Workers are afraid AI will take their jobs. They’re missing the bigger danger.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Walk into any corporate office, and you’ll hear the same anxious conversation: Will AI eliminate white-collar jobs? The optimists insist that new jobs will emerge to replace the ones we lose—after all, it has happened in previous tech revolutions. Pragmatists argue the workforce will simply become more productive with artificial intelligence, creating more value with minimal job cuts.

And the pessimists fear entry-level knowledge workers will become obsolete altogether. But this debate misses a crucial dynamic. Right now, workers are potentially training AI how to make them obsolete.

And they often don’t realize it. The kind of AI used by companies, called an enterprise AI system, can capture everything you do at work and use that information to train itself. These systems can record your interactions within the platform—the prompts you write, the documents you create, the queries you run.

In other words, the company can potentially track—and claim ownership of—every keystroke you make within the system, every idea you document there, every tool you build using that platform. It can identify what approaches worked best, what email language got responses and how you approached those clients. And all that knowledge can become part of the company AI, so it may eventually know, down to increasingly fine details, how you do your job.

Then comes the dangerous part for employees: The AI can pass that information along to anybody else who does your job, or in some cases just do the job itself. Over time, you could become a lot less valuable to your employer—and a lot more replaceable. This dynamic may fundamentally change the relationship between employer and employee.