Orca does not usually replace a role directly. It much more commonly prevents one from being hired. And of the two, the second is the one nobody sees.
Quick context if you are new here. I build Orca, an AI executive chief of staff. Meeting prep, inbox triage, CRM, research, the social posts, the things that used to need a small support team around a single founder. It works, which is sort of the problem.
Because here is what actually happens. A founder running Orca does not make the next hire they had been planning. The PA they would have brought on. The social media manager they were about to brief. The junior researcher with a job spec already drafted. None of those hires happen. And there is no redundancy announcement, because there is no redundancy. The job spec just sits in a folder, and the budget line quietly goes away at the next planning cycle.
Which means that the person who would have got that job never finds out it existed. They are out there applying for roles, getting fewer interviews than last year’s cohort did, being told the market is competitive. A cancelled vacancy appears in no unemployment statistic. Nobody who was never hired shows up in a layoff tracker.
I think this is the bit most people have wrong about AI displacement. Everyone is waiting for it to look like something. A restructure with a name on it, a headline with a big number, a queue outside a building somewhere. What is actually arriving first is absence. Jobs that would have been posted are not posted. Teams that would have been backfilled are not backfilled. Each individual decision is unremarkable, and the aggregate is anything but. If you are waiting for the announcement before you take your own position seriously, I think you will be waiting a long time, and the wait is the expensive part.
I will not pretend I am watching this from a safe distance. The efficiency I am selling to one founder is, in aggregate, a hire that never happens for someone else. I have a small set of justifications I rotate through for that, the someone-else-would-build-it one, the real-value one, and so on, and the honest version is that none of them fully gets me off the hook. The Prologue of the book is called The Builder’s Dilemma, and it goes through each of those justifications properly, plus the one conversation with an agency owner that I have not been able to shake since. I will leave those in the book rather than rehearse them here.
For now, the point is smaller and closer to home. If your own role sits anywhere near the orchestration layer, the question is not whether your company will announce something. It is whether the role behind you, the one that used to be the next rung down, is still being hired at all. Worth asking. Quietly, if you have to.
This is from the Prologue of The Next Rung, my book on what AI displacement actually looks like from inside. It’s open for pre-order now: