At CFTE, we’ve spent the past decade working with governments, financial institutions, and professionals around the world to understand how technology transforms work. Today, the question we hear most often is simple — but deeply personal:
What will AI do to my job?
It’s a question asked by graduates trying to enter the workforce.
By policymakers planning for labour shifts. By professionals navigating uncertainty inside companies large and small. But perhaps the problem isn’t the question. It’s the way we’ve been answering it.
Too often, the conversation around AI and jobs is framed in extremes:
- Will AI take all the jobs, or create new ones?
- Should we be afraid, or excited?
At CFTE, we believe this framing is incomplete. Because AI is not producing a single future of work — it’s producing three structural paths. And unless we understand which one we’re on, we can’t prepare properly.
A moment of clarity from a previous wave of disruption
To see this more clearly, we need to go back.
In 2015, CFTE’s co-founder Huy Nguyen Trieu was Managing Director at Citi, and the Fintech Resident Expert at Oxford Saïd Business School. It was a moment of extraordinary innovation. Startups were emerging daily, offering new models for lending, payments, investment, identity — and more.
But the real challenge wasn’t speed. It was confusion.
Which innovations were truly transformative?
Which were simply digital improvements?
And which ones wouldn’t survive?
To bring clarity, Huy created the CDE Innovation Prism — a framework to classify innovation by the kind of impact it creates:
- C for Cheaper, Better, Faster — innovations that optimise existing functions.
- D for Different — innovations that introduce entirely new behaviours or systems.
- E for Enhancing — innovations that increase the capabilities of people or organisations.
For the past decade, we’ve used this framework across sectors — from analysing the rise of Bitcoin and Revolut to advising central banks and financial institutions. And today, we’re applying it to the most urgent transformation of all: artificial intelligence and the future of work.
The Three Paths: Mass Displacement, Supercharged Professionals, Creative Disruptors
When we apply the CDE Prism to artificial intelligence, we see three structural futures of work — all happening simultaneously. Each corresponds to a different type of innovation, and each leads to a fundamentally different outcome.
The first path is Mass Displacement. This is driven by “Cheaper / Better / Faster” innovations — technologies that do existing tasks more efficiently than humans, often at near-zero marginal cost. We’re already seeing this across sectors. AI systems are writing content, reviewing contracts, summarising meetings, and generating code. In many cases, the output is faster, cheaper, and — for repeatable tasks — objectively better.
This doesn’t just reduce workload. It reduces roles. When a single AI model can do what once required dozens of entry-level employees, companies naturally scale down hiring. The result isn’t just automation. It’s winner-takes-all economics, where a few high-performing individuals or firms displace many. That’s why we call this mass displacement — not because it’s hypothetical, but because we are already witnessing it in real time.
The second path is the rise of the Supercharged Professionals. These are individuals who’ve learned to integrate AI into their own workflows — not to replace themselves, but to augment their capabilities. They use AI to research, analyse, prototype, communicate, and learn faster. This is the “Enhancing” category of innovation — where people become exponentially more productive, not by doing more, but by working differently.
Some of these professionals are launching businesses that scale to tens of millions with just a handful of people. Others are advancing quickly inside organisations, not because they have more experience, but because they’ve developed the ability to think and operate at a higher level — with AI as a partner. This isn’t about digital literacy. It’s about performance at scale.
The third path is led by the Creative Disruptors. This is the “Different” category of innovation — where entirely new systems, industries, or value models are created. These individuals don’t use AI to optimise the existing system. They build something fundamentally new. People like Sam Altman aren’t writing prompts or automating tasks. They’re shaping the infrastructure of intelligence itself. This path is rare, but it’s transformational.
What links these three paths is not chronology — it’s structure.
- Cheaper leads to mass displacement.
- Enhancing leads to a new professional class.
- Different leads to new economic systems.
And all three are unfolding — at the same time.
What it means for individuals, organisations, and nations
For individuals, this is not just a macroeconomic insight — it’s a personal one. The difference between those who are displaced and those who are supercharged lies not just in skill, but in adaptation. It’s about whether you’re learning to use the tools, or being replaced by those who do. AI is no longer a topic for the future. It’s already shaping promotion decisions, productivity expectations, and professional opportunity.
For organisations, the challenge is structural. Talent strategies must now account for rapid capability gaps, shifting team structures, and emerging roles. It is no longer enough to train for today’s jobs — the real task is to prepare people to shift roles, adopt new systems, and contribute meaningfully to AI-augmented workflows.
For governments and national leaders, this becomes a question of resilience and competitiveness. Countries that rely solely on job protection will struggle to keep pace. Those that invest in supercharging talent — and enabling systemic innovation — will be better positioned to lead in the next wave of economic and technological evolution.
So what differentiates those who thrive?
Once we understand the three futures, the most important question becomes clear:
What separates those who are displaced from those who become supercharged?
This is the focus of our latest research:
It builds on our earlier work on AI and jobs — but goes deeper, focusing on the human dimension. It explores what differentiates high-performing individuals in an AI era, how to build those capabilities, and what systems and mindsets will be needed to scale them across organisations and nations.
The future of work is not one path. It’s a set of structural patterns.
And once we understand those patterns, we can move beyond headlines — and build the systems and skills that matter.
🔗 Read: The AI-fication of Talents → https://courses.cfte.education/cfte-the-ai-fication-of-talents-whitepaper/
🔗 Learn more about the CDE Innovation Prism → https://courses.cfte.education/cfte-research-and-reports/cde-innovation-model/
