Hat count this stretch: 3.
The first job I ever deleted wasn't a person. It was a file.
We ran a tube laser, and like every machine on the floor it only accepted geometry in its own format. The standard way to feed it was a chain: model the part, export it, push it through a translation into the format the laser could read, then import that. A translation file sitting in the middle of the workflow whose entire reason to exist was that two pieces of software didn't speak the same language. Everybody treated that step as part of the job. It was the job — somebody's time, every part, forever.
I got it in my head that the translation didn't have to be there. I went back into Autodesk Inventor and designed the tube differently — built the model so the laser could take it directly. No export, no translate, no re-import. The part went from design straight into the machine. The step didn't get faster. It stopped existing.
That's a small story. One file, one machine. But it's the first time I remember seeing work that existed only to move information from one form into another — and realizing you could delete the work by fixing the thing upstream instead of staffing the gap.
Hold onto that, because it's the whole game, and it scales a lot further than a file.
The one thing you're looking for
That translation file is the whole thesis in miniature. Strip away the software and every "AI eliminated a job" story is the same shape: something exists only to take what the business already knows and re-render it into a form the next station can use. A file translation is a re-render. So is a person who reads one screen and types it into another.
That's the failure mode — not the person, the arrangement. The information already exists. You've just put a human in the gap to be the cable between two things that should talk to each other directly.
The translation file was the harmless version. The expensive version wears a badge and draws a salary. Once you see work this way, the candidates light up — and they come in four shapes.
Shape 1 — The Relay
A person whose job is moving information from one place to another. They don't change it. They carry it.
The tell: "Let me forward that to you." "I'll let the floor know." "I'll loop in engineering."
At most manufacturers, when a deal closes, the details reach the floor by email, a text, and a hallway conversation. Somebody owns that relay — and the day they're out, the handoff is too. At one shop I work with, we wired it so closing the deal fires the handoff itself: the kickoff lands structured and complete, and it no longer depends on anyone remembering to carry it. The relay didn't get faster. It stopped being a person's job.
Shape 2 — The Human Database
A person who holds live state in their head. Ask them and they know; don't, and the business is blind.
The tell: "Go ask so-and-so, they'll know where that one stands."
At one shop, a single person was the sales pipeline. Not metaphorically — the live status of every active pursuit lived in his memory and his sent folder. Who's hot, who's gone quiet, what's slipping. That's not a person doing a job. That's a person being the system. We built a watch that reads the same signals he was reading by instinct and surfaces what's gone quiet on its own. He's still there. He's just no longer the only copy.
This is the dangerous one, because it doesn't look like waste. It looks like your best employee. Right up until they take a job somewhere else.
Shape 3 — The Reconciler
A person who exists to check whether two records agree.
The tell: "Every Monday I pull this report and compare it against that one." If the answer to "why" is "to make sure they match," you've found it.
Two systems that should agree, a human stationed between them as the referee. The reconciler rarely fills a whole role — they fill an hour here, a morning there, scattered across people who don't realize they're all doing the same chore. Add it up across the building and it's a position hiding in plain sight.
Shape 4 — The Reader
A person who reads a stream of stuff to pull out the few things that matter.
The tell: "I go through the inbox every morning and flag the ones we need to act on."
The status of every quote used to live in one person's inbox — knowing where one stood meant asking the person who remembered. Now the mail stream gets read automatically and the status surfaces on its own.
I'll give you one I ran on myself, because I'm not going to point at other people's operations without pointing at my own. Every week I write client updates. Assembling "what actually happened this week" meant rereading a week of email and meeting notes and synthesizing the handful that mattered. I built an extractor that pulls the decisions and commitments into the draft for me. I eliminated a slice of my own week. It was the right call there too.
How to use this
Walk your operation and ask one question at every desk: is this person creating something, or carrying something that already exists?
That's not just a cost test. It's the line between the work people resent and the work they'd do for free. Nobody grew up wanting to be the cable between two systems. But making something — a design, a fix, a process that didn't exist yesterday, a customer who trusts you — is about as old and as human as it gets. It's the part of the job people actually go home proud of.
Carriers are candidates. Creators are the whole point. Relay, Human Database, Reconciler, Reader — name the shape and you've found work a system should be doing instead of a person. You're not hunting it to shrink the team. You're hunting it to move people off the carrying and back onto the creating.
You don't need process-mining software to start. You need the four shapes and a notebook. The software just does at scale what I did with that one tube — find the spot where information gets re-rendered to cross a gap — except it never gets tired and it looks at every desk in the building at once.
And why that's a good thing
Eliminating a position is not eliminating a person. It's eliminating the part of someone's week that was quietly eating them.
I know what carrying work does to a person, because I was the carrier. Not long ago I wrote here about becoming the single point of contact for our biggest customer — me, routing every request by hand across divisions. That was the Human Database and the Relay, in the flesh. For years I was the place information went to get passed along. It's a strange kind of exhausting: busy every minute, and at the end of the day you've made nothing. The grind was never the hours. It was spending them moving things that already existed from one place to another.
Every bit of value I ever added came from the opposite — the rare stretch where I got out of the weeds long enough to actually look. The tube redesign. The process nobody asked me to build. The judgment call that mattered. None of it came from carrying. It came from having room to think.
Get a person off the carrying and two things happen. They add more, because they finally have the room. And they enjoy it more, because creating is the part of work that feels like anything at all. That's not a soft benefit you tack on at the end. That's the benefit.
Because here's the one thing none of the four shapes covers. A system can absorb the carrying. It still can't notice that a process needs to exist in the first place. That takes a person with enough room to see it — standing on the floor, looking at what isn't there yet.
That's the half of this nobody automates. More on it next time.
If I'd had AI... back then, I found that translation step because it annoyed me, one machine at a time. Process-mining and workflow tools map every hand-off and format-shift across a whole operation and surface the redundant ones automatically — the translations, the relays, the re-keying. The catch: the tool finds the step. It still takes an operator to redesign the thing upstream so the step stops existing.
Your turn: Walk your floor this week and find one carrier — one person moving information that already exists from one place to another. Name which of the four shapes it is. That's your first candidate.
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Field notes on AI, operations, and ownership from inside America's small manufacturers. Every installment of From Burnout to Buyout — the real story of 18 years inside a company that went from a napkin sketch to a $400M acquisition.