T-SQL Tuesday #189 – Me, Myself, and AI

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Taiob and he’s posed a great point to consider: How is AI changing our careers?

Oh boy, this could be a divisive topic with plenty of opinions – I’m seeing submissions roll in as I’m finalising this and I’m very much looking forward to the community’s views on the topic.

Introducing a basic level of AI into a business can feel transformational day to day. It simultaneously adds expertise and removes friction. It changes ‘piece together something from Google’ into ‘one prompt’, and ‘hours of meetings’ into ‘instant summaries and action points’.

All for handing over a few pennies each month.

ChatGPT and Copilot are my personal nerd-herds working alongside me with incredible breadth and depth of knowledge. And they’re fast.

In my role, the adoption of AI has been primarily at a personal level and not organisational. It’s not currently shifting what I do, but how I do it – and the distinction matters. It changes my approach to challenges. It accelerates what I’m able to learn, produce, and troubleshoot, and ultimately deliver.

But we’re talking about ‘Careers’ here. That’s both the present and the future.

The rise of the models and scale of their knowledge makes them well-suited to teaching. On the personal side, they can be used to provide advice, support, and build learning paths that directly support career growth.

I also consider this blog to be part of my career trajectory: sharing knowledge and lessons learned as a portfolio of sorts. AI helps elevate the value of what I produce here too. I can discuss subject areas to check for blind spots or other perspectives to consider, and it also adds quality by peer reviewing drafts, generating cover images, and even advising on SEO.

But what AI giveth, it taketh away. Take a look at the traffic Google has sent my way over the last 12 months. I’ve overlaid impressions (orange) and clicks (blue), and I’m sure you can spot the impact the rollout of AI Mode has had on traffic:

This shows how the landscape is changing and we’re all being taken along on the ride whether we like it or not. Or this could be a commentary on the quality of my content, heh 😅

With GPT5 being released and agents gaining prominence, there’s no slowdown to the AI train. Their surface area is rapidly growing and they aren’t waiting for our careers to catch up.

Our responsibility to ourselves is to understand these tools and how to best utilise them for our goals. Thankfully there’s no shortage of models out in the wild – just remember, they can be more alike than you think.