The industrial revolution for knowledge work has begun

In a cramped London workshop in the 1800s, a team of artisans bends over workbenches, crafting every component of a chair by hand. Each piece is a testament to skill and care — but also time, inconsistency, and cost. Then the assembly line arrives. At first, it’s met with skepticism, even hostility. But soon, production scales. Quality stabilises. Entry-level work is redefined.

Fast-forward to today. My Brompton bike, still hand-assembled in London, is the child of that transformation. It’s a symbol of what happens when craftsmanship meets repeatability. When thoughtful design embraces industrial process.

Now, the same forces are reshaping knowledge work.

The AI Revolution Isn’t Replacing Workers — It’s Raising the Floor

When we talk about AI and jobs, the loudest conversations are usually about what’s being lost. But that misses the more interesting shift: what’s being standardised.

Much like how the industrial revolution gave us consistent, affordable goods, AI is setting a new baseline for what “good enough” looks like in knowledge work. Entry-level research? Automated. First-draft emails? Generated in seconds. Scheduling, summarising, prioritising? Quietly handled in the background.

The implication isn’t that knowledge workers are obsolete. It’s that the floor is rising. Fast. If your value was in knowing where to look or how to format a response, AI’s got that now. But just as assembly lines didn’t kill design, AI won’t kill thinking. It will, however, make the shape of “junior” roles unrecognisable.

The Entry-Level Isn’t Disappearing—It’s Evolving

It’s tempting to say AI is “eliminating” junior roles. But that’s not quite right. What’s really happening is more nuanced: entry-level work still exists. But the expectations for what a junior person can accomplish are changing.

Think back to the factory floor during the industrial revolution. The artisan who once hand-carved each chair component didn’t transition into an assembly line worker. They were often displaced by machines that could do in minutes what once took hours. But the roles that followed weren’t devoid of skill, they simply required different kinds of mastery.

Instead of intimate knowledge of wood grain and chisel angles, workers needed fluency in timing, tooling, coordination, and safety. The expectation wasn’t to create something wholly from scratch—it was to contribute reliably to a larger system. Precision and productivity became the new markers of competence.

What emerged was a new layer of specialisation: the machinist, the line supervisor, the tool-and-die maker. Each role demanded awareness not of the material, but of the system — how to operate within it, maintain it, and improve it. These were skilled roles, just not the same kind of skill.

Fast-forward to today. An entry-level accountant isn’t expected to track balances in a paper ledger or manually reconcile line items from boxes of receipts. They start in Excel or Xero. They build pivot tables. They debug formula errors. The baseline of competence has changed because the tools have changed.

This is exactly what’s happening now with AI in knowledge work.

A junior researcher today might not be expected to gather source material manually, but they will need to verify AI-generated summaries. A new content marketer might not need to draft copy from scratch, but they’ll be expected to assess tone, optimise prompts, and steer the output toward a strategic outcome.

The shape of early-career work is adapting. What used to be years of grinding through rote tasks is now replaced by an expectation to direct, critique, and refine AI outputs. That’s not less work — it’s different work. And it requires a different kind of readiness.

We’re not eliminating entry-level roles. We’re raising the baseline of what entry-level means.

And that’s ok.

Every generation enters the workforce under a different set of assumptions and tools. The tools get better. The expectations shift. The foundational human skills — judgment, communication, initiative — stay essential. But how we demonstrate those skills evolves.

This is not a threat. It’s a recalibration. And just like the craftsman became the machinist, and the bookkeeper became the spreadsheet analyst, the next generation of knowledge workers will start their journey with AI as a co-pilot, not a competitor.

We’re All Bromptons Now

I ride my Brompton because it’s a fusion of legacy and modernity. Its folding frame is as clever as the day it was conceived, but the experience is unmistakably modern: seamless, efficient, delightful.

That’s the model for the future of work. AI as the scaffolding that supports, elevates, and accelerates. Not a crutch. Not a threat. A quiet motor humming in the background while you focus on what makes your input uniquely human.

Craft still matters. Taste matters more. Judgment, decisiveness, ethics — these aren’t replaced. They’re exposed. Amplified. When AI handles the busywork, what’s left is the why, not the how. And that’s a far scarier thing to be held accountable for.

The Next Shift Isn’t Automation. It’s Expectation.

The shift we’re experiencing isn’t about efficiency. It’s about assumption. We’re entering an era where the default is:

• Your research will be thorough
• Your writing will be clean
• Your thinking will be structured

Because AI will take care of all three. That’s the new baseline.

And once the baseline rises, everything above it becomes even more valuable… but also harder to fake. In a world where everyone can write a decent report, insight becomes the differentiator. Where everyone can summarise the meeting, influence becomes the skill. Where everyone can manage their inbox, discernment becomes the edge.

This is not a call to panic. It’s a call to recalibrate.

If you’re early in your career: seek out projects where AI can’t yet tread. Ambiguity, novelty, chaos — these are your proving grounds. If you’re mid-career: resist the temptation to coast. Delegate to AI, but audit it ruthlessly. If you’re leading others: build new scaffolding. Find ways to teach judgment without needing people to do the grunt work first.

The industrial revolution didn’t just birth factories. It reshaped education, labor policy, urban design. We’re due for a similar reckoning in knowledge work. Not because the work is going away. But because the assumptions underneath it already have.

Published: 23/07/2025