The future of knowledge work
Insights from Fiverr CEO's internal email.
Welcome to the 14th edition of Perplexed by Jaga.
I built this digital garden to share everything that has perplexed me. If it’s your first time here, you can find older posts here and read more about me here.
Three weeks back, Micha Kaufman, the founder of Fiverr shared an internal email on his LinkedIn.
He explains how “the future of work” is changing & recently it’s been blowing up all over the internet.
Here are my thoughts on it 👇🏻
But first, what is Fiverr?
Fiverr is an online services marketplace that connects freelancers worldwide with clients seeking digital services. Tens of thousands of freelancers offer services in engineering, marketing, design, and other business problems.
Also, they are a public company trading on the NYSE, so it is no joke when the founder publicly shares a distressing internal email like this on his social media.
What does the email say?
The email is meant for the Fiverr team and the entire freelance community.
If I had to summarise in 3 points, here they are 👇🏻
Learn to use AI to improve efficiency before thinking about hiring more humans.
Learn prompting and how to use AI Agents in all departments. I’ve seen AI adoption explode in marketing, engineering, and customer support. But it was interesting how he also included the law in it.
I’ve spent the last two months on an unpaid sabbatical trying to understand the future AI is creating for us.
Here are some things I have learned that align with what Micha mentioned in his email.
1. AI will come after the personnel budget:
If you work in an organisation, look around to see where the money is spent. You’ll see that 10X the amount of money is spent on employees and team members over tools and software.
The problem is that many people assume AI is going after software budgets.
But you cannot be more wrong.
Keywords like “efficiency,” “move faster,” and “smaller teams” suggest that AI is targeting the personnel budget (your salary).
Painful as it is, business is capitalism, favouring the path with the best ROI.
2. Prompting is only V1 of the future of work with AI
Most folks who have understood the power of AI are only getting better at prompting.
Like me, millions of early adopters are pouring themselves into improving their prompting skills.
But we fail to recognise that prompting is not what will take away our jobs.
The real deal is understanding how to use AI Agents.
I’ll write a future piece explaining the difference between an LLM app like Chatgpt, an AI Automation and an AI Agent, but here’s a quick explainer.
Let’s say you must write a follow-up email after a meeting with a colleague.
With an LLM like Chatgpt, you give it all the context (meeting notes) and prompt it to write the email.
Even though you might have 10 meetings every day, you have to follow the same manual process every single time!
Also, an LLM doesn’t have access to your Google Docs, where all the meeting information is stored, nor is it connected to your email client.
So you have to manually copy the meeting information, prompt it, and paste the email copy into your email client.
Painful!
But an AI Agent can
Access meeting notes (e.g., from Google Docs)
Identify key takeaways
Filter sensitive info (e.g., “Sarah seemed stressed”)
Draft a tailored email
Optimise for the best send time
Connect to your email client & send it.
It can do all this while constantly learning from feedback.
That is the future of work but very few people and organisations seem to be getting there. I am guessing we need a “Zapier-like moment” where it is so easy to create multi-step agents so adoption becomes real.
3. Top performers become better.
This is the best human insight I have understood about the future of work after AI.
Most top performers become leaders and learn to manage people not because they want to, but because they have to.
A brilliant engineer becomes a tech lead
A top salesperson becomes a sales director.
A stellar marketer becomes a marketing manager.
Yet many of these leaders will never confess the hidden struggle: managing people is draining, complex, and often misaligned with the skills that made them stand out in the first place.
Managing people is a completely different skill, which can distract them from the strategic, creative, or technical work where they thrive.
Forget the people who want to become leaders and build teams.
AI is a godsend for knowledge workers who are incredible at their craft and never want to manage a team.
They can instantly improve their throughput and efficiency using AI, without any effort to build a team (which is something they do not wish to get better at).
Closing thoughts on Micha’s email
It sounds awful to hear that a machine will take over something you’ve worked hard to become good at.
But an interesting quote from Eric Hoffer comes to mind
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
The world will not stop because you are in denial, and AI will end up changing existing jobs.
However, it will also lead to the creation of new jobs, just as the Internet did 30 years ago.
My incentive to keep learning about AI is simple: If I don’t, I’ll miss my opportunity to contribute to this world's new future.
I plan to continue writing about AI and the future of knowledge work. If that sounds interesting, you can subscribe below.