Last Tuesday, Atlassian fired 1,600 people. That is roughly 10% of the entire company. More than half of them were engineers.

The reason they gave was simple: AI.

This was not a struggling company. Atlassian's cloud revenue hit over a billion dollars last quarter, up 26% year over year. They are growing, profitable, and doing well by every financial measure that matters.

The stock went up on the news.

Let that sit for a moment. The market rewarded them for cutting 1,600 jobs. Just like it rewarded Block a few weeks ago for doing the same thing. Just like it will reward the next company that announces it is replacing humans with AI agents.

Eighteen months ago, Atlassian's CEO said publicly that AI would mean they'd hire more engineers. Last week, he said it would be "disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas."

Eighteen months. That is how fast the story changed.

If you are a VP, a director, or a partner sitting inside a large organization right now, you probably noticed something familiar in that timeline. The narrative at the top shifts quickly. And the people who believed the previous version of it are the ones who get caught.

This is not just Atlassian. Reuters is reporting that Meta is planning layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its workforce. ServiceNow's CEO told CNBC that unemployment for new college graduates could easily hit the mid-30s in the next couple of years. Amazon laid off tens of thousands and then had a six-hour checkout outage partly because a human engineer followed bad advice from an AI tool that referenced an outdated internal wiki. They'd let go of the people who would have caught that.

A new dashboard called jobloss.ai is now tracking every publicly reported AI-linked job loss in real time. Since January 2025, the number is over 76,000 globally. And those are only the ones that made the news.

The pattern is clear. Companies are not waiting to figure out what AI means for their workforce. They are cutting first and learning later. And the stock market is cheering them on.

Here is where it gets personal for you.

You have spent 20 or 25 years building expertise that is rare. You know things that cannot be Googled. You have judgment that was built through thousands of decisions, hundreds of negotiations, and a few spectacular failures that taught you more than any success ever did.

That expertise is real. But right now, it is locked inside an organization that sees your salary as a line item and your replacement as a quarterly strategy.

The question is not whether AI will reshape your company. It already is. The question is whether you will be the one deciding how your expertise gets used, or whether someone else will make that decision for you.

Now, here is where most people in your position get stuck. They know they should be building something of their own. They know they should be visible, known for what they know, positioned as the person others call when they need a specific kind of help. But they do not know how to start that process. And one of the biggest barriers is the most basic one: writing.

Building authority as an independent expert requires you to share what you know. Newsletters, LinkedIn posts, articles, frameworks. The kind of content that makes the right people say, "This person understands my problem better than I do."

And this is where AI becomes your greatest tool, if you know where to draw the line.

A New York Times experiment recently asked 86,000 people to tell the difference between AI-written and human-written passages. 54% preferred the AI versions. They could barely tell the difference.

AI is very, very good at writing. That is no longer a debate.

But what matters for someone building an independent practice is the following: the decision of when to use AI and when to write yourself is the decision that determines whether people trust you.

There is a spectrum. On one end, you have writing that must be entirely yours. Your point of view on an industry shift. A story from a negotiation that went sideways and what you learned from it. The newsletter where you take a position that could make some people uncomfortable. That writing is how people decide whether to work with you. It is the reason they pick up the phone. If AI writes it, the connection is hollow. Even if the prose is beautiful, it carries no weight because there is no one behind it.

On the other end, you have writing where efficiency matters more than voice. A case study that needs clean structure. An industry analysis. A summary of regulatory changes. In these cases, AI can do the heavy lifting while you shape the direction and add the insight that only you can offer.

The people who build authority fastest understand this distinction instinctively. They use AI to handle the volume, the research, the structure. But when it comes to the moments that create trust, the personal stories, the hard-won lessons, the opinions that come from decades of experience, they show up and write it themselves.

Your expertise is an asset. Your perspective is what makes it irreplaceable. AI can help you share both at scale. But it cannot replace the part of you that makes people want to listen in the first place.

The corporate world is reorganizing around AI whether you are ready or not. Atlassian proved that last week. The smartest move is not to wait for the next round of cuts. It is to start building something that belongs to you, where your expertise is the foundation and AI is the system that helps you reach the people who need it.

That is a very different position than being employee number 4,217 waiting for a reorganization email.

Warmly,

Salama

P.S. If you are planning your move out of corporate in the next 3 to 6 months and want a clear first step, I set aside time each week for 15-minute strategy sessions. No pitch, just clarity. Apply here.