal brands and productization of the self, and the democratization of tools and tech.
1. The leverage of artificial intelligence.
AI is the first tool in history that lets a solo operator perform like a full team.
The jobs disappearing first are the mechanical ones: top-funnel writing, basic design, routine research, admin tasks. Anything that scales by volume is already owned by machines.
The old way to get ahead was credentials and courses and degrees and certifications (the next point).
Today the advantage goes to the person who can orchestrate AI like an army.
You either direct the intelligence or you get replaced by the people who do.
The next decade will multiply this leverage.
Every device, every space, every workflow will be wired with ambient intelligence. Homes, wearables, vehicles, workplaces, all pulling in data and acting on it before you ask.
Tasks that used to burn physical or cognitive energy will collapse to thought-level actions.
Quick message. Drafted. Cursor. Moved. Planning. Visualized. A full workspace materializes in front of you like a holographic command center.
These ideas used to feel like sci-fi. They are now product roadmaps. The distance between imagination and implementation is shrinking at hyper speed..
The operator who learns to wield this leverage gets exponential output.
2. The demise of credentialism.
Your competition is no longer limited to your location. Now you’re competing with eight billion people.
The bar to break through has been raised a hundred-thousand fold compared to when I began my career. Degrees, alma maters, and “years of experience” no longer matter.
Against the backdrop of growing charlatanism in the online guru space and a realization among enterprises in the professional world that college degrees do not equal ability to execute, all that really matters is the ability to provide tangible results.
Startups being driven by millennials could care less where you went to school. All they want to know is “what can you do for me now?”
That’s all that matters.
3. The globally-distributed team and flexible work.
I’ve worked as a digital nomad in Costa Rica, Tulum, Hawaii, Amsterdam, and the UAE.
I’m more invigorated and more creative abroad than at home – or certainly shackled to an office where my presence is required 5 days per week.
The desire for remote work, location freedom, and flexible schedules is growing.
Gen X and Z knowledge workers are awake to the reality that you don’t need to be in an office to be productive.
And if you’re an employer, who says the best person for the job is in your city, or would be willing to relocate? To require employees to be on-prem is to sabotage your ability to get the best talent.
As an employer, you just have a larger surface area when you build a remote team.
The only variable is whether your trust the people you hire to get work done.
And f*ck the 9-to-5 schedule. I don’t care when, where, or how my team gets their work done. As long as they get it done – do it however you want to!
The weekend is losing its allure as assumed non-work time; days are meshing together.
Every day is the same, for me. I work seven days per week, mixing in R&R as needed.
The lines between work and pleasure are dissipating. These are net positive changes.
4. Personal brands and productization of the self.
The personal brand is the new resume for anyone who knows what’s what.
If you don’t have one, it’s a yellow flag (to potential clients, partners, or savvy employers).
The digital marketplace is over-saturated with cheap content, so a premium goes to the people providing real value for a specific audience who needs what they share.
I also think the majority of influencers, subject matter experts, and executives will take on short-term or part-time projects where they take on gigs in exchange for a significant sum.
Here, they’re renting out their expertise more than they are their time, being paid to accelerate outcomes not based on what they do, but who they are and the digital leverage they carry.
Now, it’s not so much about what you do but who you are.
I failed at my first online business (a Kangen water franchise).
I peddled the product (I tried to take it onto my New Earth Knowledge brand) but I didn’t become it. I didn’t redefine my entire personal brand as “The new earth Kangen water guy.” That’s what it would have taken.
In the next ten years, everyone will have a namesake podcast just in the same way everyone has their own Instagram or TikTok account today.
We’ll start to see the gig economy transfer over into the corporate world and personal brands will be the key point of distinction as people decide who they want to bring in for short-term stints or fractional roles.
5. The democratization of tools and tech.
You used to need a team, a budget, and a CTO to ship anything meaningful. Now a kid with a laptop and an internet connection can spin up an entire stack before lunch. The walls around technology are collapsing. What used to require capital now requires curiosity.
Every problem has a point tool.
Workflow stacks balloon past 50 tools without anyone blinking. And the cost of experimentation is almost free.
This creates a different kind of landscape. Software is no longer a moat.
Your user base is the moat. Your relationship with them is the moat. Their trust, their switching cost, their emotional attachment to your product.
No code and low code have lowered the barrier of entry so far that ideas compete on execution velocity. Whoever ships most often, learns fastest. Whoever learns fastest captures the surface area.
AI tools will keep collapsing the gap between idea and implementation. What used to take a quarter now takes a weekend.
Here’s the deal now:
- Point tools cover everything you can imagine.
- People are comfortable running stacks of 50 tools.
- Price compression makes it cheap to test anything.
- Moats come from users, loyalty, and community, not the codebase.
- No code and low code remove 90 percent of the friction for non-technical founders.
Against the backdrop of all these trends coming together, how do you break through to capture the attention of people whose money you can take? (No one makes money, you take it from other people).
The way to win is to push on both ends of the shaft: to make it impossible to say no to your proposition or product, and to de-risk to an insane degree for your counterpart.
- If you’re looking for a job, proactively provide a free audit pre-interview.
- Use Spokeo to look up the hiring manager and send them a direct mailer with your CV and a growth audit.
- Offer to work for free on a 30-day probationary period.
- Undercut the competition by lowballing the listed salary range by 20%, then do more for less to protect your job.
- Eliminate the need to hop on a sales call to get started using a product-led sales (free trial) approach.
- Propose net-60 pay terms with a no-questions-asked 110% money-back guarantee against any dissatisfaction.
- Rewrite their website, onboarding, or outreach sequence for free, as a show of force.
This is how you engineer inevitability.
Most people try to be impressive. Make yourself indispensable instead.