How to Become Un-Fireable in the Next 5 Years.
My verdict, after watching this from the consulting seat.
TLDR;
You can’t be fired if you’re the owner. Ownership is the ultimate job security.
If you won’t own, be part of the AI machine itself: the infrastructure everyone depends on.
If neither, be gloriously boring. Robot pizza has existed for years. We still choose humans.
The worst position: replaceable digital work in the middle. That’s where the compression happens.
A question I keep getting - from clients, from friends, lately even from family members who used to think my job was “something with PowerPoint” - is some version of: how do I make sure I still have a job in five years?
It’s a fair question. Layoffs keep making headlines, AI tools keep getting better, and the honest answer most people get is a shrug plus “learn AI, I guess.”
I’ve spent over fifteen years consulting for companies of very different shapes, and the last few years watching AI reshuffle who’s safe and who’s nervous. So let me give you my actual verdict instead of a shrug. There are three positions that make you extremely hard to remove from the economy. Everything else is negotiable.
The first, and it’s not close: ownership.
An employee, no matter how skilled, sits inside someone else’s spreadsheet. When that spreadsheet needs to shrink, skill only decides the order of the cuts, not whether they happen. An owner cannot be laid off from their own company. The business can struggle, sure - but nobody walks into your office and takes your equity away because a tool got cheaper.
This is why I tell people the goal isn’t to become the most impressive person in the building. It’s to have your name on the building, even if the building is small. A tiny business you own beats a fancy title you rent. Titles are borrowed. Ownership is yours until you sell it.
And no, this doesn’t mean everyone should quit tomorrow and become a founder. Ownership comes in sizes. A side business. A stake in the company you work for. A client base that follows you, not your employer. The direction matters more than the size - every year, own slightly more of what feeds you.
The second position: be part of the AI system itself.
If a wave is coming, the people who don’t drown are the ones selling surfboards. Chips, data centers, energy, the physical and technical plumbing underneath all of this - that layer is where the money is currently flooding, and it’s the layer that gets *more* necessary as AI grows, not less. AI can write your emails. It cannot manufacture the hardware it runs on without an enormous human industry behind it.
You don’t need to be a chip engineer, either. That whole system needs finance people, operations people, logistics, sales, construction. Being adjacent to the machine is nearly as safe as building it.
And the third position - my favorite, because it sounds like a joke and isn’t: be very boring.
Restaurants. Cafés. Bakeries. The businesses nobody puts in a keynote.
Here’s the thing people miss: robot-made pizza is not science fiction. It has existed for years. Machines can knead, top, and bake. And yet, when you walk down any street in any city, where’s the line? In front of the place where a human is doing the work.
We don’t choose the café for the technical quality of the coffee extraction. We choose it for the place, the person, the small talk, the feeling that a human made something for us. That preference has survived every technological wave so far, and I see zero evidence this wave is different.
Nobody is disrupting the neighborhood bakery. Not because they can’t. Because customers don’t want them to.
Now, the uncomfortable part of the verdict - the mirror.
If you’re in none of these positions, and your work is digital, repeatable, and done for someone else’s company… that’s the middle. And the middle is exactly where the compression is happening. One person with AI tools now does what a team did, and companies have noticed. The middle doesn’t disappear overnight; it just needs fewer and fewer people every year, and everyone in it can feel it.
So the play, as I see it, is simple to say and slow to do: move. Toward owning something, however small. Or toward the machine itself. Or toward the boring, human, physical world that AI keeps politely ignoring while it tries to prove it can do the impressive stuff.
Five years is enough time to reposition. It is not enough time to wait.
That’s my verdict. I’d rather own a boring bakery than rent an impressive title.