How to Thrive in the AI Era: Practical Insights from a Tech Veteran

Internet Era Growth and Skill Shifts

During the 2009 campus recruitment cycle, foreign tech firms (Microsoft, Nokia, IBM, Google) were the most coveted employers, while Chinese BAT companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) were considered secondary. Widespread PC adoption, broadband, and core Internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML/CSS/JavaScript) together with search and big‑data technologies drove PC‑Internet growth, pushing the market values of Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba to $500‑$1,000 billion.

In 2013 the emergence of mobile Internet—smartphones, 3G/4G networks, iOS/Android apps, and recommendation algorithms—triggered a second wave of growth, raising Alibaba and Tencent to $5 trillion valuations and spawning new giants such as ByteDance, JD.com, Meituan and Pinduoduo.

These technological transitions rendered many previously high‑demand skills obsolete. Example: Windows desktop development, once a premium role because control of the desktop equated to control of Internet traffic, lost relevance as the ecosystem shifted to mobile. Similarly, PHP, which excelled at rapid PC‑web site construction, fell out of favor because its interpreted performance and limited I/O could not meet mobile‑scale request volumes, forcing developers to retrain.

AI Era Emergence

The author defines the AI era as beginning in 2023 with the launch of ChatGPT, which moved AI from a research curiosity to a production technology.

Since then, major players—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Chinese firms such as Alibaba’s Qianwen, DeepSeek, ByteDance’s Doubao, and SeedDance—have invested heavily in GPUs, model training, and inference services.

QuestMobile data show rapid user adoption within three years: Doubao reached 340 million MAU, Qianwen 170 million, and DeepSeek 130 million (source: QuestMobile report).

NVIDIA’s market capitalization grew from roughly $300 billion in 2023 to about $5 trillion three years later, a ten‑plus‑fold increase.

Compensation for AI talent escalated from six‑figure annual salaries to tens of millions, reflecting the scarcity of large‑model expertise.

Impact on Employment and Skills

AI capabilities now cover coding, customer service, auditing, and autonomous driving, delivering lower‑cost, 24/7 operation without traditional labor constraints. This has led to large‑scale layoffs in 2025: Salesforce cut half its customer‑service staff in September; Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees in July (total 2025 layoffs >10,000) to reallocate resources to Copilot and Office AI; Amazon dismissed over 10,000 staff in October, including programmers whose roles were automated.

AI‑driven medical diagnosis systems have reported accuracy exceeding 95% compared with physicians, illustrating AI’s performance in high‑stakes domains.

While AI excels as a labor substitute, other production factors—capital, land, natural resources, traffic, users, and data—remain irreplaceable. The author argues that these non‑labor assets will continue to determine competitive advantage in the AI era.

Illustrative Example of Human‑AI Collaboration

In a hospital setting, even if an AI diagnostic system claims >95% accuracy, a senior physician must still oversee AI outputs, validate results, and intervene when necessary. This underscores that expert human oversight remains essential for reliable AI deployment.