Are you using yesterday's playbook for an AI driven tomorrow?

My mum hurried up to me, one fine Saturday morning while I was in the kitchen. It was time to pick my GCSEs, in Year 9.

'What do you want to do in the future?'

I knew my options were extremely limited like a pop quiz, similar to 'Who wants to be a Millionaire'.

A: Lawyer

B: Doctor

C: Accountant

D: maybe an Engineer and an Architect but the first three were the right answer.

Anything else after that was a failure and shame. To this day, elders in my family ask me what I do again. 'Business Analysis BA, so you analyse the business? Why?'

And just so that we're clear, university was not an option. The only choice was which university and only the best would do.

At any community event, aunties will welcome me with 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' And once it was established that I would be a Doctor, like my Dad, being greeted as 'Our future Doctor.' became the norm. As an immigrant's daughter the idea of doing what I loved was not an option. It was not a secure bet for a successful future.

Over 25 years later, we know how much this has changed. Globalisation has increased competition for these elusive career paths and although the respect and status for these careers socially has not diminished, the bargaining power of the pound has. It's harder to afford the lifestyle we had bargained for by sacrificing our dreams and creativity.

As we move to greener pastures for the sake of better schools, we get hit with the same racial tensions we faced decades ago. We pay for private schools and still require tutors and somehow need to find time to carry them to multiple extracurricular activities while pushing our careers to even greater heights.

Is the cost worth the outcome?

Perhaps this playbook worked a mere five years ago, but the competition is beyond international students and companies opening up their roles to cheaper regions. It's ChatGPT or Gemini completing analysis usually conducted by a top management consultancy team over a few days in a few minutes.

Bill Gates this year stated; “Artificial intelligence will replace doctors, teachers and other professionals within the next decade, rendering humans unnecessary for most tasks.” The traditional belief that a professional career path will afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle, if you just work hard enough, doesn't exist anymore.

It's becoming more obvious that we need to prepare for a very different job market. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic stated this year “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10–20% in the next one to five years.” Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (2025), owners of ChatGPT “AI will soon replace many customer service jobs, particularly those performed via phone or computer… AI will accelerate this turnover.”

By the time your child applies for university or starts looking for an entry level job, AI literacy will not be a nice to have, but a basic requirement.

It's not only Tech leaders that have stated this, in the recent McKinsey Report (2025):
“Employees believe AI will replace roughly 30% of their work in the next year — far more than leaders currently anticipate.” In the World Economic Forum (2025) report it states; “92 million jobs are projected to be displaced by 2030, with 170 million new ones emerging… but mismatches in skills and geography pose real challenges.”

Our children are still in formal education, we still have time to respond and prepare them, we already are.

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