The New Math of Work

Most of what you hear about AI and work is framed around loss: jobs going away, skills becoming less relevant, entire industries of work being reshaped. That's possible, but it's not the part that matters most right now.

In Open to Work, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman set out to tell a different story. A clear-eyed one about where the real opportunity is in this moment and what it actually takes to capture it.

The New Math of Work

For a long time, the relationship between effort, expertise and value was stable and legible:

• Develop expertise in a role

• Get better at it over time

• Your value compounds

That's the part that's shifting, and it's shifting faster than most people realize.

When something that used to take an hour now takes ten minutes, you face a choice that didn't exist before. You can use that time to add value and invest in the parts of the work that couldn't be automated in the first place, the work that requires more judgment, more context, more perspectives and more genuine decision-making.

Ryan discusses though those two paths look almost identical at first, over time they lead to very different places in this Open to Work newsletter.

One story in the book is about Jonetta Gresham, a fifty-something nurse turned project manager, who describes herself as the "old dog that learned the new trick." She was, by her own admission, the "hell no to AI" person. Skeptical. Resistant. Shaped by a lifetime of pop culture warnings about machines taking over. Then she was assigned to create a résumé using an AI tool during a workforce training course. She saw the result and thought: "This is me on paper…When you have to change your résumé to fit a role, you know how much work that is? Just to take the skills you've got and fit them into a format that matches the job you're seeking?"

That moment was Jonetta picking which path to go down. By choosing one where she engaged with this new technology, she was able to not just better articulate her skills on her resume but also open up time to learn new skills and go after new opportunities. Read more of Jonetta's story here.

How to Pre-Order Open to Work

Open to Work hits shelves next week. It goes deeper into the new math we've been describing, with the frameworks, stories, and practical tools to help you figure out which parts of your work are worth investing in now. Pre-orders are available now at linkedin.com/opentowork.