Your Identity Was Never What You Do for a Living

AI is changing every job title, including the CEO's. That's causing an identity crisis for a lot of people, because most of us have tied who we are to what we do. Your job title will change. Your identity is who you've always been, and it won't.

AI now knows what you know

Most of what you've spent your career learning is now available to anyone with a $20 ChatGPT subscription.

Mine too.

Some days I wonder what my job will be in five years.

If that feels uncomfortable, you're not alone. Cloudflare reports that about 2.5 billion people now use generative AI regularly, adopted more than twice as fast as smartphones. The knowledge that used to set professionals apart is now a search away for almost everyone.

Coffee with a CEO

I had coffee with a CEO this week. We talked about AI, of course. Mostly we talked about identity.

I think we were both tired of acting like dogs chasing our tails, trying to keep up with the "latest and greatest" in AI.

The thing about AI is that it's causing a kind of existential identity crisis for all of us. When AI knows what you know, who are you? Are you still needed in this "new world" of AI?

Every job title is moving

Yes, your job is changing. So is your boss's. So is your CEO's.

• Account managers are becoming forward-deployed engineers.
• Marketers are becoming growth engineers.
• Software engineers are becoming builders.

It's hard not to feel a little dizzy when your label keeps changing. Every day there's a new model, a new title, a new term.

I've written about what this means for companies in Business, and about how teams are reshaping around it. This article is about the person inside the title.

What you do vs. who you are

Your job title is what you do. It will change.

Your identity is who you've always been. It won't change.

Mine has never changed, even when my title did. Over the years I've been a founder, an executive, an investor, a board member, and someone working quietly in the background. You can read that path on My Story.

How to find yours

If your sense of self is wrapped up in a title right now, it helps to separate the two on purpose.

1. List the titles you've had. Write down every role, not just the current one.
2. Find the thread. Ask what you were really doing in each one. The common answer is closer to your identity than any title.
3. Say it in one line. Mine is "I grow people and businesses." Yours should be short enough to survive the next ten job changes.
4. Let the how change. New tools change how you do the work. They don't have to change why you do it.

If you're carrying old assumptions about what a career should look like, unlearning the playbook is a good next read.

What this means for leaders

If you lead people, this isn't only your crisis. Everyone on your team is asking the same question about their own role, whether they say it out loud or not.

The leaders who handle this well talk about it plainly. They don't pretend jobs aren't changing, and they don't treat people as interchangeable with the tools. They help each person see what they bring beyond what they know: judgment, relationships, taste, care for the customer, the ability to bring a team along.

• Name the change. People handle hard news better than silence.
• Separate the person from the task. A task being automated is not a verdict on the person who used to do it.
• Invest in the how. Give people time and room to learn the new tools, so the change happens with them, not to them.

None of that runs on a model either. It's leadership, and it matters more now than it did before AI, not less. For more on leading through change, read leading in difficult times.

Why this matters for the next five years

The pace isn't going to slow down. New models, new tools, and new job titles will keep arriving. If your sense of self rises and falls with each one, you'll spend the next five years anxious and reactive.

If your identity sits underneath the work, the changes become something you can use instead of something you have to survive. You can try the new tools with curiosity, because they aren't a threat to who you are. They're just a new way to do what you already do.

That's the shift I'd encourage anyone to make, from the newest hire to the CEO.

It also changes how you treat other people. When you stop measuring yourself only by your title, you stop measuring others that way too. You start noticing the colleague who always makes the room calmer, the manager who develops people, the engineer who cares about the customer. None of those qualities show up on an org chart, and all of them matter more as the tools take over the rest.

AI can't copy who you are

The rest of who I am doesn't run on a large language model either. It never did. And the little one on my back above Lake Louise has no idea what my title is. She's never needed to know.

So when you start to feel like a dog chasing its tail, or like you have no idea who you are or what you'll be doing in five years, remember this.

A question for this week

Finish this sentence without using a job title: I am someone who... Write down your answer and keep it somewhere you'll see it. Mine is that I grow people and businesses. That stays true no matter what my job is called.