Why the AI boom is forcing a rethink of career success

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a simple but provocative point. He said artificial intelligence is more likely to increase the value of blue-collar work. The idea itself is not new. What makes it interesting is how directly it challenges a long-standing belief about how people advance in their careers.

Historically, the usual path to senior leadership meant starting close to the work, often in hands-on roles. Advancement usually meant moving into offices, meetings, spreadsheets, and management layers. The closer you got to the top, the farther you were from the physical work that kept the business running.

Early conversations about AI followed a similar script. Most of the attention went to office jobs, knowledge work, and desk-based tasks. Meanwhile, the people running factories, warehouses, power systems, and data centers were rarely part of the discussion, even though those systems remained essential.

That is where the idea of the “new blue collar” comes in. The term describes jobs that combine hands-on work with digital and AI tools. These include technicians who keep data centers online, workers who operate advanced manufacturing equipment, and crews who manage energy and infrastructure systems that AI depends on. These roles sit where software meets the real world. They are hard to automate, expensive to replace, and critical when something goes wrong.

It is still unclear how long this shift will last. Robots and automation may eventually take on more physical tasks, and hiring surges around infrastructure projects may slow. But even if the change is temporary, it can still affect who gets ahead. When companies care more about who can keep complex systems running, they tend to promote and trust different people.

That does not mean future CEOs will come solely from the trades. It does mean that knowing how things actually work may matter more than it used to. Leaders who understand how power is delivered, how equipment fails, how safety issues arise, and what causes systems to break under pressure are often better at judging whether a business can expand without constraint problems.

For people thinking about their own careers, the message is not to switch jobs but to pay attention to where influence is forming. If Huang’s prediction proves correct, success may depend less on abstract ideas and more on who knows how to make things work in the real world.

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Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com