🎙️In a "jobless boom," invisibility is the real risk

I want to be honest with you about what's actually happening in 2026, because the headlines make it sound scarier than it is — and the truth is more useful.

The most credible reporting on this (a Harvard Business Review survey of around a thousand executives earlier this year) found that very few companies have actually replaced people with working AI yet. What's really going on is that leaders are cutting and slowing hiring in anticipation of changes they expect later. They're redrawing the org chart based on a future they're imagining right now.

Sit with that for a second, because it changes your move entirely. If decisions are being made about an imagined future team, then the question isn't "Is my work good enough?" Your work has been good enough for years. The question is: "When they picture the team that matters, is my name in the picture?"

Here's the trap so many brilliant women in tech fall into — I fell into it for years myself. We believe that if we just keep our heads down and do exceptional work, the recognition will follow. It's a beautiful theory. It's also how you become the most valuable person nobody can name.

I learned this the hard way. As a working mom with almost no time, I did the work, shipped the things, mentored the team — and watched opportunities flow to people who were, frankly, more visible than they were qualified. It crushed me. So I did the one thing that terrified me most: I got on a stage. And the strangest thing happened. My calendar didn't change. My standing did. My last three roles came directly from speaking — not from new skills, but from finally being known for the ones I already had.

Speaking is the single fastest way to convert what you do into who you're known as. A talk takes the invisible — your judgment, your hard-won perspective, the call you made that everyone else got wrong — and makes it a public, repeatable, attributable thing. It puts your name on a position.

And here's the AI piece, the part that flips the fear: AI is brilliant at retrieving what's already known. It can summarize your field, draft your deck, and explain the fundamentals better than most of us. But it wasn't in the room when you killed the project everyone loved because you saw the failure coming. It can't hold the lived judgment that makes your point of view yours. When information is free, a perspective becomes the premium. The redraw isn't a threat to that — it's a spotlight on it.

You don't need to become louder. You don't need a personality transplant. You need your name attached to a point of view, in rooms that matter, on a stage that makes it permanent. That's a skill. Skills can be built — and they can be built faster than you think.

You don't need all five. Pick at least three and actually do them this week.

Monday — Find your sentence. Write down one opinion you genuinely hold about your field that you'd defend in a room of experts. That's your on-the-record sentence. It doesn't have to be revolutionary; it has to be yours.

Tuesday — Say it out loud, to one decision-maker. Drop it in a meeting, a 1:1, a Slack thread leadership reads. Lead with "My take is…" Watch what it does to how you're referenced afterward.

Wednesday — Bank the receipts. List three calls you've made that turned out right and three things you know that AI can't have been "in the room" for. This is your raw material — and your evidence the next time the curse whispers that you have nothing to add.

Thursday — Turn one receipt into a 5-minute story. Pick the best one. What was the moment, the decision, the lesson? That's the seed of a talk. You're not writing a keynote — you're naming one thing you could stand up and say.

Friday — Tell one person you want to speak. Say it to a colleague, a friend, your group chat: "I'm going to give a talk this year." Speaking it aloud once makes it real, and now someone's rooting for you.

The market has never valued a real human point of view more than it does right now. Let's make sure yours gets heard. 🎤

🌞 Keep Shining,

Barkha

P.S. — The whole point of this issue is that you can build this skill faster than the org chart is being redrawn. That's exactly what I built First Stage for: in four weeks you go from "I think I have something to say" to delivering a real, recorded conference talk — live. The next cohort opens July 7, and seats are limited so every speaker gets real attention. Want first dibs? Join the waitlist here and you'll be the first through the door.