I Built the Spreadsheets That AI Now Builds in Minutes

For 12 years, my job was building the kind of spreadsheet an AI now builds in a minute.

Models, forecasts, the careful analysis that sat underneath big decisions. I was good at it. It paid well. And it felt safe, because it was technical, and technical was supposed to be the thing nobody could take from you.

The Headlines Read Differently When You Did the Job

So when I read the news about AI now, I do not read it like a spectator. I read it like someone watching a machine do, in ninety seconds, the thing I spent a decade getting good at.

And what I see worries me. Not because the machine is clever. Because of how quickly the people around it are deciding they no longer need other people.

It Is Not the Jobs You Expected Anymore

For years we were told automation would come for the factory floor and the call centre. Repetitive work. Manual work. The story was always that educated, white-collar, technical jobs were safe.

That story is falling apart.

In the first quarter of this year, the tech industry cut close to eighty thousand jobs, and around half of those were linked to AI. One fintech launched a set of AI tools to take the admin off its finance team. The next day, it let go of around fifty people, many of them in engineering and data.

Consulting firms have started cutting the back-office analyst work, the research and reporting that AI now does in minutes rather than weeks. The CEO of one of the largest AI labs has said the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar roles, and that finance, law and consulting would feel it first.

The junior analyst. The first-year associate. The graduate who did everything right. These were the safe jobs. The ones your parents wanted for you.

And This Is Before the Tools Are Even Switched On

Here is the part that should make you sit up.

Most of this is happening before companies have properly turned the tools on. The version of AI I can run on my own laptop today, with no special access and no corporate budget, already does work that used to need a small team. I am not exaggerating. Tasks that once took me days now take an afternoon.

Now imagine what happens when that becomes normal inside organisations. When the tool is approved and simply expected. When every manager is asked why a function still needs three people instead of one. Most of them will not have a good answer.

That is not a distant future. That is a budget meeting next year.

The Advice Everyone Gives Is Incomplete

The standard response to all this is to reskill. Learn AI. Become the person who uses the tool instead of the person the tool replaces.

It is not bad advice. But it is incomplete, and a little dishonest.

Because the truth is you may not be able to out-run the machine on skill. It learns faster than you. It does not sleep. For a lot of roles, the gap will keep closing no matter how many courses you take. Telling everyone to simply become more skilled is a comforting answer that quietly ignores the maths.

So the real question is not about skill at all.

The Protection Nobody Talks About

What actually protects you is not your skill. It is your position.

I do not mean your job title. I mean the financial position you have built underneath your life. The people who will move through this calmly are not the ones with the cleverest CVs. They are the ones who have a buffer. A runway. Money that is doing a job, so that losing the salary becomes a setback instead of a freefall.

This is the thing nobody posts about, because it is not dramatic. It is boring. It is the unglamorous work of building something behind the income, so the income is not the only thing holding your life up.

I have written before that Dubai gives you the salary, but it does not give you the system. The same is true here. A high income with nothing built behind it is not safety. It just looks like safety until the month it stops.

You Are More Exposed Than Your Title Suggests

Now the uncomfortable test.

If your income stopped this month, how long could your life keep running on what you have already built? Not on a new job. Not on a side hustle you would scramble to start. On what is already there.

For a lot of high earners, the honest answer is weeks. Sometimes days. They have the salary of someone secure and the financial base of someone living payday to payday, only with nicer holidays.

Employment security has always been a bit of an illusion. AI is simply making the illusion harder to ignore. The job was never fully in your control. What you build with what the job pays you is.

What I Actually Tell People

I am not telling you to panic. Panic makes people do reckless things with money, which is the opposite of what this moment asks for.

I am telling you to get honest about your exposure, and then do something about it. Build the base. Know your number. Bring your fixed costs down so your life does not assume the salary will arrive forever. Give yourself enough runway that a layoff becomes a problem you solve over months, not a crisis you face in days. When the plan holds, the fear has somewhere to go.

None of that requires you to predict the future. It just requires you to stop betting your whole life on a single source of income you do not control.

I cannot tell you whether AI will come for your specific role. Nobody can. But I can tell you that the people who sleep at night through all of this are not the ones who feel the safest. They are the ones who are actually prepared.

That is a choice you can still make. The machine has not taken that one yet.

You cannot control whether the machine takes your job. You can control whether losing it takes everything else with it.