Last week a company called Opendoor told its team it was winding down its 250-person operation in India and pulling the work back to the US. The reason was not cost. They had rebuilt the work around AI and small, AI-native teams. The CEO described what the company would become: “a much smaller company by headcount, but a much larger company by impact.”

Read that line again as someone with twenty-plus years behind you. That is the labor market quietly reorganizing itself around AI, rather than a company restructuring, and it is moving faster than most of the people inside it can react to.

There was a second story last week that sat right next to it. A group of AI researchers and former government advisors published a report called Europe 2031. It lays out how a whole continent could slide into irrelevance by getting AI wrong. They name three mistakes:

1. Europe misjudged how fast AI would move.
2. It misjudged how much AI would change.
3. And it misjudged its own ability to catch up later.

I read those three and did not think about Europe. I thought about the accomplished executives I speak with every week, because those are the exact three mistakes they make about their own careers.

Mistake one: misjudging the speed. You think you have a few comfortable years to figure this out. The people actually building these systems are saying something different. The honest timeline coming out of the labs is that the next eighteen to twenty-four months get genuinely uncomfortable, and it starts at the entry and mid levels before it works its way up. The window is not closing tomorrow. It is also not as wide as your calendar assumes.

Mistake two: misjudging how much it changes. Most professionals I meet still treat AI as a faster way to write an email or build a deck. That is the small version. The real version is that AI agents now run entire pieces of work end to end. This week a payments company, Stripe, said it compressed a code migration that should have taken months into a single day. The question for you is not whether you can use the tools. It is whether your expertise is packaged in a way that compounds with that kind of speed, or gets flattened by it.

Mistake three: misjudging your ability to catch up. This is the dangerous one. You ran divisions. You managed nine-figure budgets. You have solved harder problems than this. So the quiet assumption is that you can pick this up later, on your own, whenever you decide to. The same confidence that built your career is the thing that delays the move. By the time “later” feels urgent, the people who started while they still had runway are two years ahead.

Here is the reframe I keep coming back to.

The professionals navigating this well are not waiting to be displaced. They are doing at the individual level exactly what Opendoor did at the company level. Smaller by headcount, which for one person means one person. Larger by impact, because they have put AI agents under the hood of their own practice.

That is what an independent practice looks like now. One expert, plus AI agents that handle the positioning, the outreach, the proposals, and a large share of the delivery. It is a business built on your authority that grows without you doing everything manually, and without a team of twelve to manage. The expertise is still yours. The twenty years are still the asset. The agents are the reason a single person can now build something that used to require a department.

So before you file Europe 2031 under interesting and move on, write your own version of it.

Two columns. On the left, the path where you wait, stay where the structure is familiar, and assume there is time. On the right, the path where you move while you still have runway and build the thing you own. Then sit with three questions:

1. How fast do I actually believe this moves, not how fast I would prefer it to.
2. How much does it change what my specific expertise is worth.
3. And am I overestimating how easily I can catch up later.

The people who answer those three honestly tend to stop waiting.

If you are planning your move out of corporate in the next three to six months and you want to pressure-test where you actually stand, I keep a few 15-minute strategy sessions open each week. You will get a clear read on your situation and the first move.

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Salama