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Earlier this year, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, announced a major workforce reduction while stating that employees across functions were already using thousands of AI agent sessions a day and that the company was redesigning processes, teams, and roles for the “agentic AI era.” It is exactly this kind of development that fuels one of today’s most pressing questions: what will be the impact of AI on the value of human labor?
In the article Will I Still Have a Job? Reflections on AI and the Value of Human Labor, Filip Caeldries, Professor of Strategy and Organization at TIAS School for Business and Society, argues that the answer is more nuanced than a simple story of replacement. While AI will undoubtedly automate tasks and reduce labor demand in some parts of the economy, this does not mean human work loses all value. Consumers do not choose based on efficiency alone. Functional value matters, but so do social, emotional, and epistemic value.
The human factor still matters
That is where the human factor remains essential. In many contexts, human presence, judgment, warmth, and connection are part of the value proposition itself. The article points to examples ranging from art and live performance to teaching, care, hospitality, and customer service, where human involvement continues to command trust and even a price premium.
At the same time, the labor-market impact of AI will depend heavily on demand. Lower prices and higher productivity may reduce jobs in some sectors, while creating growth in others. The real challenge lies not only in automation itself, but in how demand shifts and whether workers can adapt, reskill, and move into new forms of value creation.
Ultimately, the article concludes that AI is likely to transform the economy rather than simply hollow it out. As AI makes more goods and services cheaper and more abundant, demand may increasingly shift toward products and services where the human element is inseparable from the experience.