Starting a career in a large corporation is a reassuring choice (I know, because I took that path myself). You learn a profession, you navigate complex organisations, you benefit from structure and mentorship. It’s a logical, almost natural route, one that students still choose in large numbers. Parents see it as continuity (of their own story), a form of security, proof that everything is “on track” and under control.
But this well-marked path hides a major blind spot: by design, large corporations cannot value individuality. They optimise for conformity, not uniqueness. And yet, in the world we’re entering, it is precisely the individual, with nuance, imagination and the ability to take and manage risk, who becomes the most valuable asset.
The Shock of AI
We are living through a major economic reconfiguration.
Recently, during a dinner, a Senior Partner at an Advisory Firm told me that junior roles would soon be replaced massively by AI systems in their organisation. That statement isn’t sensational. It’s factual.
According to McKinsey’s 2024 Generative AI and the Future of Work in 2030 report, up to 30% of the tasks performed by junior roles (like analysis, document preparation, reporting) can be automated.
AI is not taking jobs, it’s automating the standard.
What remains and what resists is what is deeply human: creativity, relational intelligence, the ability to doubt, to connect ideas, to generate meaning.
These are precisely the areas our education systems don’t cultivate and that large organisations don’t know how, or cannot afford, to leverage.
AI as an Accelerator of Individuation
In my work, I often come back to Carl G. Jung. Individuation is the process through which we become fully ourselves, free from masks, expectations and assigned roles.
Paradoxically, AI is accelerating this process. It automates everything that can be automated and frees the space where humans must become… human again.
It does not erase humans, it removes what should never have been our responsibility in the first place.
And it forces each of us (especially younger generations) to face a question no generation has ever confronted so directly:
What part of you can never be automated?
Risk-Taking as Real Capital
In this context, “taking risks“ takes on a whole new meaning. I’m not talking about quitting everything or exposing yourself unnecessarily.
I’m talking about stepping out of conformity to explore what you truly carry within you.
The World Economic Forum estimates that 40% of skills will need to evolve within the next five years and the most valuable ones will be: creativity, analytical reasoning, leadership and the ability to create meaning (Source: Future of Jobs Report, WEF 2025).
In other words: exactly what emerges when you allow yourself to test, fail, adjust and begin again.
Linear careers will be automated, but lived, embodied, risk-taking careers will not.
A Generational Turning Point
Young workers are the most exposed to automation. That could create anxiety.
I see it as something entirely different: a profound liberation.
They are the first generation that no longer needs permission to do things differently.
The first that can choose a path that isn’t defined by opposition to the norm but by coherence with who they are.
This is a truth-telling moment for our economies:
- Either we continue to produce clones destined to be replaced,
- or we help individuals become fully themselves.
Inner Work as a Professional Strategy
Taking risks requires an inner movement, a word almost absent from today’s economic vocabulary.
In simple terms:
Make space. Pause. Observe.
Listen to what is happening inside.
Recognise your value, your strength and sensitivity.
Understand what within you resists or aspires.
This inner effort builds the only resource no algorithm or machine will ever generate: self-knowledge.
There is a beautiful paradox here: AI accelerates everything except what truly matters.
Courage
For too long, we’ve entrusted the early stages of our careers to industrial logic.
AI will disrupt these models without hesitation.
The real question is no longer:
“Which job should I choose?”
But:
“How do I become a non-automatable human being?”
I believe the answer comes down to one word: RISK.
The risk of discovering yourself, of being wrong and beginning again, the risk of standing firmly in a trajectory that belongs to you.
I invite you to a simple, radical and economically powerful act: make silence, sit with yourself and listen.
It may well be the most strategic gesture of our time.
Read more articles:
How To Hire 335,000 People In 15 Years
Meet The CEO Steering Victor Buck Services Through Its Next Chapter
