The White Collar's Last Two Years
If your current job involves staring at a screen for 8 hours a day — if you're not operating a lathe, holding a tool, driving a vehicle, or making something physical with your hands — there's a good chance you won't be doing that job two years from now.
A sharp statement, I know. But hear me out.
When ATMs arrived, banks didn't shut down. But the vast majority of tellers stepped away from behind the glass. The work didn't disappear — the person doing it changed. Now the same thing is about to happen at a much larger scale.
AI Won't Take Your Job. Your Boss Will.
The popular narrative is "AI is coming for your job." Reality is more mundane than that.
AI isn't going to knock on your door. Here's what will actually happen: companies will enter a major financial downturn and start bleeding money. The cost of employing people — salaries, benefits, social security, office space, perks — will feel unbearably high. And that's when management will make the decision to let "you" go.
Think about it: nobody voluntarily trades in their gas car for an electric one. Not until gas hits $10 a gallon. The technology is ready, but the motivation comes from economic pain. Layoffs will work the same way. AI has been ready for years. The trigger won't be technology — it'll be money running out.
So Will These Jobs Just Vanish?
No. The jobs won't disappear. Reports still need to be written, clients still need to be managed, processes still need to run.
It's like having a housekeeper and then letting them go when your finances take a hit. The laundry doesn't vanish. The dishes still need washing. You just have to handle them differently now. More cheaply.
So what happened? You let the housekeeper go, but now you've got housework on top of everything else. The same thing will happen in companies. Teams will shrink, but the workload will stay the same. The people who remain will have to wear multiple hats. An HR manager who currently handles only recruitment will suddenly be responsible for recruitment, onboarding, payroll, and employee satisfaction — all at once. One person, five hats.
This is exactly where companies will start looking for a way out. And that way out will be AI products with autonomy.
What Do We Actually Mean by "Agentic AI"?
"Agentic Artificial Intelligence" — you hear the term every day, but what does it really mean?
In English, there's the expression "giving someone agency." The ability to determine your own actions, willpower, being in control. So "agentic AI" simply means: artificial intelligence that can make its own decisions, get things done, and take action without waiting for instructions.
Let me put it more plainly: synthetic workers.
And these synthetic workers entered our lives in the first week of 2026 under the name OpenClaw.
A Viennese Developer's 43rd Project Shook the World
Peter Steinberger is a developer from Vienna. He sold PSPDFKit, the PDF processing company he founded, for over 100 million euros. Then he spent three years searching for himself — travel, therapy, experiments. Eventually he came back to writing code. He shipped 43 open-source projects. The 43rd one shook the world.
Originally launched as Clawdbot, then renamed to Moltbot after a trademark dispute with Anthropic, and finally settling on OpenClaw — the project racked up over 145,000 stars on GitHub in no time. For the first time, people watched an unrestricted, autonomous AI browse the web, send emails, create files, and manage calendars right on their own computers.
It was like the Wright Brothers' first flight. 12 seconds, 36 meters. Nobody said "you could fly to Paris with this." But everyone understood: something heavier than air can fly. The rest is iteration.
That's exactly what OpenClaw was. A proof of concept for autonomous AI. My view: 2026 will be the year we see a far more mature, refined version of the idea OpenClaw put on the table.
What I Expect in 2026
My prediction is that the big players — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — will ship their own versions. They'll release new features, capabilities, and projects with a value proposition of "build and deploy your own worker agents."
On the infrastructure side, giants like Microsoft and Amazon will offer solutions around "how to securely run these agents on our platform."
By summer 2026, we'll see the first enterprise pilot deployments. Companies will start testing early versions of these "worker agents" in internal processes.
2027: Crisis, Catalyst, and the Great Shift
How well will these agents do their jobs? Exactly as well as they're designed, as clearly as their tasks are defined, and as frequently as they're updated.
I don't expect a seismic shift within 2026 itself. White-collar workers will still be at their desks. The real break comes in 2027.
Why? Because I'm expecting a major financial crisis. Under headlines like "the AI bubble has burst," we'll see a sharp drop in American stock markets, a 2008-style upheaval in the financial world, capital pulling back, and company margins getting squeezed. Yale, JPMorgan, and independent analysts are already pointing to a 30 to 50 percent market decline in the 2026–2027 window. OpenAI itself projects it could run out of money by mid-2027.
As long as there's no financial crisis, everyone will tolerate the premium of employing humans. As long as the money's flowing, nobody will feel the need to change.
But when the money dries up? Things will change.
Just like the pandemic. Zoom was founded in 2011. Video conferencing technology had been ready for years. But nobody used it. Then within a single month, the entire world switched to remote work. The technology had been there all along — what was missing was the necessity. COVID created that necessity.
The financial crisis of 2027 will play the same role. It will be the catalyst that forces companies — the ones who've been putting off implementing AI workers for years — to act within months.
So What Should You Do?
Honestly, I don't know either. I don't have a clear-cut prescription. But I see two scenarios:
If you're a small cog in a big machine — meaning you have a defined, repetitive, narrow-scope white-collar job — it's going to be tough. These are the positions AI will take over most easily and most quickly. People in this situation may need to make more radical changes. Like making handcrafted products and selling them on Etsy. Like pivoting toward physical, distinctly human work that's hard to automate.
If you're more of a generalist, this could actually be an opportunity. But you'll need to prove something: that you can work 10 times more efficiently with AI, that you can single-handedly take on the responsibilities of an entire department.
Think of it through the factory analogy. When robots entered the assembly line, the line workers lost their jobs. But the factory managers — the ones who managed, programmed, and supervised the robots — became even more valuable. You'll be the manager overseeing these synthetic workers, these worker agents. In the literature, they call this "human in the loop."
Final Word
The capitalist system is about to get reformatted. Nobody sees it coming.
The "work, get paid, consume" cycle is built on the assumption that human labor is the primary creator of value. That assumption is about to be challenged more seriously than at any other point in history.
I don't know the future. Nobody does. But when I put together the pieces I can see, I believe the next two years will be a quiet revolution. Not a loud one. No bells will ring on the stock exchange floor. You'll just look over one day and the person at the next desk won't be there anymore. And an agent will be doing their job.
Get ready. Or at the very least, don't get caught off guard.
This article was written in February 2026. It reflects the author's personal views.
