What it is

A chatbot is software that talks to people through text (or sometimes voice). Old ones followed rigid scripts and were mostly rubbish. New ones, powered by large language models, can hold genuinely useful conversations, answer complex questions, and handle tasks that used to require a human on the other end.

Why it matters for your job

If part of your role involves answering the same questions repeatedly, a chatbot can probably do it now. Customer support, internal help desks, first-line enquiries... these are the jobs getting automated fastest. The people who stick around are the ones handling the stuff chatbots can't: angry customers, weird edge cases, anything requiring actual judgement.

What to do about it

Spend an hour using a modern chatbot (like ChatGPT or Claude) and push it hard. Find where it breaks. That gap between what it can do and what it can't? That's where your value lives. Make sure you're firmly on the right side of that line.