Nobody announced it, but the way the industry values you has changed.
It's really not about your years of experience, your title, or not even how hard you work anymore. It's whether you've figured out how to multiply yourself - and the answer, as you might've guessed, is AI. But not AI in the way most people think.
Two things specifically have shifted the math:
1. Your output ceiling is gone.
You used to be capped by hours in your day. That's no longer the real constraint. AI can step in and handle the parts of your work that eat time - research, drafting, testing, formatting - end to end. You stop being the bottleneck.
2. You stop making zero-sum tradeoffs.
The old deal: say yes to the big project, and something else shrinks. AI breaks that logic. You can take on more scope without burning out or dropping the ball on everything else.
Both of these become possible when you build an AI superagent - not a single AI tool you prompt, but a connected system of agents that moves an entire workflow forward on its own. You put in the brief. The system does the work.
PwC found that workers with AI skills earn 56% more than peers in the same role. Wages in AI-exposed industries are growing 2× faster. And that's just for people who use AI, not the ones running autonomous systems that work for them.
The market is done paying for time.
It's paying for leverage.
Carla Dewing breaks down what this actually looks like in practice. Link in the comments.