There’s a lot of talk right now about programmers losing their jobs because AI can code. But that’s the wrong framing, this is much bigger than that, coding is just the most visible part. If I look back at my last corporate job, at Mercedes-Benz regional headquarters in Beijing (2000–2002), I realize almost all of it can now be done by AI. And this was not an intern role or so, I was Senior Manager, Controlling, for Daimler’s operations in Northeast Asia (Daimler was the mother company of Mercedes-Benz). In hindsight, that title was partly job inflation, it was more of a solid middle management job. But I was good at it, I had real responsibility, and Mercedes-Benz paid a lot of money for me to do it.
What I actually did all day
The job was simple, in the way many corporate jobs are simple once you strip away the endless meetings and politics.
I communicated with joint ventures, factories, and sales organizations in the region. They sent me spreadsheets with their financial results. I analyzed them, consolidated them, and turned them into reports and presentations. I made budgets: monthly budgets for the next year, and annual budgets for the next three to five years. Then every month I compared budget vs actuals, explained variances, wrote it up, and presented it.
There were other tasks, of course. There are always other tasks, especially for a young, ambitous guy who was still eager to quickly climb the corporate ladder. But most of the job was variations of collect numbers, make them consistent, explain them, and tell a story.
The expat package was wild
When I moved to Beijing I had just turned 28. I don’t remember my exact salary anymore, but including expat ‘hardship’ allowances it must have been somewhere around USD 100k to USD 150k per year at the time. This was a real salary in those days, and in Beijing it went very far. For some reason headquarters in Stuttgart thought life in Beijing was hardship, but for me it was actually much easier and relaxed than life in Germany. You could live like a king, and I did!
On top of that I got a housing allowance, which was USD 6000 per month (that number was so astronomical to me at the time that I still remember it). I had a very nice company car, and I was flying business class. Even the vacation flights to Europe for me and my girlfriend were business class and paid for by the company.
Mercedes spent a lot of money on this role. And the crazy thing is: the role was basically a workflow, a workflow that is now completely automatable.
AI can do my entire workflow
AI can:
- write and format reports
- build and improve presentations
- analyze numbers, spot anomalies, find drivers
- reconcile messy spreadsheets and inconsistent formats
- translate and communicate in multiple languages
- ask follow-up questions when inputs are missing
- chase people politely when they are late
- run the same process every month without getting bored
I didn’t speak Chinese well back then. I spoke English and German fluently (and Dutch, which was useless for this job). AI can communicate directly with factories in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, German, whatever is needed, and it can keep the tone consistent.
Even the spreadsheets I received can now largely be produced by AI agents inside those factories and sales orgs. A lot of financial reporting is simply formatting, mapping, validating, and explaining. In other words, both the inputs and the consolidation layer are automatable.
This is not about AI getting smarter anymore
For a long time we could say: “Yes, AI helps, but you still need people.” But that argument is getting weaker by the week. Over the past weeks AI has improved so much that you don’t need the people anymore. AI agents can now schedule tasks (for example, make a weekly report every Monday morning, create a powerpoint presentation for headquarters every Friday afternoon), and make decisions about what to independently from their human.
From now on it’s not about whether AI can do the job, but it’s about whether companies are willing to let it do the job. Are they willing to adopt AI? It requires organizational courage, a lot of risk tolerance and of course the eternal internal politics. The fact is that cutting staff is painful and messy, and nobody wants to be the first manager to say: “I can replace my entire team with software.” But they can, and eventually they will.
One person could do twenty of these jobs
My old job is a perfect example of leverage. If you give a capable person the right AI tooling, they can run the reporting and budgeting process for far more entities than one human ever could in 2001. If a company like Mercedes-Benz wanted to, they could centralize a lot of controlling work. One small team at headquarters could cover what used to be dozens of regional controllers. They won’t do it overnight, but they will do it over time. Quietly, with “reorganizations” and “efficiency initiatives”.
If you are in that job today, you should pay attention
Somebody is doing a job similar to mine right now. Somewhere in Stuttgart, Singapore, Beijing, Dubai, wherever Mercedes-Benz has regional structures. That person is at serious risk. They might be excellent at their job, but their job is a process, and processes are what software eats.
The emotional part, for me
I was proud of that role at the time. I didn’t love corporate life, but I was good at it. It felt like a serious job. A “real” career path, a big salary and huge condo, all while in my late 20s. I felt like I had made it. (As a side note: I still eventually decided to leave that cushy job, to study Chinese and become an entrepreneur, something none of my colleagues at the time understood).
Realizing that the whole thing can now be done by AI is a revelation. It makes the changes feel very concrete. It’s not a thought experiment anymore, or a theoretical idea. It’s my own life, my own résumé, one of my own chapters, and I can see how it gets automated.
What happens next?
If you are a 20-something today in a white-collar job, you probably feel this already. You see what the tools can do, because you use them, and you know the direction. If you are in your 40s or 50s, you might still be underestimating it. Not because you’re not smart, but because your mental model of “what a job is” was formed in a world where the work required humans by default.
The scary part is the speed, and the fact that many people will not have an obvious “next job” to transition into. If you lose your job and you know you can find another one in a few months, you can survive. If you suspect your whole category of work is being automated across the economy, that’s a different psychological reality.
If I’d be in that job right now, I would spend all my waking hours learning about AI and vibecoding and I would automate my own job. I would show top management in both the regional headquarters and in Stuttgart how they could save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars right away. My colleagues would likely hate me for it, but they would simply be shooting the messenger, because if you don’t adapt you die. Maybe I would be fired for doing it (Mercedes-Benz was a very conservative organization in those days, they resisted change, especially if initiatives came from middle management, which was one reason why I left the corporatate world), but my job would have been gone eventually anyway.
We will need a new social contract
I don’t see a way around some form of universal basic income, or what Elon calls “universal high income”. I believe it’s a stability requirement, without it the world as we know it will fall apart. If people lose their jobs and don’t have a way to provide for their families, plus no expectation of finding another job anymore, they will revolt.
We are heading toward abundance in production and scarcity in employment. That mismatch creates political pressure, resentment, and instability. We can either design for it or crash into it. I’m not optimistic that governments will handle this gracefully. But I also don’t think we can stop the technology anymore. And honestly, I don’t want to stop it, because the upside is enormous. The question is whether we build a world where people can still live with dignity while the machine does more and more of the work.
Final thought
If my Mercedes-Benz “senior manager” job from 2000 can be done by AI now, then a huge portion of white-collar work can be done by AI. Many people believe it may happen in 5-10 years, but reality is that we are there already.
AI doesn’t need to get more capable anymore, in its current form it’s good enough already. What we are seeing now is the slow realization inside companies that the old org chart is outdated. Once that realization spreads, things will move faster than most people expect.