Category: AI, Automation & More

Work, Automation, and the Fiction of Workforce Demand

The Vacancy Mirage and Labor’s Future

Reports out of the Netherlands keep repeating a familiar refrain: workforce shortages, desperate employers, record open vacancies. Peel back the headline and a different story emerges—one calibrated for this moment of accelerated automation. The jobs calling out for bodies often belong to professions already in AI’s crosshairs: administrative staff, support desks, operational roles, clerical pipeline work. Leadership’s rallying cry to “fill the gaps” does not signal stability for those entrenched in roles that digital agents and process automations are poised to swallow whole.

Ignore this shift at your peril. Corporations, banks, hospital systems, care facilities—logically the last bastions for hands-on labor—now move quietly but decisively towards automating every repeatable process. They do it not for novelty but under the relentless arithmetic of cost-reduction and efficiency. The jobs that soak up time zones, perform high-volume but rote interactions, produce records nobody reads: these wither first.

AI, Data, and Power: Uncomfortable Arithmetic

The World Economic Forum said it openly: by 2030, any employer not building with AI at the core is building nothing. Employees must work with AI modules, design new workflows, or exit. Artists, founders, directors—those leading with creative solution based thinking—already grasp that AI’s appetite for data means every organization is swiftly becoming a data factory. Not gold, but data: harvested, monetized, fed into models that shape everything from funding cycles to the delivery of culture. The paradigm shift is not only who produces but who holds the power to profit from dataset economies.

Who is hiring? Look at the job boards. Project managers, product leaders—roles tasked with wrangling data, distilling trends, feeding the loop of product iteration and monetization. These jobs remain because they hold both a critical thinking edge and a proximity to organizational decision-making. They cannot be code-switched or scripted away; their job is to interpret the numbers, predict the human, secure the revenue stream. Anything under that bar—anything repetitive, predictable—faces erasure or export.

Outsourcing Human Contact: The Geography of Deskilling

Global wage arbitrage continues to redraw the boundaries of labor. When companies bother to “retain human interaction,” they simply shift support offices from high-cost economies to wherever labor is cheapest. Want real evidence? Try buying a Dutch-made T-shirt, or an American one. The production left years ago; only the story of prosperity remains. Western economies may wax poetic about “reshoring” and returning jobs, but logistical and wage realities erase those fantasies. For cultural leaders and artists, this means wrestling with infrastructure that will never again be local by default.

The delusion that AI and productivity gains purely empower ignores the core logic: every system designed for profit will relentlessly seek to deskill, automate, outsource. The window for those without adaptive mindset work is closing faster than most admit—with a brutal swiftness for anyone clinging to the routines of the 20th century. That’s not fear-mongering; that’s arithmetic.

Critical Preparation: Mindset Audits and Relentless Adaptation

The artist, founder, or director who hesitates—waiting for systems to stand still while they recalibrate—already lags. The productive question is not “if” the world changes, but which skills increase one’s competitive advantage in a system hellbent on both creative and economic consolidation. Waiting is a luxury past generations may have enjoyed at the onset of mass computing or mechanization. Today, refusal to audit mindset or resist shifting skillsets is less nostalgia and more abdication—a choice to exit relevancy by inertia.

It’s lazy, not for want of intelligence or curiosity, but for persisting in the myth that inherited routines retain value. You blink, and your labor’s context closes around you.

Practical Tool: The “Relocation Audit” Framework

Block one hour this week. List every skill or routine you offer—sectioned into “Automatable,” “Location-Transferable,” and “Interpretive/Creative.” Now, scan your nearest sector for live vacancies: what’s automating, what’s being offshored, what’s irreplaceable? Draft a minimum of two pathways to migrate your creative labor from “Automatable” to “Interpretive.” Treat this as an annual, not one-off, audit.

Critical creative solution based thinking starts from the facts—and demands structure, not comfort.

Question for Reflection

If a system rewards only those whose skills can’t be automated or outsourced, what structures or practices—old or new—stand between creative labor and disposability, and do you trust them to protect you?

1 August 2025
A Paradigm Shift in Safety: What Founders and Directors Must Now See Clearly
Standard Operating Procedures Are on the Chopping Block

For artists, cultural founders, directors, and creative leaders invested in systems-based thinking, a relentless reality sits at the threshold: protocols you built careers upon—SOPs, predictable hierarchies, inherited routines—face replacement by automations that don’t sleep, complain, or unionize. The creative sectors have long enjoyed a buffer of complexity, a sense that their labor exists outside mechanization’s grasp. But artificial intelligence, now deployed with reckless capital backing and surprising sophistication, is not respecting those old boundaries.

The historical precedent is clear: sectors often insulated from efficiency drives—curation, project management, arts administration, HR, even programming of public experiences—are getting their workflows absorbed by AI agents and automation flows on platforms like Make and n8n. This isn’t a distant threat; it’s already the status quo in finance, health, logistics, and insurance. The same logic is coming for the galleries, the performance spaces, the cultural labs, and all the standard administrative scaffolding supporting them.

Who Gets Replaced—and How the New Competition Looks

This shift shreds a generations-old conception of job security. For women, particularly those shaped by norms promising safety for skilled, diligent, procedural work, this moment forces a candid reckoning. Many founders and directors have internalized promises: stable procedures equal employability; creativity is immune to automation; pay your dues and the system pays you back.

Those assumptions are obsolete. The job market no longer pits applicants against each other based on credentialism or years clocked in. Today, you compete with workers who not only wield creative thinking but also implement, orchestrate, and even build the automation tools that neutralize routine. These individuals use associative intelligence, not only to execute on vision but to generate new flows of labor, product, or service—because data, not tradition, is now sovereign.

Founders who grew their infrastructure around predictability must now see roles and obligations as provisional, subject to challenge by agents more tireless, less sentimental, and far cheaper. This demands a mindset shift: from defending territory within a fixed operation, to constructing adaptable architectures where creative problem solvers thrive and proliferate.

Capital, Power, and the Myth of Provision

Let’s make the unspoken explicit: for many, especially women, beliefs about labor intersect fundamentally with beliefs about provision, both personal and institutional. Safety—whether via secure jobs, reliable leaders, or even the expectation of external providers (spouses, boards, patrons)—has fed the illusion of continuity. Some harbor the fantasy of a “sugar daddy” solution, be it a person or a patronizing institution, underwriting their work in perpetuity.

AI erodes not only the labor market’s practical guarantees, but the emotional contracts tying identity to work. When both partners, or both director and deputy, discover their functions replicable by automation, the fiction of external provision collapses. If safety is the baseline expectation anchoring strategic choices, now is the moment to unsettle that comfort. Where does agency reside, when the system quietly reconfigures value and attention flows?

Frameworks for the Next Movement: What Powers Survival and Influence Now

To build resilient, forward-strategic institutions or practices, founders and leaders must interrogate three domains without sentimentality:
- Which of your current workflows exist due to inertia rather than necessity?
- What skills or creative processes feel irreplaceable—are they, or just unchallenged?
- Where, in daily operations, is AI already present but underestimated?
Surface-level roles are thinning. Influence accrues to those who architect modular, adaptive systems—those who read labor trends as signals to complement or supplant, upgrading their own practices before forced by obsolescence. For founders and directors, this means trading old assurances for frameworks that reward critical, anticipatory, cross-disciplinary solution building.

Practical takeaway for your next session or team meeting:

The Substitution-Complement-Upgrade Worksheet
- List all key tasks you own or oversee.
- For each, mark: S (substitute by automation), C (complement with human creativity), U (upgrade to a novel, AI-enabled approach).
- Name the implicit power dynamic: Who loses power if this shifts? Who gains influence?
Repeat quarterly. Notice which categories expand and contract. Lead with the shifts, not with nostalgia.

Mindset Over Method—The New Status Quo

Those who thrive now will be creatives operating outside conventional permission; they will prototype, implement, and question ahead of the system, not while awaiting its incentives. If your business or institution still runs on “this is how it’s always been,” ask: Who does this habit serve? And what does it cost to stay loyal to it as the context mutates?

There will be fewer external guarantees; self-provisioning, at the institutional and personal level, must adapt accordingly. Building infrastructure remains the work—but the shape, tempo, and logic of that infrastructure demand creative, solution-based, critical thinking now, not another round of credentialist gatekeeping.

Journal Prompt

When does your attachment to “security” serve your work—and when does it shield you from building structures that are robust, adaptive, and truly future-facing?
1 August 2025
Intelligence Is Now the New Gold: Steering Artistic Labor in the Age of AI Extraction

The Link in the Bio Is Not a Suggestion—It’s the Threshold

Founders, directors, and leaders who work from creative solution based thinking understand this already: the series does not resolve itself here. The practical information—layered, sequenced to reduce overwhelm, constructed for real development—sits behind a simple boundary: the link in the bio. This is not a casual gate. It signals a shift from “information as ambient resource” to “intelligence as guarded asset.” Success is now authored individually. No Rembrandt, no cause, no heritage house or luxury label will syndicate your achievement for you. The trail is yours to set, but the portal is priced and protected.

This boundary setting is as structural as it is symbolic. It moves beyond ego or scarcity; it addresses the core reality facing artists and creative leaders: when information migrates behind paywalls, it’s because extraction has become the norm, not the risk.

Platform Capitalism, Forced Transparency, and the AI Hunger

Let’s name the system: Social platforms commodify intellect, labor, and process by integrating AI modules that track, analyze, and mimic. This is no longer abstract—AI is not limited to logistics or finance sectors; it festers now at the core of creative, cultural, and artistic domains. Each prompt, every image, the entire narrative output—all are fuel for the ravenous model.

Consent is a fiction in this context. You might believe you retain control over your creative intelligence, but without real-time digital safeguarding, it trains the next module. Redistribution comes without credit, compensation, royalties, or even acknowledgment—erasing the notion of intellectual property for artists and founders alike. By participating, you feed a pipeline that profits others, not the originator.

The economic critique is direct: If you believe tuition for “official” creative education will secure your advancement, prepare for higher barriers, steeper costs, and diminishing practical returns. On the other side, those who depend on free-flowing information from open creative communities risk watching those wells run dry as the most valuable knowledge migrates away from surveillance infrastructures. A new stratification unfolds, separating passive consumers from engaged contributors.

Gatekeeping as Resistance, not Exclusion

When you witness the rise of password protection and paid entry, do not mistake this for universal greed. Gatekeeping is increasingly a defense against creative extraction—a refusal to let the unique intelligence of directors, artists, and culture founders become mere fodder for corporate algorithms. The value creation is explicit: your mindset, honed by multiple perspectives and organized around discernment, is what AI seeks to imitate—yet cannot originate.

The critical move is to shift from complaint to conscious participation. Every community that charges for access negotiates two things at once: the sustainability of its resource pool, and the integrity of the information ecosystem. The transition from hopelessness—‘why does everything cost now’—to structural thinking requires creative leaders to treat their own intelligence as the rare input it is, refusing to offer it free to surveillance systems that convert it into scalable profits.

To pay for real, context-specific intelligence is now to hold ground against extraction. To withhold, or strategically share only within communities that honor creative labor, is to resist the reduction of artistry to anonymous training data.

Practical Framework: The Intelligence Boundary Audit

A tool for founders, leaders, and directors: At the end of each week, audit your digital trail and creative outputs. Identify where your intelligence—strategies, methodologies, peer responses—has moved into open channels. Did you receive substantive, equitable value in return (money, access, reciprocal insight)? Where did extraction outpace exchange?

Next, define three boundaries: what stays public, what enters trusted networks, and what is kept for paid enclaves or protected portfolios. Reroute your labor consciously. Test subscription communities now, while access is affordable, but interrogate their gatekeeping logic—demand clarity on value, governance, and redistribution. Treat your creative intelligence not as an infinite well, but as the gold others seek to mine. Make every transaction intentional.

The Next Paradigm Shift

Intelligence has become the new currency, outpacing oil or traditional capital. Every founder, leader, and artist is now tasked with examining not merely their output, but the systems that surround its distribution. Question not only how your work circulates, but for whose profit and purpose.

Before you invest effort—before you freely educate the next wave of platform modules—ask yourself daily: What structural benefit accrues to you, your peers, your communities? Think not only in the cost of euros or dollars, but of authority, authorship, and creative autonomy. And when the temptation arises to pay inflated sums for proximity to supposed prestige, while neglecting the slow stewardship of your own process, recognize which paradigm you reinforce.

Critical Reflection

How might we collectively redefine the value of creative labor so that intelligence is not surrendered to platforms, but circulates purposefully—generating equity for artists, founders, and leaders who think systemically?

1 August 2025
Who Wins When AI Is the New Boss?
Contesting the Arena: Power, Labor, and the Illusion of Competition

It’s damn hard to compete with tech businesses. Let’s state the truth up front—any founder or director who believes they’re going toe-to-toe with entities like OpenAI. The resources, the data, the capital, the teams—they’re playing a very different game. Most of us build with what’s in our pockets and heads. So, who wins? Gary Vee has been circling this question, and while I don’t agree with everything he drops, a good chunk of his perspective lands tight on the nail.

Big players leverage scale and systems in a way most smaller organizations, collectives, or individual artists never will. Once OpenAI or Google adopts a technology, the definition of intellectual labor changes, the meaning of “property” shifts, and the workflows in creative sectors—the supposed “safe” zones away from automation—get upended overnight. There is almost a fatalism to it: do you keep fighting in a game where the rules change mid-play? Yet that’s the old paradigm talking: power accumulates upward, risk gets distributed downward, everyone dutifully performs under the idea that a sufficiently unique logo separates you from annihilation.

Brand Out—Personal In: Survival Isn’t a Hashtag

Gary Vee insists on building a personal brand, but the term itself is misleading. No one buys because you chose cyan blue for your banners. At its core, a brand is a structure—a system of values, vision, mission, added value, delivery, presence. It’s not trivial: it’s the philosophy that underpins every decision when institutions, labor, and revenue are up for renegotiation.

For directors and artists alike, this means literal forward thinking: Which philosophy sits at the heart of your work? What solution-based thinking do you bring to increasingly mechanized environments? That’s a better brand than any clever trademark. It’s not about signaling uniqueness, but about clarity—seeing exactly what you bring to the table as a creative leader, and knowing how to interpret, monetize, and communicate that without apology or need for permission.

Labor Redefined: From Factory Mindset to Creative Autonomy

Anyone waiting for validation from dominant systems will soon meet disappointment. The paradigm shift is real: across sectors, executives and founders repeat the script of ‘AI-first’ environments. Tackle the truth—whenever you hear “AI is improving our process,” it’s code for labor being absorbed, restructured, or made obsolete. What we previously called “training” in a corporate sense? Today, it is resource transfer (your know-how, your style, your problem-solving) from humans into automated agents.

So decide: do you play victim under the bulldozer, repeating the familiar chorus that “nobody cares” about your history, your previous contributions, or your job security? Or do you pivot? The aim for businesses is unchanged—profit sits at the core. Creative founders and directors must ask: how does my solution-based practice generate profit—for me, my communities, my mission—when the rules flex without notice?

Tool: The Inventory of Offerings

Practicality matters. Here’s something to adapt—an inventory exercise that applies regardless of scale:
- Philosophy Audit: Write down, in plain language, the philosophy governing your organization or practice. Cut the jargon.
- Value Translation: Take each element—vision, mission, style, process—and translate it into direct value for your audience. How does it solve real needs, or transform experiences?
- Monetization Pathway: Map out at least two routes through which this translated value could drive profit, not only through art sales but workshops, collaborations, limited-use licenses, or unique digital experiences. Think infrastructure, not one-off wins.
This exercise shifts mindset from reactive (“Will AI steal my job?”) to generative (“Where does my value originate, and how shall I structure it for autonomy?”).

Mindset, Power, and Moving Past the Enemy Narrative

AI isn’t the enemy: the real adversary is a mindset hung up on loss and scarcity. Scarcity of platform, of attention, of meaningful income. It’s the paradigm that convinces artists and creative founders their survival rests on guarding tradition tight or railing against technology. This thinking dissipates creative autonomy and muddies decision-making.

In most sectors, this shift won’t arrive as a tidal wave—it’ll seep through interfaces, contracts, behaviors. The last ones in are those who refuse to question whether their systems reflect their values or just inherited templates.

You don’t need OpenAI’s payroll or Altman’s reach to reset the balance. What matters now is honest recognition of where your personal—and institutional—value originates, and a willingness to shape systems around that understanding, not the other way around.

Question for Reflection

Whose values are truly embedded in the infrastructures you build: yours, or those of institutions whose incentives are out of step with your vision of creative labor?
31 July 2025