I have spent my career infatuated with the next thing.
Building and exiting Boxever (acquired by Sitecore), where we helped world-class brands through the first real wave of big-data personalisation and AI. Putting worker training and compliance into people's pockets at HSI Skillko. Now co-founding Overpath. The obsession has not changed.
I have worked through every major inflection point of the last two decades. Cycling through floppy disks to load a single programme. The screech of a 56k modem and the sense that the internet was a new dimension. Watching the cloud turn hardware into air. Mobile putting the world in a pocket.
Every time, the headlines arrived as a mix of utopian promise and dystopian dread. And every time, the same thing happened underneath the noise. The technology recalibrated how we worked and what we valued. It did not remove the human from the picture.
I still love the technology. I love more what it does for us - how it acts as a lever that lets us lift far more than our own weight.
This wave asks a harder question. Is AI another lever, or the first technology that replaces the person holding it?
Before answering that, it is worth being precise about what is at stake.
There is a modern habit of treating work as a transaction. Hours in, money out. I disagree with that completely. Work is a cornerstone of the human experience. It is where most of us find identity and purpose.
I have always been drawn to Ikigai, the Japanese idea of a reason for being - the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. For nearly everyone I know, the workplace is the main arena where that intersection actually happens.
It is also where we find community. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of happiness we have, keeps landing on the same finding: relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term health and contentment. A large share of those relationships get forged at work. McKinsey's research on purpose points in the same direction.
Take work away, or strip the personality out of it, and the loss is not measured in productivity. It is the social glue.
Work has given me a mountain to climb and a team to climb it with. Dave Kelliher and Alan Dunne at Datalex gave me the early learnings that shaped a whole trajectory. Dave O'Flanagan and Alan Giles and I spent a decade building and selling Boxever. Brendan Maloney and Liam Brennan and I grew a flourishing tech business organically out of the West of Ireland. Now Ross and I are building Overpath. Those people, and many more I have no room to name, have defined me.
So the conversation about AI and jobs is bigger than tasks. It reaches into the fabric of belonging.
I read the clickbait. The end of the white-collar worker.
Then I talk to friends of mine (people I consider significantly smarter than me) and some of them genuinely believe in a jobless future. They point to the speed of displacement and to how well these models now reason and create.
The concern is serious. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs work set 69 million new roles against 83 million displaced by 2027. A net loss of 14 million. That number deserves respect rather than a quick counter-argument.
Two decades in this industry taught me a pattern anyway. We overestimate displacement and underestimate evolution.
Think about the mid-nineties panic that electronic mail and digital databases would empty the office. Remove the paper, the filing, the physical hand-offs, and what would be left for people to do?
The internet exploded work. It cleared out the low-value movement of paper so we could absorb a hundredfold increase in information and complexity. It let a small team in Dublin compete with a giant in New York.
Generative AI is the next phase of the same liberation. The fear today is the 1995 fear. The old tasks are visibly disappearing. The complex new world that this efficiency creates is not visible yet.
For decades we have asked humans to behave like machines. Data entry. Summarising long threads. Keeping rigid CRM fields current. It is workflow debt, and it drains the energy people should be spending on judgement.
That is the work generative AI takes.
The evidence is early and consistent. MIT and Stanford researchers found that access to generative AI raised worker productivity by around 14%, with the largest gains among less experienced workers. Goldman Sachs put 300 million jobs in the zone of exposure and concluded that complement is more likely than replacement, because most roles are only partially exposed. On that reading, keeping a human in the loop is a performance requirement before it is a safety feature.
Generative AI is the first technology capable of saying: I will handle the machine work. Go back to being a human.
Here is the shift I care about most, and the reason I am building what I am building.
The internet connected us to information. AI connects us to execution.
Every organisation I have worked in knew more than it could act on. The playbook existed. The methodology was trained. The data sat in the CRM. And the gap between what the company knew and what any individual did on a Tuesday afternoon stayed open.
Knowledge was never the constraint. The gap is structural, and nothing in the stack was built to close it. The CRM records what happened. Intelligence platforms analyse what it means. Neither one changes what happens next.
That is the layer we are building at Overpath. An execution layer for revenue teams - teammates that carry the deal context, hold the methodology, and show up at the moment the work actually gets done.
The machine work leaves. Judgement, relationships, and the reason people get out of bed stay exactly where they are.
The enterprise moves from a run state to a change state. Less time feeding the database. More time interpreting the story the data is telling.
We are in the forming stage of that era and it is messy. The internet, the cloud and mobile all taught me the same thing. Technology expands the theatre we play in.
Work will stay important. We will always need a reason to get up and a group to belong to.
AI isn't the mountain. It's a better pair of boots for the climb.