There is a person I want you to think about before you read any of the numbers. She has worked the breakfast shift at a café in Western Sydney for eleven years. She knows every regular by name and order. She manages a school-holiday rush without visible effort. She has never been late. And in the next thirty-six months, the economics of her employer will make her role something a tablet and a QR code can do at a fraction of the cost.
Nobody will call it what it is. They will call it efficiency. They will say the industry is evolving. They will talk about AI as a tool, not a replacement, right up until the roster no longer has her name on it.
I am writing this because I want to be honest about what is coming, who it is coming for, and what I think needs to be built in response. I am a specialist in Concurrent Product and Process Design, which is the discipline of designing a product and the process that delivers it at the same time rather than sequentially. It is a way of seeing systems whole, not in parts. Across more than thirty operational roles in critical infrastructure, retail, transport, consulting and technology, I have watched entire categories of work quietly disappear while the people inside them were told to just adapt. I have sat across from those people. I know what it looks like. I built Sharktech Global with four co-founders because we are not willing to watch it happen at this scale without doing something about it.
The Sectors Being Hollowed Out
The data is not speculative. It is a current count across six industries in simultaneous transition. Every one of these sectors employs people who show up, perform reliably, and have done nothing wrong except hold a role that the economics of automation now make inconvenient to keep.
AI concierge systems, self-ordering kiosks, and automated kitchen management are at commercial scale in Sydney and Melbourne right now. The front-of-house role is contracting. The kitchen porter role is tracking behind it.
The cashier role carries the highest single automation exposure of any major job category. AI checkout processes a full trolley in under one second. The role is not being made redundant. It is being retired as a category of work.
Eighty percent of customer service roles are projected to be automated. The cohort carrying this risk is overwhelmingly younger, lower-income, and disproportionately female. They are absorbing the earliest and deepest shocks in the entire displacement landscape.
Autonomous trucking cuts per-mile operating cost by 38% and road incidents by half. For large fleets, the business case is already resolved. What remains is regulatory approval, and that is moving faster than the industry anticipated.
MIT and Boston University confirm this is a count, not a forecast. Assembly line employment is projected to fall from 2.1 million to 1.0 million by 2030. These are not jobs that are changing. They are jobs that are ending.
Bank tellers, loan processors, junior analysts, paralegals. These were the entry points to professional careers for an entire generation. The bottom rungs of the professional ladder are being removed.
The Three-Year Window
What makes this moment different from previous waves of automation is the speed and the breadth. The same disruption that took two decades in manufacturing is now compressing into thirty-six months across every white-collar, service, and knowledge sector simultaneously. Three phases define the transition.
AI handles the repetitive core of jobs while humans remain nominally in the role. Eighty-five million jobs are in active displacement. Wages in AI-exposed occupations are flattening. Entry-level employment among 20-to-30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles has fallen nearly three percentage points in twelve months. The job title is still there. The substance of the work is quietly leaving.
The gap between displaced jobs and created jobs reaches its widest point. Workers whose roles have been gradually automated must now formally transition. One hundred and twenty million workers globally are at medium-term risk of redundancy and unlikely to receive the reskilling they need. Agentic AI, systems capable of executing entire workflows autonomously, becomes commercial norm across finance, legal, marketing and logistics. This is the window that will define a generation of working people.
The WEF projects 170 million new roles created against 92 million displaced, a net positive of 78 million positions. Those numbers describe entirely different people in entirely different places with entirely different skills. The question is not whether new work will exist. The question is whether the woman from the breakfast shift has a path into it. That path will not be built by the market on its own. It has to be deliberately constructed.
The demographic reality that is not discussed enough: 79% of employed women in high-automation-risk jobs versus 58% of men. 86% of the highest-risk administrative and clerical workers are female. 6.1 million workers in those roles lack the savings, the geographic mobility, and the reskilling access to adapt on their own. The displacement is not evenly distributed. It concentrates on the people who were already carrying the least.
The Honest Version of Both Stories
There is an optimistic story being told about all of this and I believe parts of it. AI will create 170 million new roles by 2030. Workers who learn to use AI earn a documented 56% wage premium over those who do not. Industries are being restructured, not destroyed. I hold those things as true.
I also believe the difficult version. The new roles are not in the same places as the old ones. They do not require the same people. The reskilling gap is not a planning problem. It is a human problem measured in individual lives. I have seen enough of those lives, across thirty-plus roles and thousands of operational sites, to know that statistics do not capture what that weight feels like for the person carrying it.
The people who are losing their roles did not fail. Their jobs failed them. And the system has never had a convincing answer for what comes next. My co-founders and I built Sharktech not because AI displacement is a commercial opportunity, though it is. We built it because we have each seen, from different seats, what happens when people are excluded from the tools that could change their direction. We decided we were not willing to watch it happen at this scale without responding directly.
A technology that benefits only those who already have advantages is not progress. It is acceleration. The question for anyone building AI right now is whether they are building a ladder or a ceiling.
The Skills That Already Exist
The World Economic Forum is clear on what will matter most after displacement: analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, collaboration, and the capacity to make decisions under uncertainty. These are not future skills. They are not skills you earn from a certification. They are skills built through doing, and they are the exact skills that every person who has managed a hospitality rush, navigated a difficult customer, held a team together through a hard stretch, or built anything from scratch already has in abundance.
The woman from the café has those skills. She has always had them. What she has never had is the infrastructure to deploy them at scale or the technology to amplify what she already knows how to do. That is the gap. It is a tools problem, not a people problem. And it is solvable. That is what we are building toward.
What Sharktech Is Rolling Out
Sharktech Global is currently rolling out multiple AI-integrated platforms with a single design brief: make the people most exposed to displacement feel genuinely valuable, genuinely capable, and genuinely in the game. Not with reassurance. With tools.
Enterprise-grade growth infrastructure for small businesses and sole traders who could never afford an agency. The person rebuilding after displacement gets the tools that used to cost ten thousand dollars a month for a fraction of that.
Skills mapping, career pathway intelligence, and the confidence layer that reskilling programs consistently forget to build. Designed for the person who knows they have value but cannot yet see where to direct it.
For the café owner, restaurateur, and food business operator who needs to compete with larger chains. Exclusive ANZ rights. Built for the independent operator who the market consistently under-serves.
Protecting the workers still in physical roles through real-time AI safety intelligence. 150-plus global customers, 1,500-plus installations. Exclusive ANZ distribution rights held by Sharktech.
The next three years will not be defined by how sophisticated the AI gets. They will be defined by how many people get access to it on their own terms, in ways that expand their options rather than eliminate them.
Sharktech is rolling out AI-integrated platforms designed specifically for that outcome. Not to make technology more powerful. To make the people most affected by it feel that they still have something to contribute, because they do. Every last one of them.
Technology must serve people. Humanity deserves nothing less. That is the whole brief.
For the record
How many jobs will AI displace in Australia by 2028?
The period from 2026 to 2028 is identified by multiple labour economists as peak displacement. Globally, 85 million jobs are in active displacement by end of 2026. In Australia, the roles carrying the highest risk include retail cashier and checkout positions (88% automation risk), customer service and data entry roles, hospitality front-of-house, and entry-level finance and administrative positions. Banks, major retailers, and logistics operators are all automating at commercial scale in 2026.
What skills will matter most after AI displacement?
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, collaboration, and decision-making under uncertainty as the most durable human skills in an AI-augmented labour market. These are not skills built through certification. They are built through doing, and they are already present in abundance in the people currently most exposed to displacement.
What is Sharktech Global building for displaced workers?
Sharktech Global is rolling out multiple AI-integrated platforms designed to keep displaced workers valuable and productive. These include VCPility for small business growth, Motivo360 for workforce intelligence and career transition support, eTakeaway Max for hospitality operators, Flagman for industrial safety, and the Sharktech Command Centre, a unified AI operating system that gives micro-businesses the operational capability previously available only to large enterprises.
Why is Dainu Devis building AI products specifically for displaced workers?
Dainu Devis is a specialist in Concurrent Product and Process Design and has worked across more than 30 operational roles in critical infrastructure, retail, transport, consulting and technology. He has directly witnessed workforce displacement across multiple industries and built Sharktech with four co-founders on the founding conviction that technology must serve people rather than replace them. He is a third-generation entrepreneur who operates on a long-arc philosophy, building for decade-level outcomes rather than immediate returns.