Professionals are under pressure in a rapidly changing economy. Here's how to stay ahead

Tom is a software engineer with a degree in computer science. We’ve changed his name to protect his privacy; he is smart, hard-working and well-liked. For years, Tom ran a small engineering shop that built, maintained and grew company websites. His business was thriving and he was saving for the future.

Then, a year ago, Tom’s steady pipeline of contracts suddenly dried up. Tom realized that all the work his team was performing across multiple clients had vanished due to artificial intelligence (AI). It wasn’t a downturn; it was a reckoning.

Overnight, his livelihood disappeared as his skills grew obsolete. Tom had a choice to make – adapt or be left behind. But when he looked at the labour market for guidance, what he found was daunting.

Hiring in sectors like health and sustainability was growing, but tech was contracting fast. GM, for example, recently cut 1,000 employees while introducing 50 robots to the factory floor, and Oracle reduced its headcount by 21,000 –13% of its workforce – as it reshapes its business around AI. Across the US this pattern held, with 50,000 layoffs in 2025 attributed to AI.

Tom’s story isn’t an outlier; it’s one we see daily. My company, Localized, stays in close contact with a wide range of employers from our database of 50,000 organizations as we focus on connecting emerging talent with jobs. Over the last three years we have seen top tech behemoths, banks, consulting firms and systems integrators freeze their early talent pipelines one by one.

Leaders of university technical recruitment for the Middle East and Africa who previously worked closely with us to build their recruitment pipelines were quietly let go or restructured to focus on mid-level recruitment in known hubs like Warsaw, Bangalore or Tel Aviv. As companies leaned further into automation, entire engineering entry points for African and MENA-based fresh graduates evaporated.

The situation for fresh graduates looked dire – including for those with Ivy League degrees – as unemployment rates skyrocketed. Some attribute these shifts to remote work and others to AI. The effects on talent pools were ultimately the same – fewer jobs, internships and entry points to an uncertain employment landscape.

Yet despite predictions that AI would eliminate much of the professional workforce, a path forward is emerging. Through tens of thousands of interactions with learners and employers navigating rapid technological and climate change, we've found that early-career graduates and vulnerable professionals can protect themselves from this uncertainty – and prepare for what's ahead.

Both AI and climate change are redefining which skills existing white collar jobs require and determining what new roles emerge.

The professionals who thrive are fluent in both. Tom's recovery, it turns out, was no fluke. It traces a deliberate set of skills that any professional can build.

That skills framework is what I call GRADIENTS:

So what happened to Tom? He set aside his old mental model for software development and began learning with a beginner’s mind via YouTube and books like The AI-Driven Leader by Geoff Woods.

Instead of focusing on coding languages, he built agents to manage his time, coordinate his workflows and automate his job search. One agent searched for jobs that matched his profile, another filled out applications on his behalf and a third tracked his process.

He learned the difference between retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and how the various large language models (LLMs) work, and why Transformers – a deep learning architecture – matter. He ran experiments on token cost models.

These systems became his calling card in interviews. Today, he is a tech leader at a successful company and is infusing his rapid prototyping and release methodologies across every department from sales to customer success.

He now works alongside team members who weigh AI usage with climate impact to find ways to innovate in a carbon-conscious way. Carbon intelligence is still an area of growth for Tom, but he is aware that his upskilling needs to be continuous.

Tom had the benefit of years in the workforce before his AI reckoning. He had already built the managerial skills needed to oversee agents and people alike. For students and fresh graduates, building those same managerial, time management and intelligent systems design muscles takes practice.

And, unfortunately, employers are providing fewer opportunities for this practice. But there are still many ways for us as a society to support this growth.

At Localized, we host “AI show and tells” every two weeks across our company to track what people are learning and building, and we’re going to make those sessions public so our learners can benefit as well. We also built an AI-first learning management system for training purposes and personalized career coaching platform. Our designer tackled fundamental questions about what design and interfaces should look like beyond chatbots in the age of AI.

This is new terrain; we want to build in public, grounded in first principles thinking. We’re also planning a series of green hackathons for thousands of post-secondary students in 2027. Universities and workforce training programmes can do the same – for both AI and green skills. Instruction can come from practitioners and fellow students, as the landscape is changing so rapidly that aficionados of AI and carbon intelligence may be more up to date than tenured professors.

To paraphrase Reid Hoffman, "learn from people not [just] classes", because by the time it’s taught in class, it’s may already be too late. Hackathons and labs built with municipalities, startups or community organizations can energize learners and keep their applied learning relevant. And like Tom, what they produce becomes their calling cards.

In this new era, AI feedback loops in the form of building intelligent systems are not only possible but critical. And with growing AI adoption comes increased energy usage, grid pressure and downstream effects on municipalities and society at large.

Thus demand for green skills – which already outpace supply – grows stronger. Professionals who pair that AI systems fluency with carbon intelligence won't just adapt to the future of work – they'll help define it.

Master these skills and you become an indispensable supervisor – the agent of change who sets the agenda, the systems and the benchmarks, then moves on to solve adjacent problems.