Last week, I came across a really interesting chart at an MIT event and thought it was worth sharing. The chart comes from the @nberpubs working paper Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market. It looks at how exposed different jobs are to AI across wage levels. The general pattern is quite clear: the higher the salary, the more exposed the job tends to be to AI. But once you get to roughly the top 10% of earners, the curve starts to come down. One important clarification: “AI exposure” does not mean the chance of being replaced by AI. It is more about how much of a job could be changed, supported or automated by AI. Still, the chart made me think about a very practical question: Why are so many well-paid knowledge jobs highly exposed to AI, while the small group of people at the very top may actually be harder to replace? My view is that the higher you go, the less your value comes from simply doing tasks faster. It increasingly comes from whether you can: 👉 Ask the questions that really matter 👉 Make decisions with incomplete information 👉 Align different teams, resouraces and interests 👉 Take responsibility in critical situations 👉 Earn trust and get people to follow a direction For senior leaders, I think the AI era requires a few important shifts. 1️⃣ Move from high-level executor to organizational orchestrator AI and your team can both become part of your execution system. A leader’s value is not in personally completing every task. It is in defining the right problems, setting priorities, spotting risks and turning scattered outputs into something that creates real business value. 2️⃣ Build a deeper understanding of people and organizations AI has access to huge amounts of public knowledge, but it does not truly understand the internal culture, history, trust and power dynamics of a specific organization. It may not know what the board is really worried about. It may not understand what a client wants but has not said. And it may not see why a solution that looks completely logical on paper simply will not work inside a particular company. That kind of judgment comes from years of real negotiation, collaboration, conflict and crisis management. 3️⃣ Use AI to expand your management capacity A lot of a manager’s time used to be spent on reporting, communication, corrections and repetitive coordination. As AI takes on more basic analysis, information processing and workflow tasks, leaders can oversee more projects, understand more complex data and spend more time on the decisions that actually matter. A leader who uses AI well may eventually be able to manage a scale of business that previously required an entire small division. 4️⃣ Strengthen the abilities AI can support, but cannot truly own Judgment, empathy, persuasion, trust and leadership will become even more important. As more work becomes automated, genuine human connection may become more valuable, not less. When teams are dealing with uncertainty caused by AI, they need more than efficiency tools. They need someone who can explain the direction, build confidence and lead people forward together. That human side of leadership is still very difficult to automate. The more I think about it, the more I believe that being “irreplaceable” in the AI era is not about doing the same work faster than a machine. It is about being able to do what a machine cannot do on its own: 👉 Understand complex people, make sense of an uncertain reality, and lead others toward a future where there is no standard answer.