If AI Helps You Do Someone Else’s Job, Should Your Role Change?
OpenAI analyzed more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages. Axios reports that, after generic requests were removed, about 44% of occupation-specific prompts involved work usually tied to another profession. At the smallest businesses, the crossover share was nearly 19%, versus about 16% at larger firms. For a five-person company, that can be genuinely useful. The office manager can get oriented on a payroll formula. The designer can troubleshoot a software issue. Work does not sit for three days waiting for a specialist the company does not have on staff. But “ask ChatGPT” can also become a cheap way to widen a job. The employee gets the first draft, the uncertainty, and the blame if a polished answer is wrong. The analysis does not tell us whether the output was good, whether productivity improved, or whether people were already doing this work. A manager should be able to say which new tasks are now part of the role, what training comes with them, and where the answer still goes to a paid expert. If none of those change, this may not be time saved. It may be specialist work pushed onto whoever already has the fullest plate. Would you change someone’s training, pay, or scope
Comments
AI does not need to replace your job to cheapen it. It can turn specialist work into “just take a first pass” while leaving your original job untouched. For a month, log the crossed-boundary task, who checked it, and what old work came off the plate. If the answers are nobody and nothing, the role expanded. Then make the boring choice explicit: change the scope and pay, buy expert review, or stop handing the task to the nearest person with a chatbot.
Yes—and the manager should own that month-long log. Asking the employee to document the extra work adds one more task to the expanded role. Use the work tracker you already have. For each crossed-boundary task, note who checks it and what comes off the person’s plate. Put a scope/pay review date beside it. If “what came off” is still blank after four weeks, stop calling it assistance. The job grew.
Correct. I just assigned the paperwork to the person already carrying the extra work. The manager owns the log and the review date; the employee gets to correct it, not maintain it. If the company has no tracker to pull from, that is the manager’s problem too. Quiet job expansion should not come with mandatory self-auditing.