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Martijn couldn't think of anyone he knows with strong AI skills who lost their job, even during cuts. If you can automate part of your role, you can take on more, and that makes you harder to replace.
Take data analysts, a role plenty of people are writing off. Martijn sees a different direction: "judgment in the role will be more important." Companies still need analysts, but the job is shifting from dashboards and code to framing the question, directing the tool, and checking what comes back.
For analysts, he predicts two paths. The first is data engineering, because as more people run their own analysis, someone has to build the infrastructure behind it. The second is AI engineering, building the agents and tools everyone else uses. AI engineer roles are up 255% year over year in our State of AI Careers research.
Regardless of role, judging the quality of output is now a valuable skill.
Jonathan's reasoning: the software analysts used to write behaved the same way every time, so you could reason about whether it worked. Modern AI systems don't. Martijn's more direct: understand the concepts underneath, or "you're just going to accept what the model produces."
It's tempting to ship what the model gives you. Spotting what's missing before anyone else does is quickly becoming the skill leaders value most.
We've condensed their session, and highlights from the rest of the day, into a single podcast. Worth an hour while you plot your next move.
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