This is a review and expansion of the Global Intelligence Report from Citrini Research which lays out a scenario for what happens when AI genuinely replaces white collar work at scale. It also covers my expectations for the future based on the current trends around the market. I’ve been a software engineer long enough to know that the question isn’t whether AI changes my industry; it’s how fast. This post is me thinking out loud about that.

A great start here is to remember that this definitely is a thing as there are now plenty of Software Engineers who have been let go. This is a prime example of a senior engineer from Atlassian being let go due to AI replacement. And he posted a full breakdown of the work. As AI gets more effective, companies need fewer developers. This is already true. I can tell you from experience for a greenfield project, you don’t need the same headcount anymore. Brownfield is a different story, but already it seems the open source community is struggling here; instead of people contributing to existing projects, they just make a new project. Its not dissimilar to how we largely stopped repairing old things and rather replaced them in the manufacturing space. This has had a real effect on the Open Source community and on the job market.

According to the report mass layoffs probably don’t happen in 2026 or 2027 for large tech companies. Profits are still fine. But as soon as quarterly numbers dip for any reason, the layoffs come. I’ve already seen this at my own company. I came to work one day and another team was just gone. No announcement, just gone. I don’t know for sure but I think the layoffs correspond to these lows, approximately. Its surreal when it happens.
The layoffs do what layoffs are designed to do, spike profits. Human labor was the main expense, so removing it looks fantastic on a balance sheet. Stock markets hit record highs. Investors are thrilled. The unemployment numbers barely move because tech workers are a tiny fraction of the overall population. But the second-order effects are where it gets interesting. White collar workers don’t just occupy desks. They occupy cafes, restaurants, car mechanics, dry cleaners the entire ecosystem of small businesses that exists because thousands of people commute to the same place every day. When those people stop coming, businesses close. If you’ve ever walked through an old warehouse district, you’ve seen this already. Areas that were once full of workers became full of machines, and the human-centered businesses around them died. The same thing happens to business districts when AI replaces the information workers inside. If it stopped here, the world is probably stable enough. A painful transition for some industries, but manageable. The problem is it doesn’t stop here.
Legal work, real estate, tax preparation, insurance these industries follow the same pattern. AI handles the routine work, companies consolidate, profits rise, and the small businesses that served those workers start closing. This all happens roughly in parallel, not sequentially. The Citrini report suggests this cascading effect hits faster than most people expect. I’m skeptical of the exact timeline, but the direction seems right. Every industry that primarily moves information rather than physical things is going to be changing.
When people lose their 180,000 (your choice of currency here) job in the first, second, or third round of layoffs, they don’t disappear. They take a 45,000 CHF job. And as these overqualified people flood into the gig economy and service work, they push wages down for everyone already there.
The people who keep their jobs aren’t celebrating. They’re saving as if they’ve already been fired. They find themselves working twice as hard, with AI handling the other half, but they’re not hoping for raises. They’re hoping to not be next. This isn’t a recovery. It’s a compression. The remaining high earners, roughly 10% of the population drive more than 50% of consumer spending. Houses, cars, vacations, restaurant meals, private school tuition, renovations. These people also have savings, so when they eventually get laid off, they don’t immediately change their behavior. The economy looks normal for two or three more quarters even thought the unemployment numbers are up. Here we begin to see the slow trend upwards of unemployment. (https://www.amstat.ch).

You could also imagine this in the famous words of Gary Stevenson, “no more f%$#@ing kitchen renovations now”.
What this means for the spatial industry
The professions will probably collapse in on themselves as less people are required. So BE, FE and QA engineer might become a product engineer. Deep technical knowledge is still very valuable but a wider range is expected. So capabilities to develop QGIS plugins, Google Earth Engine, STAC data structures etc. Focus on a wide range of skills and diversify your interests within the Geo domain and related fields. Don’t be naive about the effect of AI. People will be loosing their jobs. Some professions will be disappearing completely and you should be aware of that. It doesn’t mean the world is ending but some people are going to be hit hard by this. Companies will continue to operate and IP particularly will remain important but less people will be employed.
The underlying functions will also largely remain the same. Hopefully some interesting opportunities will come up. For example, as wealth inequality grows then aspects of the profession such as asset management, BIM models, asset focused change detection and surveying will probably, in my view, be the growth area’s; certainly that is where my current product development efforts are focused.
What to do as a Geospatial professional
Imagine going back to London in 1600, its a good way to mentally transport yourself. Think of what you could do at the time to improve your situation in the long term. There is very little you could buy that would be preserved; and that’s how I feel about the future with AI. All technology will be more rapidly surpassed and become obsolete in the functional sense. So definitely try to monitor the Future of Jobs Report and keep up with AI developments if you want to remain employable in this space. Remember that AI beat the worlds best chess players 40 years ago but chess didn’t go out of fashion. Its more popular than ever but the people who did go extinct were chess players who didn’t train with AI. So on a personal level your job might no longer be to write the best spatial query using SQL but rather to review or to prompt / re-imagine the approach to such a query.
What to do:
- Be aware of the job market always so you know what new aspects of the profession are trending
- Diversify your skill set
- where possible solve real problems
I once registered all the graffiti of a city. It was used by the Mayor and by the Police. It was useful. But it wasn’t useful to really really big companies and that is ok. Look for local opportunities because they are under exploited in a world of AI and while the competition did just increase for you, so did your ability to do more complex work.

p.s I hope your doing ok.



















































































































































Since Roman times city planning has included the provisioning of Water. Moving forwards a couple of thousand years has taken us away from the obvious aqueduct to an immensely complex underground network of pipe’s servicing the 3 water system; Wastewater, Storm water and drinking Water.









