Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Why The Threat to Remote Work Isn’t RTO — It’s AI.

It’s easy to vilify RTO. It feels like a betrayal of the flexibility that employees proved they could handle. The commute, the dress code, the forced meetings—these all symbolize a regression from the autonomy and trust that defined the pandemic-era work shift. But in truth, RTO is often a proxy for something deeper: a company’s attempt to reestablish control, cohesion, and culture. It may be clumsy or tone-deaf, but it’s not inherently about undermining employees. It’s a human response to an uncertain world.

AI, on the other hand, is not human at all. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t feel loyalty. It doesn’t care about culture. And it’s accelerating at a rate that makes even the most seasoned professionals question their relevance. Where RTO is a conversation, AI is a quiet displacement and employees feel the pressure.  They’re adapting to hybrid schedules, performing for metrics, and navigating a constant stream of new tools that may one day make their own skills obsolete. Meanwhile, companies are trying to optimize for productivity, reduce overhead, and stay competitive. It’s a tension rooted in conflicting survival strategies: employees want to preserve autonomy and career relevance; companies want to streamline and scale. Both are logical. Neither is villainous.

But the risk is asymmetrical. If employees lose this negotiation, they don’t just lose flexibility—they lose leverage. When your work becomes measurable, it becomes automatable. And when it becomes automatable, it becomes optional. The challenge for workers is not just to stay visible, but to stay irreplaceable. That requires a shift in mindset: from task completion to value creation, from efficiency to innovation, from doing things right to doing the right things.

To protect themselves, employees need to think beyond job titles and toward unique contribution. Ask: What do I bring to the table that AI can’t? Relationship-building. Strategic judgment. Emotional intelligence. Cultural fluency. These are not always in the job description, but they’re often what separates the indispensable from the redundant. It’s no longer enough to be skilled—you must be uniquely human in your work.  As Steve Martin always says, Be so good, they can’t ignore you.

Second, employees need to become curators of change, not victims of it. Learn the tools and understand the tech. Be the person who helps others adapt, not the one who resists the inevitable. The workers who use AI to elevate their performance—will be the ones who endure. It’s not about beating the machine; it’s about partnering with it in a way that elevates your role.

Third, seek visibility. Remote work can breed isolation. Intentionally make your contributions known. Speak up. Volunteer for the messy, high-impact projects that require real judgment. Presence, whether physical or virtual, still matters. Companies value employees who show initiative, communicate well, and align with the broader mission. Those traits transcend any algorithm.

Ultimately, we need to reframe the narrative. RTO is not the villain. It’s a symptom. The deeper transformation is technological, not geographical. If we spend all our energy fighting the location battle, we may miss the more important war—the one over our very relevance. And in that war, the solution is not just to resist, but to evolve.

The future of work belongs to those who can blend human strengths with technological tools. Employees must own their growth, assert their value, and choose to be more than a node in a workflow. Because the enemy isn’t where you work. It’s whether your work continues to matter.