While Everyone's Worried About AI Taking Their Job, I'm Thinking About Yours Differently

Open your LinkedIn feed any morning and you'll find it: another think-piece about which white-collar jobs AI is taking next. The anxiety is real and warranted.

I've been building a physical product business for 18 years. This question is not academic for me.

Anthropic's CEO has publicly stated that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Moreover, most workers won't recognise the danger until their positions are already gone. Goldman Sachs research found that AI systems can now match or outperform up to 47% of industry professionals on a defined set of economically valuable tasks. When nearly half the value a professional delivers can be replicated by a machine, companies don't need to wait for a recession to start reducing headcount. They just do.

This is not hype. This is already happening.

But here's what I keep thinking about, and why I'm writing this:

Hardly anyone is talking about the founders making physical things.

The automation narrative has a blind spot

For decades, the conventional wisdom was clear: get educated, get a knowledge job, don't work with your hands. The safe path was the office, the spreadsheet, the briefing document. The people most at risk from automation were assumed to be factory workers and logistics workers — people who worked with their hands.

That assumption has been completely flipped.

The Stanford AI Index identified knowledge workers as disproportionately exposed to AI disruption compared to manual workers. The jobs being hollowed out right now are in law firms, financial services, marketing departments, and corporate offices; not on production floors.

The IMF's 2024 assessment found that roughly 40% of jobs globally face meaningful exposure to AI. That figure rises to approximately 60% in high-income, digitised economies. Those are overwhelmingly knowledge work economies.

Meanwhile, a Microsoft study — the largest real-world analysis of how AI actually affects different jobs — found that occupations requiring physical work, direct human interaction, or operating and monitoring machinery had the lowest AI applicability scores of any category measured.

Let that land for a moment.

The person who built from scratch a food product, a skincare brand, a clothing line, who sources ingredients, manages production runs, navigates logistics, builds retail relationships, and ships real things to real people — that person is sitting on a skill set that is structurally different from the one being disrupted right now.

This is not the same as being recession-proof

I want to be honest with you, because I think the "makers will be fine" narrative needs a serious caveat.

During downturns, households tend to focus spending on everyday necessities — food, petrol, medicine, utilities — while discretionary spending weakens. If the disruption to white-collar employment is deep enough and fast enough, purchasing power contracts, and that affects everyone who sells things.

During economic hardship, brand loyalty weakens as consumers become more willing to experiment with cheaper alternatives — particularly in everyday categories like food, household items, and personal care.

So no, I am not arguing that physical product founders are untouchable. What I am arguing is something more specific: that in the early stages of this shift (right now, before purchasing power has meaningfully contracted), the bootstrapped founder making a physical product is better positioned than most people realise. And more importantly, that the skills developed running a lean product business through constraint are exactly the ones that build long-term resilience.

What physical product founders have already learned

Here's the counterintuitive part.

The skills you have built running a bootstrapped product business — managing inventory cycles, funding production from your own cash flow, operating without a safety net — are not just survival skills. They are the exact skills that determine who is still standing when conditions shift permanently, not just temporarily.

The knowledge worker facing displacement right now is learning these lessons for the first time, under pressure, with no prior experience of running lean.

You already know how to run lean. You may have been doing it for years without calling it anything.

Survival is a skill

The narrative says the safe career was always the knowledge career. The degree, the credential, the corporate role.

That narrative is being rewritten in real time.

The founders who built physical things, who learned to operate without safety nets, to run on real cash flow, to sell actual products to actual people, built something that looks a lot like resilience from the outside.

From the inside, it probably just felt like survival.

But it turns out, survival is a skill.

Over the coming weeks I'm going to go deeper on all of this: the personal history that taught me how product businesses survive real disruption, the cash flow mechanics that actually determine resilience, and the practical things you should be doing right now if you're building a physical product brand in this climate.

Because resilience isn't a mindset. It's a set of decisions, made in advance, before you need them.

Next week: I've already lived through my version of an economic apocalypse. I'll also go into what actually kept the business alive, and what I'd do differently now.