“CISO” Did Not Exist in 1999
AI will create jobs we can’t imagine yet
In 1999, I was a 23-year-old lawyer walking into my first corporate job at Celotex Corporation. The IT department was one guy. He’d ask me to help him fix the copier because I’d worked as a runner at a law firm and knew my way around a Minolta. That was corporate technology support in the late ’90s. One person, a copier, and a prayer that the internet connection held.
Obviously, it looks a lot different today. A mid-size enterprise has an IT department with network engineers, cybersecurity analysts, cloud architects, data scientists, DevOps teams, compliance specialists, a CTO, and often a CIO reporting directly to the CEO. The title of Chief Information Security Officer didn’t exist in 1995. Neither did “cloud architect.” Or “DevOps engineer.” Or “data scientist.”
None of these jobs were predicted. They grew organically as the technology matured and organizations realized they needed entirely new kinds of expertise to manage what it made possible.
The pattern.
This weekend, Nikki was at a social gathering and ended up in a conversation with a software developer. All she wanted to talk about was how AI is going to ruin everything. Jobs gone. Industry destroyed. The future looked bleak from where she was standing.
It’s hard to blame her because the headlines are relentless, and the perspective is narrow. We’ve spent the past few editions of this newsletter writing about real problems: the one-dimensional worker, the wage paradox, the cultural friction of the two-speed workforce. We’re not pretending those challenges don’t exist.
But we’ve been sure to include what we see as the opportunity this change presents. Every major technology shift has followed the same arc. The technology arrives, and fear follows. People focus on what’s being lost. And then an entire ecosystem of new work grows up around it that nobody saw coming.
The automobile eliminated the horse-drawn carriage industry. It also created mechanics, gas station operators, highway engineers, traffic planners, insurance adjusters, and suburban development. The internet wiped out entire categories of clerical work. It also created web developers, e-commerce managers, digital marketers, cybersecurity professionals, and an infrastructure industry worth trillions.
The new jobs weren’t the old ones dressed up in new language. They were genuinely new. And in most cases, they were more interesting, better paid, and more human than the ones they replaced.
The opportunity
New roles are already forming. Companies are hiring AI governance officers, creating positions for people who design human-AI workflows, and building teams that train AI on organizational context and culture. These roles didn’t exist two years ago.
The IT department in 1998 gave no indication that it would become one of the most critical functions in every enterprise. AI will follow the same path. We just can’t see all of it yet.
The people who will do well in this transition are those who view AI as the early IT professionals did the internet. Not as a threat to their relevance, but as the foundation of an entirely new kind of work that will need their expertise, their judgment, and their willingness to learn.
The organizations that invest in their people right now, that build cultures where growth and adaptability are the expectation, will be the ones that create the jobs we can’t imagine yet.
We’ve seen this story before. And it ends with more opportunity, not less.
Links:
• PwC Global AI Jobs Barometer Job numbers are rising even in highly automatable roles. AI-skilled workers command wage premiums up to 56%.
• BLS: Computer and information technology occupations 317,700 new openings projected each year in computer and IT occupations.
• St. Louis Fed: Tech sector growth IT employment shot up 36% in the 1990s and reached 4.6 million workers by 2015.
• WEF: Invest in the workforce for the AI age 170 million new jobs projected by 2030. 92 million displaced. Net positive, but only if companies invest in people.