Run toward fear: LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman on how AI will change workplaces

‘The fear is real. So is the biology behind it’

On the inherent anxiety among employees surrounding AI, he says, “It is completely justified. It is also biology. The human brain is wired to fear change. It is wired to not get exponential change, and this is a moment of big exponential change.”

“Work is not ending, but work is changing,” he says. “The people who are going to be OK, if not better off, at the other end of this disruption are the people who change with work as it changes, not the people who wait, hold back, hunker down.”

His first piece of advice is that people should use the tools. “This is the easiest-to-use technology that humans have ever created. You can talk to it like you would a friend or a family member or a co-worker.” He points to organisations like Karya, a nonprofit working on AI tools in Indian dialects, as evidence that access is widening. “More and more of these tools can be used in local dialects. You don’t have to engage with these tools in English alone.”

The three-bucket framework

For those in roles that feel acutely threatened–call centre workers, data entry operators, junior accountants, content writers–Raman offers a concrete way of thinking around the problem. The exercise begins by listing the dozen or so tasks that make up a typical working week, and then sorting them into three buckets.

Bucket one contains tasks AI can already do independently: meeting summaries, first drafts, basic research, routine coding. “Anything in your job that’s generally routinised, that is memorisation–you are not doing much individual contribution to it. You are just running through the motions. That is bucket one,” he explains.

It is in bucket two where the real opportunity lies. These are new things a person can do with AI that they could not easily do before. A call centre executive preparing for a client meeting, for instance, can now arrive with a richer brief on that client’s concerns than was previously possible without a research team. “The tool very quickly can say: this is what they’re concerned about, this is what they want to hear from you.” Bucket two is about expansion, not substitution.

Open to Work co-authored by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman. (Source: amazon.in)

Bucket three is purely human capability–the time freed from bucket one work, redirected toward thinking, relationship-building, and judgment that no tool can replicate.

“Like a conveyor belt, you want to move your tasks into bucket two and three,” Raman says. As that shift happens, he argues, work becomes more personalised and more valuable: “That means we are going to deliver higher value work. That means we are going to have a safer career and get paid more.”

Who is actually most vulnerable?

The answer may surprise people. Raman argues that the farmer in Punjab and the shopkeeper in Chennai are, for now, safer than the software engineer who spends the day coding. “There is no job that is safe. There are skills that are safe,” he says. The roles most exposed are those built around technical and analytical tasks, which have for so long defined middle-class aspiration in India for a generation.

“There are a lot of people all over the world, but especially in India, who did everything right. Who did everything right and whose families sacrificed a lot to afford that degree, who have spent years since childhood learning those technical skills,” he says, acknowledging the building frustration. “The rules are changing, and that can’t be changed.”

Yet even for those workers, the framework offers a path. Software engineers, he says, are more than their code. “Some of them talk to customers and will do so now more because AI does the coding. Some of them are really good at contemplation and systems building.”

The five C’s of human capability

The book’s central proposition is that as AI displaces machine-like work, human capabilities must move to the centre. Raman and Roslansky worked with neuroscientists, behavioural economists, and organisational psychologists to identify what they call the five C’s: curiosity, compassion, courage, creativity, and communication.

They are, in his view, the core of what will generate economic value going forward. “You are not going to get a resilience or compassion certificate. You are going to hone them in service of work you are doing that is unique to you.”

A word of caution on overuse

Raman warns against the temptation to outsource too much to AI. He describes a story in the book about someone who came to realise he was losing his own voice by letting the tools do too much. Research from MIT neuroscientists found that when people simply relay AI-generated answers without engaging critically, their own thinking declines, a phenomenon researchers called cognitive debt.

“You give it the wrong data, you use it in a way you are not supposed to given where you work, or overuse it, and you will actually be worse off,” he said.

India: running in the right direction

On India specifically, Raman is cautiously optimistic. He says that AI infrastructure is growing and adoption is rising, but says the country still trails major economies. The bottleneck, he says, is “this battle of belief–can these tools help me do something, or are they going to replace me?”

He sees an important role for a national narrative around AI–one that moves beyond anxiety and makes the opportunity concrete. He also pushes back on an overreliance on large formal-sector job creation as the primary strategy, arguing that the surest path to sustained job growth is through new business creation. He points to data from LinkedIn: the number of members adding ‘founder’ to their profiles has risen by more than 100 per cent year-over-year in India, and more than seven in 10 Indian professionals say they want to work for themselves in the near future.

“India is sitting on a lot of the fundamentals” for a startup flywheel, he said. “More support for small businesses, more support for entrepreneurialism in the formal economy that is where I would push India to go.”

The human skills now coming to the centre of work are, Raman says, deeply embedded in Indian culture. “There is such a culture of entrepreneurialism and hustle and resilience and adaptability, and all the things that are going to come to the centre of work to pull from.”

The 30-60-90 day plan

The book closes with a practical 30-60-90 day roadmap. The first 30 days are about demystification–getting comfortable with the tools and running small experiments. Days 30 to 60 shift focus to the five C’s and to mapping one’s unique capabilities. By day 60 and beyond, the goal is to think differently about career itself.

“You are not climbing a ladder anymore. You are on a climbing wall, which means you can go in any direction,” Raman says. “That is both terrifying and liberating.”

The chapter preceding the roadmap is called ‘Nobody beats you at being you.’ It is the book’s animating belief: that every individual carries a set of capabilities, shaped by lived and learned experience, that no AI system can replicate. The work of the next decade, in Raman’s view, is learning to act on that.