Still Useful in an AI World: The Human Playbook for the Age of AGI

That is not hyperbole. Right now, inside every major enterprise software platform, large language models and agent workflows are quietly absorbing the daily tasks that built your career. The underwriter who memorized twenty years of policy. The analyst who owned the weekly report. The marketer who wrote the quarterly campaign. The paralegal who drafted the motion. Their work is being atomized into tasks, and the tasks are being sorted into "keep" and "automate" piles. By the end of the decade, the sort will be complete.

If you are a knowledge worker in 2026, you are either adapting or you are already behind. There is no third option.

STILL USEFUL is the survival manual for the biggest labor transition in a century.

Corporate instructional designer Ken Konet (M.Ed., MBA) has spent twenty-five years figuring out how to teach working adults things they desperately need to know but really do not want to learn. In Still Useful, he turns that discipline on the AGI transition itself and delivers a plan that is honest about what is being lost, specific about what remains durable, and usable on Monday morning.

Inside you will find:

• The Three Pillars of Human Premium (Physicality, Accountability, Taste) and how to anchor your career on at least one of them
• A diagnostic framework for sorting your own tasks into A, B, and C categories before HR does
• The Accountability Premium: why signing your name on a decision is the single most underrated career move of the next decade
• Prompt Architecture and Agent Wrangling, two practical AI literacy skills that separate the hired from the displaced
• The White-Collar Autopsy: which jobs are in the blast radius, and which are safer than you think
• The Blue-Collar Renaissance and the Care Economy: where the hiring is actually happening
• Jobs That Do Not Exist Yet: a pattern-recognition framework for spotting emerging roles before anyone else does
• Money and Meaning in a Post-Labor World: how to build financial optionality and non-work identity while the transition unfolds
• The Monday Morning Seven: the full playbook, compressed into seven specific actions you can begin this week

• 90-Day Human Hardening Plan
• Industry Survival Matrix across sixteen sectors
• Prompt Architecture Starter Kit
• Reading List and Primary Sources
• Glossary of AGI-era career terms
• 25-Question Human Skills Self-Assessment
• Pivot Resources and credentialing pathways
• Ken's Personal Playbook

You are not behind. You are early. The average American is going to figure this out about two years from now, which means right now, today, the world is quietly full of jobs, opportunities, and pivots that nobody is fighting over yet.

You are reading a survival manual while most people are still watching the trailer for the movie.

Start this week. Finish in two months. By the end of the year, you will have moved more decisively on your career than ninety-five percent of the people in your industry.

You are going to be okay. You are going to be useful, to people who matter to you, for a long time.

Go get Monday.