The Last Time This Happened, Millions of Jobs Appeared

I heard something on a podcast that stuck with me. It was a former Tesla executive talking about what happened when long distance calls changed.

Back in the day, if you wanted to make a long distance call, you did not just dial a number. You dialed zero and talked to an operator. A real person physically connected your call by plugging lines into a switchboard. That was the job. Hundreds of thousands of people did it. It was stable, local, part of the community.

Then technology replaced it. Electronic switches came in, and within a short window those jobs were gone. People were worried, and rightly so. There was a lot of conversation about what was being lost. The jobs, the stability, the impact on families.

But no one could see what was coming next. Because on the other side of that shift, something new got built. Once long distance became basically free, a whole new layer of business opened up. Toll-free numbers. 1-800 companies built on the idea that people could now call without friction. And behind those, call centers. Support teams. Sales teams. Software companies built to serve all of it. Entire industries that did not exist before suddenly became normal. Millions of jobs, created on the other side of something that first looked like pure loss.

That is the part that stuck with me, because it feels familiar. We are in a moment where AI is doing something similar. It is changing how work gets done, and there is a lot of conversation about what is going away. That part is real. Some roles will change. Some skills will not be needed the same way.

But the more interesting question for anyone running a business is what is on the other side. What are the call centers of this moment. What services and products do not exist yet because this technology has not fully played out. If long distance becoming free created an entire industry around communication, what does AI making thinking, writing, building, and problem solving cheap create. What gets built on top of that.

I do not have a perfect answer. But I know how I want to approach it. Lean in. Learn it. Experiment. Stack tools and figure out where they fit into how we work. Not because I have it figured out, but because I do not want to be standing on the outside trying to catch up later.

The people who built those 1-800 businesses were not waiting for clarity. They saw a shift and moved. That is the whole thing. Something changes, something gets replaced, and on the other side something bigger gets built. I would rather be learning how to build in that environment now than trying to understand it after the fact.

Even if we cannot see exactly what is coming, we still get to choose how we show up for it.