Artificial intelligence is making career management faster, cheaper and more accessible. Workers now routinely turn to ChatGPT for résumé writing, cover letters, interview preparation, LinkedIn profiles and networking messages, folding AI into the daily mechanics of professional advancement. But Laura Simms, founder of Your Career Homecoming, a specialised career coaching company, argues that the more consequential story is not how efficiently AI is helping people climb, but where exactly it is helping them go.
Her concern is that many professionals are becoming increasingly adept at optimising careers they already feel emotionally disconnected from. In that sense, AI may be accelerating a problem that predates it.
In this interview with Business A.M.’s Onome Amuge, Simms discusses career anxiety in the age of AI, the pressure to continuously optimise oneself professionally, and why better tools are not necessarily creating a healthier relationship with work. She also reflects on what it means to rethink ambition at a time when technology is making it easier than ever to keep moving in the wrong direction. Excepts:
Many professionals are using AI tools like ChatGPT to improve resumes, cover letters, and job applications. Do you think these tools are solving career problems or simply helping people move faster within careers they may already feel disconnected from?
For the most part, these tools help people move faster. AI (in the hands of an adept user) is brilliant at execution but poor at giving direction. It can sharpen a resume and polish an application, but it’s not a reliable guide on whether the job you’re chasing is the right one for you. So AI often just gets you more efficiently into a role that doesn’t fit. The real problem my clients faced was never that they couldn’t write a resume. It’s that they’re good at work that drains them and have no idea what they actually want instead. No amount of speed or optimisation at the application stage addresses that question. Used well, AI is an accelerator. What’s worth paying attention to is what you’re accelerating toward.
LinkedIn recently reported that nearly half of professionals worry AI will fundamentally change their careers. In your experience, how much of today’s career anxiety is driven by AI versus pre-existing workplace dissatisfaction?
AI is definitely adding another layer of anxiety. It’s a heavily covered topic right now, and a lot of that coverage tends toward the apocalyptic, so it piles more uncertainty onto already uncertain times. That said, there’s almost always something in the zeitgeist that workers worry about and can’t control. AI is the current one.
It helps to separate two different fears that get blurred together. AI is a real new pressure on people’s sense of security. “Will there be a job, an income, a place for me?” That’s a legitimate worry and it’s largely about the outside world and out of their control. Underneath it is an older one that has nothing to do with technology, which is whether the work was ever right for them in the first place. That’s about fulfillment, and for a lot of people it was already missing long before AI was on the radar.
What AI tends to do is magnify the second by way of the first. The fear of being replaced is easier to face than the more personal worry that the career you built isn’t one you actually want. So AI is both a real pressure on security and a mirror held up to a question of fulfillment people were already avoiding.
Do you think AI intensified the pressure workers feel to constantly optimise themselves professionally, and what impact is that having on mental well-being?
People are worried about keeping up because their livelihood feels like it’s on the line. The fear isn’t only that technology replaces them. It’s that if they don’t stay current, they’ll be replaced by another person who uses the technology better than they do. On its own, that pressure would be fairly normal. Workers have always had to keep their skills current. What’s different now is the pace. AI is being adopted and accelerated faster than most people can absorb, and they’re being asked to absorb it on top of schedules and minds that are already full.
The stress sharpens when the message from the top is cool and distant. A “you’d better keep up” delivered as a warning, with no continuing education or support attached, lands very differently than “here are the tools and here’s the time to learn them.” One treats keeping up as the worker’s private burden. The other treats it as a shared investment.
When the bar keeps rising and the support doesn’t, people read that gap. They’re being treated as a less valuable asset than the technology. That kind of low-grade pressure follows someone home and shows up in the body long before it shows up in the work.
Are workers becoming more productive with AI while simultaneously becoming less connected to the purpose of their work?
For some people, yes, and for others, not at all. PwC’s 2025 global workforce survey found that daily AI users report being more productive. Whether that comes at the cost of feeling connected to the work depends on the work itself.
When AI takes over the thinking and the craft, some people feel freed up and others feel hollowed out. The difference is whether the work was ever a good fit for them. Handing the part that mattered over to a machine and the work that’s left can feel more like babysitting than rewarding work.
Doing more of the wrong work faster doesn’t close the gap between what they produce and what they care about. It widens it.
Do you believe AI could ultimately make career transitions easier, or could it create new barriers for people seeking reinvention?
So far, I’ve only seen AI compound confusion. People lean on it to choose a direction, and even when they use it just to research an unfamiliar field, it can map that field wrong and send them down a dead end. It’s worth remembering what these tools actually are. A large language model works by prediction, and its suggestions are only as good as the self-awareness you bring to it. If your read on yourself is incomplete or off, it builds on that flaw with total confidence. Using it to choose a career is not far off from a high-tech version of reading tarot cards. The choice has to come from you.
In your view, are employers paying enough attention to the emotional and psychological dimensions of work as they invest more heavily in AI and automation?
Most aren’t, and the gap widens the more they invest in AI without attending to the people doing the work. Employers consistently underestimate how much their best people are already carrying. The expectation to be always on and to do more with less support, now with the added fear of being replaced by the very tools being rolled out. Before anyone writes this off as a Gen Z snowflake issue, I’m seeing it in workers in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. It isn’t about gold stars or pats on the head. People want to know their contribution matters and that they’re worth investing in. Without that, your best people start looking for an employer who treats them with more respect, and they’re the ones with the most options to leave.
For professionals who feel anxious about being replaced or disrupted by AI, what practical steps should they take to future-proof their careers?
By now everyone’s heard the standard advice: train and upskill on AI so you can work with it instead of being replaced by it. That’s worth doing, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is understanding the value you have to offer outside the context of any single role. Most people define themselves by their job title and their current responsibilities, which means when the role changes or disappears, their sense of what they’re worth goes with it. That’s the fragile position. Your real security is knowing your actual gifts, the things you do well and naturally that are valuable across roles, industries, and whatever the technology does next. That knowledge is portable; a title is not. The professionals who will weather this best aren’t the ones with the most current tool stack. They’re the ones who are clear on what they bring that no shift in technology can take away.
In your work with clients, are you seeing more people seeking career advancement or seeking career alignment and fulfillment?
Decisively, alignment. The people coming to me are well past advancement. They’ve already climbed. They got the title and the income and found [that] those didn’t deliver what they were promised. The questions have changed. It’s no longer how do I get ahead, it’s how do I take what I’ve already built and channel it into work that pays and means something, and do I have what it takes to succeed in a new way. AI is sharpening this. When the tools make the advancement game cheap and fast, the scarce and human thing becomes knowing what you actually want and why. That’s the one question a machine can’t answer for you. And to be clear, alignment doesn’t mean taking a step down. Given the option of money or meaning, my clients don’t actually want to choose. When they realise they can have both, they’ll take both every time.
Looking ahead, do you think the biggest workplace challenge of the AI era will be technological adaptation, or helping people reconnect with meaningful and sustainable careers?
The technological adaptation will sort itself out. It always does. People learned the spreadsheet and the internet, and they’ll learn this too. The harder challenge is the human one. AI helps you do your work faster. It has nothing to say about whether it’s the right work. So as the tools get more powerful, the real question gets more clear: Am I building a career that fits the life I actually want, or just a more efficient version of one that doesn’t. No tool is coming to solve that. The companies and individuals who do well will take that question as seriously as they’re taking the technology. AI is the accelerant. What it accelerates toward is still a human choice.
When borrowing from my wife came in handy