Kevin Surace argues that adopting generative AI is now essential for career survival, just as the wheel and Excel were before it. Telling a hiring manager your professors wouldn't let you use it will disqualify you. Employers expect you to demonstrate GenAI expertise and show how it makes you measurably more productive.
If you walk into a job interview this year and say this one thing, you will not get hired, period. Every technology that has come along, every single one, if you didn't embrace it, you died. Let's start with the wheel. There's 2 guys who used to take stuff on their back up to the top of the hill from the boat, right? And then a wheel shows up and one guy says, that's it, my career is over, goes home, dies a pauper. The other guy says, let me get a second wheel, build a cart, and I'll take my stuff, his stuff, and 5 other people's stuff up the top of the hill and make more money than everybody. So we can go all the way back to then. We can then go to the late 1980s, Excel shows up in a finance department. And there were some people who said, I'm not going to learn that thing. That is foreign and that's not what I do. And by the way, I can do long division in my head and I don't need that tool. And others said, I'm sorry, I'm going to embrace Excel, get rid of all that lousy stuff that I do, and now I can be more strategic. So even this coming fall, people interview, or this coming spring as they leave colleges, you know, and they start to interview and they're going for their jobs. Every single employer is saying to these students, how well do you know GenAI? And Here's the wrong answer. Our professors wouldn't let us use it. Therefore, I don't know it at all. Are you getting hired? No. If you say our professors told us not to use it, but I used it on everything and I'm an expert, hire. So already the workplace has changed just like that and wants that expertise. They want that expertise because we're seeing tremendous productivity gains in certain areas.
