Career progression used to look like a pyramid. A wide base of entry level roles — data entry, basic analysis, first line support, junior everything — feeding upward into a narrower set of senior positions. The structure made sense because you needed volume at the bottom to produce quality at the top. Junior people did the foundational work. Senior people made the decisions.

That structure is breaking, thanks to AI.

AI is absorbing the base faster than most people expected. Not just because companies sat in boardrooms and decided to eliminate jobs - though we can argue every CEO’s desire is to eliminate as much as possible to deliver the maximum value. But because the economics became impossible to ignore. Why maintain a team of five analysts producing weekly reports when a well configured AI pipeline produces the same output in minutes and flags anomalies automatically? Why keep a tier one support function when a properly grounded AI agent resolves 70% of tickets without human involvement?

My intention is not to be the designated carrier of bad news but to highlight the shift and make it clear that as jobs are being eliminated, more are created.

In essence, the pyramid is not collapsing. It is reshaping into a diamond.

The bottom is contracting. The middle is expanding. And an entirely new layer is forming at the top that did not exist five years ago — roles that require humans to design, oversee, evaluate, and improve the AI systems doing the work below them.

This is not a future prediction. It is already happening inside the organizations I work with.

What does this mean practically?

The people most at risk are not the least skilled. They are the people whose entire value sits in executing repeatable tasks at volume. The people best positioned are the ones who understand both the domain and the systems now automating it. The intersection of business context and technical fluency is where the new middle of the diamond lives.

The entry point into a career is not disappearing. It is moving. You no longer enter by doing the basic work. You enter by understanding the systems doing it and knowing how to configure, improve, and manage them.

The opportunity is the same size it has always been. The path into it is completely different.

If you are early in your career, stop optimizing for the pyramid. Start building for the diamond. The skills that matter now are not the ones that make you good at executing tasks. They are the ones that make you good at designing systems that execute tasks at scale.

That is where the roles are going. That is where the income is going. That is where the career progression now lives.

That’s for all today and see you in the next one.

One more thing, What’s one thing you would do going forward to stay prepared? Let me know by replying to this email or commenting below.