Three things to do when AI comes for your job

Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.

Your email pings, and there’s a new message waiting for you. It’s from an address called “Company Leadership” that you’ve never seen before. “After careful consideration of our current business needs, we have decided to eliminate your role as part of a broader organisational change. As a result, today is your last working day.”

The message is followed by some generic words about how grateful they are for the “impact you have made during your time with us” and with a click, you’re officially fired.

If that all sounds clinical and robotic, it’s because it is. Shockingly, it’s also the real text of an email received by about 30,000 people just over a week ago who gave years of their life working for technology company Oracle.

The business decision for the mass lay-offs was strategic, not just financial. Oracle posted a 95 per cent jump in net income last quarter, and recently took on an additional $US58 billion ($82.4 billion) in debt to invest heavily in AI infrastructure. Freeing up $US10 billion of human costs will go some way towards paying for their big bet on an automated future.

AI is already transforming our business landscape in many ways. In the last six weeks, high-profile software companies like WiseTech, Block and Atlassian have shed tens of thousands of jobs, all under the guise of AI.

Analyse, with some objectivity, if you need to add any new skills to help you in your next search.

They might feature in the headlines, but the real shifts will happen in the shadows as countless companies follow their lead. There is rarely a straight line connecting the replacement of human jobs with AI, but there certainly are some squiggly ones.

So, what do you do if one day you open your inbox and are informed, in a roundabout way, that AI has come for your job? When that happens, there are three things you should do.

The first is to pause and take your time. Sure, management would like a response back straight away, but you still can take a moment to process it, both emotionally and legally. In the Oracle example, there was no meeting with management or HR to explain the reasoning, just a cold, impersonal email that came from “Oracle Leadership”.

You deserve to know the clear reasons behind any lay-off – especially if it’s a structural displacement beyond your control – so you can craft the story that you’ll tell yourself and future employers.

The second is to analyse, with some objectivity, if you need to add any new skills to help you in your next search. You don’t have to make a full career pivot, but there might be adjacent or complementary areas that can add to what you already know. List out all your existing skills alongside those needed for new roles, find which areas overlap and close the gap with targeted learning.

The third is to meet AI where it is. Remember that this is a technology that’s only been around for a few years, so there are very few deep experts (despite what some might proclaim). The scale of adoption runs from AI-avoiders to AI-experimenters, and you should move closer to the latter to figure out how to best work alongside it.

We are on the precipice of some significant changes, and how many months or years it will take to affect parts of your workplace will depend on your industry, skills and seniority.

And if you zoom out from some of individual cases, there is still room for some cautious optimism. The 2025 World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report predicted that AI would displace more than 90 million jobs around the world, but also had the potential to create 170 million new ones, a net increase of about 80 million jobs.

While you can’t control what emails are going to ping your inbox, you can control what happens when it does. Take your time, analyse yourself and then meet it head-on because one of the fastest paths back to employment will run directly through the technology that displaced you, not around it.

Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com.