Anik Devaughn on the five jobs safe from AI

SWNS ran a solo commentary from Anik Devaughn, founder of Wired to Create and a builder of AI agents, on the five kinds of work safest from AI, and the quiet risk almost nobody is naming.

On 27 July 2026, SWNS ran a solo commentary from Anik Devaughn, founder and CEO of Wired to Create and a builder of AI agents, on which jobs hold as AI advances. His framing cut against the panic: the danger is not jobs vanishing overnight but the bottom rungs being quietly removed, and with them the path juniors climb to become senior. As he put it, the first drafts, research summaries, and basic production work — the junior work — go first, and that work “was never just output. It was how people became senior.”

His rule, drawn from building with agents every day: AI takes the execution and leaves the judgment. It relocates the need for humans rather than removing it.

From there he named five kinds of work that hold. The connectors who jump between domains, product managers, founders, solutions architects, strategists. The people with taste, creative and art directors, editors, curators, casting directors, heads of design. Anyone whose product is trust, nurses, therapists, senior negotiators, where what matters is a human who will stand behind the answer. The trades, builders, electricians, plumbers, where every site is improvised against something nobody documented. And the people who supervise AI, which, he notes, is his own job now.

Underneath the list sits the quieter warning: if AI does all of the junior work, we risk a generation that can't climb. That, he argues, is the genuine risk, and almost nobody is talking about it because it is slow and invisible.

AI replaces work you can specify. It cannot replace work you can only judge.

Anik Devaughn to SWNS, July 2026