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CNN published something today that every media professional should read.
The headline: AI isn't taking your job. It's taking parts of it.
McKinsey puts it at 57% of work activities technically automatable — not 57% of jobs. Pieces and parts, spread across every role.
I've watched this happen in newsrooms for years before anyone called it AI. A producer spending 45 minutes every morning scanning sources, formatting a briefing, repeating the same task — not journalism. Administration. That 45 minutes is now a 4-minute automated workflow.
The job didn't disappear. The task did.
The head of Claude Code at Anthropic said something this week worth sitting with: the term "software engineer" may disappear — replaced by "builder." Someone who understands the problem, designs the solution, and uses AI as execution.
That shift is coming for journalism, too.
The producers who thrive won't be the ones who resist the tools. They'll be the ones who understand precisely which 45 minutes to hand over — and which decisions to keep.
After 26 years in IT, that gap doesn’t surprise me. Companies buy tools they can’t embed, roll them out, then call it “transformation”. AI is no different.
The winners aren’t the fastest adopters; they’re the clearest on the problem first. Clarity makes AI work, not the other way around.
AI is a situational response, not a universal one.
Some teams need it now, others need governance and capability before they touch it.
The skills that keep rising in value that AI can't automate are:
- Critical thinking.
- Judgement under pressure.
- Stakeholder trust.
- Decision-making with incomplete information.
The practical win most organisations miss is not the tool.
It is the adoption layer, the human behaviour, the workflow integration, and the confidence to actually use it.
Without that, you have an expensive licence and a workforce that is quietly disengaging.
If your people aren't using it, what does that tell you about how it was introduced?
Forget Tech and Hollywood. California Runs on Healthcare Jobs.
California is synonymous with Silicon Valley billionaires and blockbuster studios. But the engine quietly keeping its labor market alive looks nothing like that — it's home health aides, mental health counselors, and eldercare workers.
From March 2022 to March 2026, health and social-assistance jobs in California grew 25%, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan think tank. Strip those sectors out, and the state would have shed jobs over that period — a gap wider than in any other U.S. state.
The April federal jobs report underscored the trend: healthcare and social assistance accounted for roughly 47% of the better-than-expected 115,000 jobs added that month.
A Boom Built on Low Wages
The forces driving the surge are well-documented. An aging population requires ever more care. California and neighboring states have aggressively expanded in-home support services to keep older adults out of hospitals. And the state has poured billions into behavioral health in recent years — mental health practitioner employment nearly doubled between Q3 2022 and Q3 2025.
But much of this growth is concentrated at the bottom of the pay scale. Home health services employment jumped nearly 25% from Q3 2023 to Q3 2025 — while wages in that category actually fell 2.7%.
"You're seeing far more seats open in low-wage sectors, and seats go away in high-wage sectors," said Kenan Fikri, a senior fellow at EIG. California, he added, is trading high-paying, export-oriented jobs in tech and manufacturing for lower-paid, locally serving healthcare roles.
An Uncertain Road Ahead
The boom may be approaching a stress test. California is scaling back Medicaid coverage for undocumented residents, and federal cuts tied to the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act — along with the expiration of enhanced ACA subsidies — threaten funding across the sector. A healthcare union is pushing a November ballot measure that would levy a tax on billionaires to offset the Medicaid shortfall.
Whether the healthcare job market can sustain itself without that federal support remains an open question. "We're going to soon discover," Fikri said, "whether the healthcare boom has legs sufficient to stand independently."