Goodbye to the average worker

For years we were warned that the robots were coming. We imagined human-like machines marching into offices, sitting at our desks. It never happened.

New worker market

(shutterstock)

2026 has begun, and the revolution looks very different. There is no overnight mass unemployment. There is something else — a crack opening quietly in the Israeli labor market, right down the middle. There are graphic designers earning 25,000 shekels more per month than their colleagues. There are content writers still debating whether they should even learn the new tools. The difference between them is not talent or experience — it is who adopted AI and who is still watching from the sidelines.
The crack you can’t see in the numbers

On the surface, the numbers still look stable. There is no catastrophe. You can still sleep at night. But inside those stable numbers lie two sharp shifts: a decline in entry-level jobs — the roles fresh graduates once used to enter the workforce, do the groundwork, and learn from the bottom up. Now, much of that work is moving to AI. Suddenly, an entire generation sees strange new requirements in job listings. Even a secretary is now expected to have “experience with AI tools.” What was once a nice advantage has become a basic requirement. And those who still haven’t grasped this will learn the hard way.

In a café in Herzliya two weeks ago, I sat across from a development manager named Yuval. Twenty years in high tech. Kids, a mortgage, stock options turned into paper. He ordered his usual double espresso, but something in him had changed.

“Do you know what the problem is?” he said. “I don’t understand why they still need me.”

He hasn’t been fired — not yet. But he sees the signs. His team has shrunk. Tasks that once took a week now take two days. Yuval is not someone who fears easily. He survived the dot-com crash, 2008, COVID. There was always work for someone who could write code. Always. Until now.

What has happened in the past two years is an efficiency trap. Where once a development team needed ten juniors to write basic code, today one senior with AI agents can do the same work in half the time. The result: Israel’s junior market has frozen. Demand for entry-level programmers, customer-service workers, and traditional content writers is falling sharply. The real threat is not that the machine will replace you — but that the colleague next to you, the one who learned the tools, will now do the work of ten. The employer only needs one out of four. Guess who stays outside.

35% of tech companies have already laid off workers — they call it “efficiency”

A fresh figure from a 2026 survey by the Israel Innovation Authority and Zviran: 35% of tech companies reported layoffs in the past six months. They call it efficiency.

Two years ago, a senior software executive told me his engineers were completing in one day what once took a week. I asked what that meant for headcount. He was silent. “That’s a question I try not to think about,” he said. Two years later, he can no longer avoid it.

The change is not limited to programmers. AI is entering every sector of the Israeli economy: banking, retail, industry. We are not at “the end of work,” but at the end of work as we knew it. The market is undergoing a painful reboot in which old job definitions are dissolving.

Demand is splitting into two extremes: service, operations, and sales jobs the economy always needs — and new AI-centered roles that did not exist until recently. In the middle — once the “safe path” for many — erosion is underway. Not overnight. Slowly enough to ignore, fast enough to feel.

This gap is not just financial — it is structural. We are moving from an economy of “what you can do” to an economy of “how well you can operate what does.”

Last week I met a young lawyer, one year after her internship. Her firm reduced the number of trainees. “The system writes the first draft,” she said. “I just edit. Sometimes I’m not sure why they need me to edit.”

She is right. If she only edits, she is part of the machine. If she shapes legal strategy, she operates it. That small difference is everything.

This extends beyond law firms. A quiet pressure is building around recent graduates — those who “did everything right.” The first door is harder to open. Entry-level roles in technology, consulting, and finance are shrinking first — exactly the tasks machines do best: basic coding, initial data analysis, reports, summaries, presentations.

AI-driven advanced medicine

Elon Musk recently said the Optimus robot will operate better than any human surgeon. People laughed. Yet today robots already perform autonomous procedures in soft tissue. The doctor of 2026 is less the “man with golden hands” and more a supervisor before screens. Diagnosis has become a data problem; surgery a precision problem.

AI can be an excellent doctor for routine tasks and a strong lawyer for standard contracts, drawing on vast historical data. But when data misleads or is missing, it falters — and it never invents the truly new. It is confined to the statistics of what has already been.

The four-year degree model was built for another world. An old one. We need shorter, focused degrees — less theory, more questions.

The old organizational pyramid is collapsing, replaced by a needle-like structure: one person, equipped with autonomous agents, owning logic and outcomes. One-person companies launching global products within weeks. Not a future vision — it is happening now.

Why the periphery will pay the highest price

Here enters the periphery — not as a slogan, but as reality. Not only geographic distance, but distance from training, networks, employers, and the ability to pivot when change comes. Without reskilling paths, without a real bridge between education and work, those with the least margin for error pay first.

Israel’s government must wake up. We need education reform. Without massive investment in technological training for non-tech populations, Israel’s social gap will become a canyon impossible to bridge.

What value do humans bring?

The man in Herzliya finished his coffee. He said he fears not only layoffs, but something deeper — a crisis of identity and dignity. Work is a source of identity. People may lose not only income but the self-worth they derive from it. Mass job loss would create a social shock that money alone cannot fix. Without a sense of purpose, society faces an unprecedented psychological fracture.

This is the question now facing many: what value do we bring that machines cannot?

What Israel must do — before it’s too late

Countries like Israel, proud of their high-tech strength and inventive spirit, must lead this shift, not follow it. It begins in schools. AI education must become as fundamental as math or English. At the same time, the state must support vulnerable populations and create smart regulation that protects workers without stifling innovation.

If we ignore the risks, we will pay a heavy social price no economic growth can offset. What is required now is radical humanity — empathy, moral judgment, and the ability to decide under uncertainty. These cannot be automated.

Goodbye to the average worker

Yet we are also witnessing the birth of a new generation. Do not try to be efficient robots — you will lose. Be human: be creative, be critical. The future ultimately depends on us. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool — perhaps the most powerful ever created — but it is still a tool, not destiny.

I will end with the familiar line: as of this moment, AI may not take your job — but someone who knows how to use it better than you certainly will.

Keren Shahar is an instructor in generative AI.