Stop trying to replace people with AI

The biggest positioning mistake in AI marketing is selling your product as a replacement for people. It wins attention now, but costs you trust later.

Heads up: This memo is a slight deviation from the usual topics I regularly write about. But it’s an important one.

In this memo: 

• Why “substitution positioning” feels good short term and decays your brand long term.
• The data showing AI isn’t actually replacing people.
• How to better position AI.

The cardinal sin of positioning in the AI era is replacement. I call it “substitution positioning.” Short term, it’s yummy. Long term, it plants cavities in your perception.

In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted software engineering jobs to go away in the following 6-12 months. Demand for software engineers is reaching new heights today.

“I think we might be 6 to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end to end.” 

In September 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted customer support jobs will go away. Almost immediately after he said that, customer service hiring started outpacing the broader job market.

• “I’m confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that’ll be better done by an AI.” 

AI companies use fear as a marketing tool. Specifically, the fear of being replaced. They got me, too. I was deeply worried about my future when Opus 4.5 got traction. 

However, as long as I see that even Anthropic is hiring copywriters and SEOs, I sleep much better.

Times were more uncertain before AI came on the scene (I’ll spare you the TED talk about unprecedented times). Fear sells. Tapping into our primal fight-or-flight response is a sure way to get attention. And layoffs act as a double agent in this environment: They make companies that underperform or overhired look good (“Look, we don’t need as many people anymore because we’re so innovative!”) and feed the substitution positioning narrative.

But the facts show that recent layoffs are closer to AI washing than AI spring cleaning:

• New York state added an option for companies to indicate when they lay staff off due to AI (technological innovation or automation). In March of this year, over 160 companies filed mass layoffs of ~28,300 workers. Not even one chose AI as the reason. That list includes Amazon and Goldman Sachs.
• Researchers at Yale looked at the CPS, a government survey that tracks employment across the US, over the last 33 months and found no evidence of job displacement from AI. The way AI impact works looks very similar to how computers and the internet changed work. 

Premium is $150/year. That’s less than one walked-back AI announcement. The Growth Memo resource library includes the positioning reframe asset in this memo… and the rest of the audits, workflows, and decks built for the AI visibility era.