That meeting you hate may stop AI from stealing your job

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Dan Sirk is a so-called fractional executive – meaning he works as the chief marketing officer for not just one company but two. Simultaneously.

It’s a juggling act made far more manageable by artificial intelligence tools such as Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT.

It used to take Sirk three to six months, or longer, to build a custom website with a team of contractors. Now, it takes him about a month, and he can do it by himself. Drafting a messaging strategy used to take a week.

When I spoke to him in March, he had just finished this task in less than eight hours. Thanks in part to these efficiency gains, Sirk is planning to become the chief marketing officer for a third company in the coming months.

And yet, when I asked if I should extrapolate from recent trends and assume he will add still more companies to his roster in the coming years, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He insisted that three was the outer limit of what he could handle, even with the help of AI.

“There are still human relationships,” he protested. Or to put it more bluntly: there are meetings.

The need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people AI displaces.

Sirk estimates that he already attends 10 meetings in any given week across the two companies. There is a standing meeting with each team of top executives, not to mention a regular one-on-one meeting with each chief executive. There is a meeting with his own direct report and with the head of sales at one of the companies. And there are meetings about specific projects, like an upcoming presentation for one company’s investors.

Joining a third company is likely to increase the volume of meetings 50 per cent. If he became the chief marketing officer for even one more beyond that, Sirk said, he would be in meetings for almost the entire workweek.

Sirk’s experience, while perhaps extreme, reflects the broader impact of AI in the workplace: it is vastly accelerating many of the tasks conducted by white-collar workers and even........

© The Sydney Morning Herald