I was at an OpenAI onsite event last week. I’ve been working with their marketing team for about six months now and this was our first in-person business review.
I signed an NDA so I can’t get into specifics. But the scope of what’s being planned genuinely surprised me. Think deep automation, agentic workflows, entire parts of the marketing function being handed off to AI.
I do a lot of these business reviews with large orgs and the direction is consistent across all of them. AI is getting woven into how work gets done at every level, across every function, faster than most people sense from the outside. I have a pretty good front row seat to it at this point.
Which is why when Sol’s story came through for the Humans of GradSimple series, a lot of what she shared hit differently.
Sol spent five years building a career in tech marketing. Started from nothing during COVID, taught herself SEO, worked her way up to marketing manager at an IT staffing company. By every measure she was doing well. And then one day her company put a slide in front of the team that said something along the lines of your role won’t become obsolete if you use AI, but it will if you don’t.
She said that was the moment she realized she was no longer aligned with where things were going.
I think about that slide a lot. Because it’s the most honest version of something I keep seeing from inside these organizations. It’s not a threat. It’s just a fact getting stated out loud, maybe for the first time, in a room full of people who had been quietly sensing it for a while.
And most importantly, that slide was right.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, if your goal is to build a career and put your degree to use, adapting isn’t optional. That’s not doom and gloom, it’s just what I keep seeing confirmed across hundreds of exec conversations this year and from the graduates we talk to through Humans of GradSimple.
The people who are figuring out how to work with AI are pulling far ahead. Different industries are moving at different speeds, sure, but the direction is the same across all of them.
But here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.
If the goal isn’t climbing inside someone else’s org but building something of your own, this is genuinely one of the best moments in history to do that.
Things that used to require a whole team, budget, and infrastructure, can be done yourself now. The barrier to building something on your own terms has never been lower.
Sol is kind of doing exactly that. Consulting, building her own thing, applying to MFA programs. She read the situation and chose to move toward what she actually wanted.
However this shakes out for you, the worst move is probably just waiting to see if it catches up to your industry.
It will. The better question is what you’ll do about it before it does.
P.S. Did you know, GradSimple Insiders is a Career Intelligence membership for early professionals who are unsure what to do next and want to avoid wasting years on the wrong path?
We break down real hiring data and job market trends so you can see which industries are actually in demand, which industries are slowing down, and whether a career path is worth pursuing before making a long-term decision.
