Will AI Take Your Job? Wrong Question.

For twenty years I've walked into organisation after organisation and said the same things: nobody can find the right document, nobody knows which version is current, nobody actually owns half the content in the business. People nodded politely. Then went back to what they were doing.

Then AI arrived — and suddenly, when Copilot confidently answers a question using the wrong policy, that mess isn't invisible anymore. It's sitting in a chat window in front of your staff and your customers.

In this episode I get into:

• Why AI doesn't fix messy information — it exposes it
• Will AI take your job? No — but it will change it. Here's what that actually means
• Why "using AI well" is about to become a baseline skill, like email
• Why two organisations can buy the exact same AI tool and get completely different results
• The roles I think are emerging as this decades-old problem finally becomes a boardroom issue

This isn't really a podcast about SharePoint, or even about AI. It's about what happens when a problem we've quietly ignored for 25 years suddenly becomes the thing that decides who wins.

Also visit the blog to read my latest article on the future of Jobs in SharePoint and what will a SharePoint Information Architect be called in 2025.

 https://simplysharepoint.com/what-will-a-sharepoint-information-architect-be-called-in-2035/

Transcript

Have you ever stopped and wondered whether your job will still exist in ten years? Not your company. Not your manager. Your actual job.

Will there still be SharePoint Information Architects? Intranet managers? Knowledge managers? Or will AI simply take over?

I've been thinking about this a lot — not because AI is coming to replace all of us overnight, but because after more than twenty years in SharePoint and information management, I believe we're standing at one of the biggest turning points our profession has ever seen. And most people haven't realised it yet.

Here's my take. The real question isn't whether AI will replace your job — it's how your job is about to change. Whether you're an accountant, a lawyer, a teacher, an HR adviser, or someone like me who's spent decades in SharePoint, every knowledge-based profession is being rewritten. Some jobs will disappear, new ones will emerge, but almost every professional role is going to need one new skill: knowing how to work alongside AI.

And strangely, this episode ends up being about Information Architecture. Because after twenty years trying to convince organisations that governance, metadata and content ownership matter, AI has suddenly made everybody pay attention. Possibly the biggest plot twist of my career.

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone, welcome to the Simply SharePoint Podcast, I'm Liza.

A few weeks ago I was at a digital workplace conference, and something stood out. Nobody was talking about SharePoint, or Teams, or even Copilot features — every hallway conversation came back to AI. But the questions people were asking weren't really AI questions. They were: "Can AI trust our information?" "How does it know which document is current?" "Who owns this content?" "Are our permissions right?"

I sat there smiling, because these are the exact conversations Information Architects have had for twenty years. Only now, people are finally listening. So today: will Information Architects still exist in ten years? What new careers are emerging? And why is this one of the biggest opportunities our profession has ever seen?

Every Knowledge Job Is About to Change

Will some jobs disappear because of AI? Absolutely — history tells us they will. Think bank tellers, travel agents, video stores, switchboard operators. But here's the part people miss: technology rarely replaces a whole job. It replaces parts of it. Take accountants — twenty years ago they spent hours manually reconciling transactions. Today that's automated, but accountants didn't disappear. Their work evolved into analysis and advice. I think AI does exactly the same thing, just much faster, across far more roles at once.

So I don't think we're entering the age of artificial intelligence. I think we're entering the age of AI-assisted professionals. Think about your own day — how much of it is spent searching for information, summarising meetings, writing reports, answering the same questions over and over? Now imagine AI helping with that. Not replacing your expertise — amplifying it. I don't use AI to replace my thinking. I use it to accelerate it — to brainstorm, draft, organise, and challenge my own ideas. I'm still the expert making the decisions.

Here's something worth hearing clearly: learning AI isn't just learning another piece of software — it's becoming a baseline career skill. Remember when Excel was a specialist skill? Now nobody puts "can use Excel" on their résumé. Same happened with email. Nobody lists "can send emails" anymore — it's assumed. AI is heading exactly the same way. In five or ten years, employers won't ask "can you use AI?" They'll simply expect it.

So don't wait for a training course or permission to experiment — open Copilot, try ChatGPT, try Claude, whatever your organisation allows, and just start learning what works.

Here's where it gets interesting for our profession specifically. If organisations are going to rely on AI to answer questions, where does AI get those answers from? How does it know what's accurate, what's current, who should see it? Those aren't AI questions. They're information questions.

Why Organisations Suddenly Care About Information

For over twenty years, people in SharePoint, records and knowledge management have been saying: metadata matters, content ownership matters, governance matters. Honestly, it often felt like we were talking to ourselves. Organisations agreed in principle but rarely treated it as a priority. Documents piled up, sites got built and forgotten within six months.

Think about your own organisation. How many documents are named "Final," "Final v2," "Final FINAL," "Use This One"? We've all seen them, we've all laughed about it. Harmless — until AI arrives. Imagine asking Copilot "what's our current procurement policy" when there are six versions floating around: one from 2018, one marked draft, one superseded, one actually current. Which one does AI use? That's not an AI problem. That's an information management problem.

This is the myth I want to bust: AI doesn't clean up messy information. It exposes it. If you've got duplicate documents, AI sees duplicates. If nobody owns a policy, AI doesn't know who owns it. If permissions are inconsistent, AI just reflects that mess — confidently, and in front of your staff and customers.

Which is why I think information is no longer just something organisations store. It's becoming the fuel that powers AI. Imagine two organisations with the exact same Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. One has clean, well-owned, well-governed content. The other has years of duplication and no clear ownership. Same AI. Completely different results. The organisations that win won't be the ones with the biggest technology budget — they'll be the ones that invested in their information.

And that's exciting for anyone who's spent their career in SharePoint, governance or knowledge management, because the skills you've been building for years just became business-critical. Not because they changed — because the world around them did.

Why SharePoint Isn't Dying — It's Becoming Invisible

People keep telling me "AI is going to replace SharePoint." I don't buy it. I think it's becoming more important than ever — people just won't realise they're using it.

Think about electricity. Nobody walks into the kitchen and says "I'm going to use electricity to make a coffee" — you just say "I'm making a coffee." Electricity became invisible, still essential, just not something you think about. Same with the internet — twenty-five years ago people talked about "going online," nobody says that now, they just order food or watch Netflix. Cloud computing followed the same path — remember companies proudly announcing they were "moving to the cloud"? Nobody cares anymore, they just expect their files to sync.

SharePoint is heading exactly the same way. Imagine it's 2035 and a new employee joins your organisation. They're not going to learn intranet navigation — they'll open an AI assistant and ask "how do I apply for leave?" They won't care where the information is stored, and honestly, they shouldn't have to. Nobody thinks about which Google server answered their search. They just expect an answer.

But — and this is the important part — just because people stop navigating SharePoint doesn't mean SharePoint stops doing the work. It's still storing the document, managing permissions, maintaining version history. The user experience changes. The foundation doesn't.

In many ways, SharePoint becomes like plumbing. Nobody gets excited about plumbing — until it stops working, and suddenly it's the most important thing in the house. If it's organised properly, nobody notices it. If it's a mess, everyone notices — especially when AI starts giving the wrong answers.

And it makes me think we've never really been "SharePoint professionals." We've been knowledge professionals who happened to use SharePoint as our platform. That's bigger than any one piece of software.

The Roles I Believe Are Coming Next

So will Information Architects still exist in ten years? Yes — and no. I think the skills become more valuable than ever. I'm just not convinced we'll keep calling ourselves Information Architects.

A few roles I think we'll see more of: the AI Readiness Architect, who makes sure an organisation's information is actually fit for AI before it goes live, not after it's already given someone the wrong answer. The AI Governance Lead, who owns who can access what and who's accountable when it goes wrong — every organisation already has security and records governance, AI just adds a layer nobody's owning yet. And the Knowledge Operations Manager — think DevOps, but for knowledge — someone continuously reviewing content and ownership, because knowledge isn't something you organise once.

Notice what these roles have in common: understanding information, governance, permissions and people. Exactly the skills Information Architects have built for years. The technology changes. The principles don't. That's why I don't think our profession disappears — I think it evolves, and finally gets the recognition it's deserved for two decades.

The Most Employable Person in the Room

So what should you actually do with all this?

First — don't wait. Don't wait for your organisation to run a training course. Start experimenting now, with whatever AI tool you have access to.

Second — the question everyone's really asking underneath everything else — will I lose my job, or will it just change? It goes without saying, some jobs will disappear, that's true of every wave of technology we've lived through. But technology rarely replaces a whole job — it replaces parts of it. So the better question isn't "will AI take my job," it's "which parts of my job look different in five years, and am I the one deciding what I do with the time that frees up?" Embrace it now, while experimenting still makes you stand out. Because AI doesn't replace judgement or experience — if anything, those become more valuable, since someone still has to decide whether the AI's answer is actually right.

And here's the thing I think matters most. Every organisation will have access to roughly the same AI technology — that's not the differentiator. The differentiator is something most organisations have quietly pushed to the backburner for years, because it was never urgent enough: do you actually know what you know? Is your content current, owned, trustworthy? Two organisations with the identical AI licence get completely different results, and the gap is entirely about the knowledge underneath. That's the real competitive advantage now — not just for organisations, but for the people in them. The ones who understand their organisation's knowledge are about to become some of the most valuable people in the building, simply because they can make AI actually work.

So here's my challenge. Don't try to master AI this week — that's impossible. Pick one task. Write an email with it, summarise a meeting, brainstorm a presentation. See what works, see what doesn't. That's how the skill builds.

CLOSING

So — will there still be SharePoint Information Architects in 2035? Maybe. Maybe not. But will organisations still need people who understand information, governance, and how to organise knowledge so AI gives trustworthy answers? More than ever. The title may change. The mission won't.

We've had this problem for twenty-five years. AI just finally gave us a reason to fix it — and that's a genuinely exciting place for our profession, and for anyone willing to learn, to be standing right now.

I'm Liza from Simply SharePoint. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.