I Promoted AI for Years and Automated Myself Out of a Job

I had to have known this moment would come. As a technology evangelist, I’d spent years minimizing AI’s potential to destroy jobs. Every paper I wrote about AI and its practical cousin, Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—which uses software robots to accomplish “thinking tasks” like reading emails—boasted that the software would liberate employees from drudgery and enable them “to do more meaningful work,” or words to that effect.

But now, the very technology that I helped promote has put me out of the job.

I’ve been evangelizing the business benefits of enterprise technology for more than two decades, first as a marketing executive and more recently as a freelance writer. At IBM, I was known as a “Software Evangelist,” and my work always had me delivering secular sermons about the redemptive potential of the latest computer program or hardware.

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