This week I read a post from a woman who was crying. Openly, heavily and publicly crying, about AI.

She was devastated by how fast it has arrived and how many people are using it. And more than anything, she was devastated by the flood of AI-generated slop: content that comes from no original thinking, no original positioning, no lived experience and no stories. Just a machine making beige noise at scale.

I didn’t scroll past. I wrote her a long comment, because I recognised her. I’ve been her.

The comment I left her

“In 2022 when ChatGPT came out, I literally lost my entire career overnight, because all of a sudden no one needed a curriculum developer anymore. They could go to ChatGPT and create the curriculum, create slides, create their content. I was made obsolete in a day after almost 20 years in a highly qualified profession.

I had no choice but to embrace AI and teach people how to use AI to do the job that I used to do for them. It was an identity crisis and also an evolution, all in one.

It’s definitely a scary time for a lot of people and I’m sending you lots of love and support, because this was me.”

So this post is for her. And for you, if you’re a designer, writer, trainer, translator, bookkeeper, consultant, VA, photographer, developer or any other qualified, skilled human who is watching work you were proud of get done by a machine in seconds.

It’s part my story (I’ve lost my job and business to AI twice, so pull up a chair) and part practical guide: how to work out what you’re really for, which pivot fits you, and how to make it without losing the authentic you along the way.

Full transparency, because it matters in a post like this: I used AI to help me shape this article, working from my own words, the comment I wrote, my memoir notes and my old posts. Which, as you’ll see, is exactly the point.

TL;DR

• Your grief is real. Losing work to AI can feel like losing your identity. Let yourself feel it before you plan.
• The people who hate AI aren’t wrong about the slop, the job losses or the bigger costs. You can hold those concerns and still choose to adapt.
• Separate what you do from what you’re for. AI took some of my tasks. It didn’t take my expertise, judgement or stories.
• Audit your work honestly: what AI does well now, what it helps with, and what still needs a qualified human.
• Pick a pivot path: teach it with AI, package it, move up to strategy, become the trust layer, go global, or change your delivery model.
• AI isn’t slop when it works from your own material: your transcripts, training, stories and lived experience.
• Start small this month. There’s a 30-day plan and copy-and-paste prompts below.

What’s in this post

1. I lost my career to ChatGPT in 2022
2. To everyone who is angry or scared about AI
3. This wasn’t my first forced pivot
4. Then I got replaced again (in 2026)
5. Step 1: Let yourself grieve it
6. Step 2: Separate what you do from what you’re for
7. Step 3: Audit what AI does now and what it can’t
8. Step 4: Choose your pivot path
9. Step 5: Train AI on your own material so it isn’t slop
10. Step 6: Your first 30 days
11. Step 7: The mindset that gets you through
12. The one prompt to find your pivot
13. FAQs

I lost my career to ChatGPT in 2022

Let me tell you where I came from, because I wasn’t always “the AI lady”.

I spent seven years at university getting my teacher training and curriculum design degrees. Then I started a business doing curriculum design. I did everything by hand. I taught, I wrote, I created, and I got paid exceptionally well for it. People paid me anything from $1,000 to $40,000 to create a single course for them.

Then ChatGPT went public, and suddenly anyone could type “Write me a course on how to bake a cake.” Done.

Almost 20 years in a highly qualified profession, and I was made obsolete in a day. My role didn’t disappear because I wasn’t good at it. It disappeared because the market no longer needed it in that form.

And here’s the bit that still makes my stomach flip. One of the first things I did was create a custom GPT trained in everything I knew: almost two decades of curriculum design knowledge, andragogy, Bloom’s taxonomy, the principles of adult learning and what makes adult education actually work. Then I gave it to all of my students, without charging them a cent, to help them create the courses I used to charge thousands for.

I cannot even begin to explain the mindset shift, the identity crisis and the absolute fear and terror that created in me.

Imagine spending that much money, time, dedication and that many sleepless nights acquiring expertise over almost two decades, and then watching it get replaced by what was essentially a prompt that you gave away yourself. It was crushing. And yes, it hit my bottom line for a while.

I asked myself the same questions you might be asking right now. “Who am I now?” “How do I stay valuable?” “How do I evolve?” I wrote about that identity death in AI is replacing jobs, so stop clinging to your old identity, and I meant every word, because I had to live it first.

All of this was also part of what pushed me further into something I’d wanted to do for years: a software business. That’s Tekmatix, which I founded and launched in 2022, very glamorously, in my fluffy socks.

To everyone who is angry or scared about AI

Before I go any further, I want to say this clearly to anyone who is anti-AI right now: I understand you. I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong, behind or “resisting progress”.

Even as an AI educator who now uses it heavily in my own business, I agree with a lot of what that woman was crying about. Too many people are using AI in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, to do the wrong job. They’re pumping out content with no original thought behind it, and it’s making the internet a noisier, emptier place.

And I feel genuinely sad for the huge number of people losing jobs to AI. I was one of them.

I also understand and accept that there are global economic, environmental and ecological impacts to the way the world is moving. As one person, I can’t do a huge amount about that, and I hope to find ways that I can. Your concerns about those things are valid, and nothing in this post asks you to drop them.

Here’s the thing, though. Buying any tool is completely pointless if you do nothing with it. Buying any software is pointless if you do nothing with it. And AI is completely fruitless if you’re not using it properly. The problem isn’t only the tool. It’s what people feed it, and what they use it for.

So I had a choice. I could give up and give in, or I could find a way to work with something I couldn’t control. I chose the second one. Not because I agree with every element of it, but because I love what I do, I love the outcomes I get for people, and I have a family to feed.

This wasn’t my first forced pivot

There are pivots we choose, pivots that are forced on us, and the ones in between: funding changes and major social and global shifts that, as single individuals, we can’t do much about. When those hit, we have to make a choice.

Back in 2014, my education business in Western Australia was flying. We were delivering government-funded training, including into remote WA communities. Then, one Tuesday morning, a single phone call of about 11 minutes told me the government funding was gone.

Not long after, I was standing in my empty office, vomiting into my waste paper bin, having just delivered redundancy interviews to my beloved employees, one by one. My work family. I was facing a seven-figure debt in redundancy payouts, lease cancellations and contracts I’d invested in that now couldn’t go ahead.

Every accountant I spoke to told me to fold the company. I didn’t. Instead I asked myself the question that changed everything: “How else can I do this?”

My circumstances had changed, but they hadn’t taken my skills and experience away. They were simply demanding I apply them differently. So I turned on my webcam and started recording every consultation, workshop and course I had ever delivered. I even turned the training I gave my own curriculum developers into curriculum development courses. I was teaching other people to do what we did.

Then I pressed publish, after 38 hours of uploading videos (cheers, Australian internet), and I went from a local market to a global one. I had no choice but to shift to online learning, and it changed my life. That’s also when the community that is now the Legends Lab began, back in 2015 as the Edupreneur Academy.

I tell the full story in Everyone has something to teach, and the practical side of surviving a crash like that in Business crisis survival: how to stabilise, pivot and rebuild stronger.

Notice the pattern? In 2014 I taught people to do what my team used to do for them. In 2022, I did it again, with AI.

Then I got replaced again (in 2026)

You’d think two forced pivots would be enough. Apparently not.

Since 2022, a big part of my income came from services that set up all the complicated tech for people: their funnels, automations, CRMs and courses. My team and I were paid to do it for them.

Then agentic AI became something anyone can access by downloading an app and simply talking to their phone. Now AI can do a lot of that setup itself. So I’ve had to pivot yet again. Today I help people connect their AI and teach them how to prompt it from their phone, so it builds the things they were paying me to do only a couple of months ago.

Here’s where it gets interesting. We can see these moments as catastrophic, devastating and unfair, and fall down and cry. (I’ve done my share of that. See: waste paper bin.) Or we can see them as an evolution. In every challenge put in front of us there’s an opportunity, and we get to choose which one we take.

For me, it’s also a responsibility. The one thing I can control is helping other people through this with my training and education: helping you stay employed, keep income coming into your business, and keep living your passion for your work, in the new way.

So that’s twice now that AI has taken my job and a big part of my business. If your work is under threat because of AI right now, here’s what to do, step by step.

Step 1: Let yourself grieve it

I know, you came for a guide and I’m starting with feelings. Stay with me.

When your work disappears, it isn’t just income. It’s identity. It’s the years of study, the late nights, the pride of being the person people come to. Losing that is a real loss, and if you skip the grief, it tends to leak out later as bitterness, paralysis or a very expensive panic-pivot.

• Name what you’ve lost. Write it down. The clients, the income, the status, the craft, the version of you that did it.
• Let yourself be angry. It is unfair. You’re allowed to say so.
• Talk to people who get it. Others in your profession are feeling exactly this.
• Give it a timeframe. Feel it fully, then decide on a date when you’ll start your audit. Grief and action can sit side by side.

It took an enormous amount out of me emotionally, psychologically and physically to make the shift in 2022. If you’re finding it hard, that’s not weakness. That’s what a big change costs.

Step 2: Separate what you do from what you’re for

This is the step that turned my fear into a plan.

What I did was write curriculum, design slides and build courses for people. AI can now do a version of all of that.

What I was for was something bigger: helping people take what they know and teach it so well that it changes someone else’s life. Understanding how adults actually learn. Knowing when a course will flop before it’s built. Spotting what’s missing. Holding someone’s hand through the terror of hitting publish. AI didn’t take any of that. It just stopped me doing the typing.

Your version might look like this:

• A graphic designer does logos and layouts. They’re for making a brand instantly recognisable and right for its audience.
• A copywriter writes words. They’re for knowing what makes a particular customer say yes.
• A bookkeeper enters transactions. They’re for helping a business owner understand their numbers and sleep at night.
• A trainer delivers sessions. They’re for changing what people can do on Monday morning.

Step 3: Audit what AI does now and what it can’t

Now get brutally honest. Go through every task you used to do and sort it into three piles:

1. AI does this well now. Let it go. Seriously. Fighting this pile is how you spend the next two years exhausted and resentful.
2. AI helps, but still needs me. It drafts, you direct and check. This is where you get faster and more valuable.
3. This still needs a qualified human. Judgement calls, trust, accountability, relationships, taste, ethics, the lived experience in your stories. This is your foundation.

Don’t do this from fear and don’t do it from ego. Actually try AI on your own tasks. You’ll be surprised in both directions: some things it does better than you expected, and some things it gets confidently, hilariously wrong.

Step 4: Choose your pivot path

There isn’t one right pivot. Here are the six paths I see working, including the ones I’ve taken myself. You might combine two or three.

1. Teach others to do what you did, with AI

This is my main one. I stopped creating courses for people and started teaching them to create their own courses with AI. People who would never have paid a curriculum developer will happily pay to learn to do it themselves. A photographer can teach small businesses to shoot and edit their own content. An accountant can teach business owners to use AI to read their own numbers.

2. Package your expertise into a course, custom GPT or agent

My custom GPT was my expertise, packaged. Your methods, frameworks, checklists and judgement can become a course, a program, a membership, a custom GPT or an AI agent that works from your know-how. You stop being paid only for your hours and start being paid for what you know.

3. Move up to strategy, judgement and quality control

When AI does the first draft, someone still has to decide what’s worth making, direct it and check it’s right. A translator becomes the person who checks AI translations for meaning, culture and risk. A designer becomes the creative director. That’s a promotion, not a demotion.

4. Become the human trust layer

The more AI content there is, the more people crave a real, qualified human they can trust. Your face, your name, your accountability and your stories become the product. People don’t just want information any more. They want someone they believe.

5. Serve a new or global market

In 2014, when my local market collapsed, I went global. If your local clients are now doing it themselves with AI, there may be a different market that still needs you: another industry, another country, beginners instead of experts, or businesses that are too overwhelmed to even start.

6. Change your delivery model

Done-for-you becomes done-with-you or teach-you. One-to-one becomes one-to-many. Face to face becomes online. Projects become memberships. I’ve done every one of those swaps at some point, and each time the work I loved survived, it just showed up in a new outfit.

Step 5: Train AI on your own material so it isn’t slop

This is the part that matters most to the woman I wrote to, so let me be really clear.

AI slop is content with nothing original behind it. No lived experience, no real expertise, no stories, no opinion. Just a generic answer to a generic prompt.

When AI creates content drawn from your own material, it isn’t slop. If it’s working from your actual words, your transcripts, your training, your stories and your lived experience, it’s your thinking, organised and multiplied. It’s you, in more places at once.

That’s how I use it. My AI tools are trained on my real emails, my blog posts, my books, my course transcripts and my brand voice. When they draft something, they’re drafting from twenty-odd years of me, not from the internet’s average opinion. And I still review it, add the bits only I know, and take out anything that doesn’t sound like me.

• Gather your material: transcripts of your talks, videos and calls, old posts, training notes, emails, proposals, books, slide decks.
• Write down your rules: how you talk, words you’d never use, what you believe, what you stand against.
• Give it your stories and tell it never to invent any.
• Review everything before it goes out. AI drafts, you decide.

If you want a worked example, here’s how I train AI to draft email replies in my voice.

Step 6: Your first 30 days

You don’t need to rebuild your whole career this month. You need momentum. Here’s a simple plan:

• Week 1: Feel it and audit it. Do steps 1 to 3. Write your “what I do” and “what I’m for” lists, and sort your tasks into the three piles.
• Week 2: Get hands-on with AI. Pick one AI tool and use it on your own work every day. Start a folder of your own material and set up one assistant trained on it.
• Week 3: Choose and test one pivot. Pick your top path from step 4. Describe one small offer in a paragraph and show it to five people who used to pay you, or would.
• Week 4: Teach in public. Share what you’re learning: a post, a short video, a free live session. Teaching is the fastest way to find out what people will pay for, and you learn twice as you do it.

Small and imperfect beats big and never. Every pivot I’ve made started with one slightly terrifying action, like pressing record on a webcam in an empty office.

Step 7: The mindset that gets you through

• Ask “how else can I do this?” It’s the most useful question I know. Your circumstances can change without taking your skills away.
• Don’t defend the title. Become the learner. The expert who keeps learning beats the expert who digs in.
• Keep your values. You don’t have to agree with every element of AI to use it well and ethically.
• Stay authentic. Your stories, humour, opinions and scars are the one thing no one else can generate. Put more of you in, not less.
• Remember why you started. If you love what you do and the outcomes you get for people, find a new way to do it. The vocation survives the change of outfit.

Since the day I lost my career to ChatGPT, I’ve taught thousands more people and helped them do what they wanted to do, even while, quite paradoxically, it pushed me further out of my original business. It’s a hard one. But it’s how I ended up here, and I’m still doing the work I love.

The one prompt to find your pivot

If you only do one thing after reading this, do this. Copy it into your AI, fill in the brackets with your own details and material, and let it help you think it through:

I've lost work (or I'm losing it) because AI can now do part of what I used to be paid for. Help me find my pivot. Work only from what I tell you and the material I give you. Don't invent anything about me.

About me:
- What I've done for work: [your role, profession or service, and for how long]
- My qualifications and training: [list them]
- What clients or employers used to pay me for: [the tasks and deliverables]
- What's changed: [what AI now does, and what that's done to my work or income]
- What I love about my work and never want to lose: [be honest]
- My stories and lived experience: [the moments, mistakes and wins only I have]
- My own material: [paste or connect your transcripts, old posts, training notes, emails, course content]

Please:
1. Split my work into two lists: the TASKS I did, and what I'm actually FOR (the outcomes, expertise, judgement and lived experience behind them).
2. Audit each task: does AI do it well now, does AI help but still need me, or does it still need a human like me? Be honest, not flattering.
3. Suggest my 3 best pivot paths from these: teach others to do what I did with AI; package my expertise into a course, custom GPT or agent; move up to strategy, judgement and quality control; become the human trust layer; serve a new or global market; change my delivery model. For each, explain why it fits me, who would pay for it, and what I'd offer first.
4. For my top pick, give me a 30-day plan with one small action a day, starting this week.
5. Write it in plain, kind, direct language. I'm a person going through a big change, not a project.

It works only from what you give it, so the more of your own material you share, the more it sounds like you and the more useful it gets.

Please use AI safely and only give it the permissions you’re willing to risk. You run your own business and your own AI at your own risk, and you’re responsible for your own accounts and data.

FAQs

What should I do if AI is taking my job or my clients?

Give yourself time to grieve the loss, then separate the tasks you did from what you are actually for: the outcomes, expertise, judgement and lived experience behind your work. Audit which tasks AI now does well and which still need a qualified human, then choose a pivot path that builds on what AI cannot replace.

What are the best ways to pivot when AI replaces my work?

Six paths work well: teach others to do what you did using AI, package your expertise into a course, custom GPT or agent, move up to strategy, judgement and quality control, become the trusted human in the loop, serve a new or global market, or change your delivery model, for example from done-for-you to teaching.

Is it wrong to feel angry or sad about AI?

No. Losing work you trained for and were proud of is a real loss, and concerns about AI slop, job losses and the wider economic and environmental impacts are valid. You can hold those concerns and still choose to learn AI and use it in a way that fits your values.

Is AI-generated content always slop?

No. AI slop is content with nothing original behind it. When AI works from your own material, such as your transcripts, training, stories and lived experience, and you review what it produces, it is your thinking organised and multiplied, not slop.

How do I train AI on my own material?

Gather your transcripts, posts, training notes, emails and stories, write down your voice and rules, and give them to your AI as its knowledge base, for example in a custom GPT, a Claude project or a Gemini Gem. Tell it never to invent facts, stories or results, and review everything before you use it.

Can I still use my qualifications if AI can do my job?

Yes. Your qualifications now matter most in the parts AI cannot do well: judgement, quality control, ethics, strategy and teaching others. Many qualified people are using their expertise to direct and check AI work, or to teach others how to use AI properly in their field.

How long does it take to pivot a career or business because of AI?

It varies, but you can start this month. In the first 30 days, audit your work, get hands-on with one AI tool, test one small offer with people who used to pay you, and start teaching in public. Momentum matters more than a perfect plan.

What does Sarah Cordiner do now?

Sarah Cordiner is a business and AI educator and the founder of Tekmatix. After ChatGPT made her curriculum development work obsolete, she pivoted to teaching people how to create courses and run their businesses with AI, and she now teaches people to connect their AI and prompt it from their phone.

To the woman who was crying, and to you

If you’re where she is right now, I’m sending you so much love. It’s a scary time, and you’re allowed to be scared.

But you are not your tasks. You’re the years, the judgement, the care and the stories behind them. That’s still yours. It always will be.

I’ve lost my job and business to AI twice, and each time the thing I loved found a new way to live. I believe yours can too. And if you want company while you work out how, you know where to find me.

Sarah x