I'll Pay You Two Years' Salary to Replace Yourself With AI

The offer

Last week Mumbrella ran a story about me offering two years' salary to anyone at Kill Boring Dead who can replace themselves with AI.

The reaction split neatly down the middle. Some people loved the idea. The other half assumed I'd finally lost the plot.

Neither is quite right. So here's the thinking behind it, written for every business owner currently staring at AI and wondering what on earth to do with their people.

Nobody pitches their own redundancy

Picture it. A producer works out that a new tool could handle most of her week. Does she walk into her boss's office and say "good news, I've found a way for you to get rid of me"? Of course not. She keeps it to herself, keeps doing it the slow way, and quietly hopes nobody else notices either.

Now multiply that by every person in your business. That's how many good ideas are sitting in drawers right now, held hostage by one perfectly rational fear.

You can't mandate those ideas out of people. You can only make it safe to say them out loud. And the fastest way to make it safe is to remove the thing they're scared of. So I did. Suggest the idea that makes your own role redundant, and the worst case scenario becomes a very good scenario.

What happened next

Nobody quit. The team already knows our industry is about to be reinvented, so they were all in from day one.

Then the ideas started arriving from every corner of the business. Creative, admin, logistics, studio, you name it. Some of the tools being built could already cover 50 to 60% of someone's role. Nobody has quite cracked the full two years' salary yet, but a few people are getting very close.

The thing I didn't see coming? The hard part now is choosing. We build most of this in-house, so we have to pick the most valuable ideas to execute first, and there's a LOT to pick from. We've had more ideas in the last two months than in the two years before. That's a very good problem to have.

This is how we've always made good work

None of this is new for us. It's the same principle I've run KBD on from day one, just pointed at a new problem.

The best creative ideas rarely come from the most senior person in the room. They come from the junior who says the weird thing in the brainstorm. The designer who thinks the brief is wrong. The community manager who has read four thousand comments and knows exactly what people actually want. You only hear from those people if saying the weird thing has never cost anyone anything.

That's psychological safety, and it isn't a wellness initiative. It's a creative strategy. The more people who can throw an idea on the table without fear, the better the ideas get. Every time.

AI is simply the next place to apply it. I'm removing every barrier to entry for ideas, and the fear of losing your job happens to be the biggest one going.

What this is not

Let me be really clear. I'm not trying to replace anyone with AI. I'm trying to collect the ideas that could.

Those are very different things. If someone works out how to automate half their role, I don't want them gone. I want them freed up for the bigger, weirder, more valuable work they were always too busy to get to. The person who found the shortcut is exactly the person I want thinking about what comes next.

What I also don't want is a team of brilliant people spending their days doing the modern equivalent of sending and receiving faxes. That isn't loyalty to your staff. That's wasting them.

If your first thought is cutting headcount, you've already lost

When the Mumbrella story ran, a lot of people assumed this was a redundancy scheme with a bow on top. That tells you everything about how most businesses are thinking about AI right now.

We've just been handed the most powerful tool any of us will touch in our careers. And the first instinct of a lot of business owners is to use it to make the spreadsheet look thinner. Same output, fewer people, pat on the back, home by five.

That isn't strategy. It's a failure of imagination. Only people with no imagination look at this technology and see a way to cut roles. If that's your first move, you're a loser, and you'll be outrun by the businesses that used it to do things nobody has done before.

The winning move is the opposite. Keep your people. Give them the best tools in the world. Point them at bigger problems. And let them suggest anything, including the end of their own job description, without a single repercussion. That's how you end up at the front of your industry instead of quietly trimming your way to the back of it.

Steal this for your business

You don't need to copy the two years' salary. You do need to copy the logic.

1. Say the fear out loud. Tell your team you know nobody wants to suggest their own redundancy, and that you completely get why.
2. Remove it in writing. Ours is two years' salary. Yours might be guaranteed redeployment, a pay rise, or a promotion into the new work. Make it real and make it specific. A vague "nobody's job is at risk" won't cut it, because everyone has heard that line right before a restructure.
3. Reward the idea, not just the outcome. Some suggestions won't work. Thank people for them publicly anyway, or the pipeline dries up overnight.
4. Know what freed-up people do next. If the honest answer is "nothing," your team will clock it immediately and the ideas stop.

I'd rather be the one doing the disrupting

Massive disruption is already happening in my industry. I don't need a crystal ball to see it. The only question is whether KBD is the one doing the disrupting, or the one lagging behind wondering what happened.

I know which one I'd rather be. And we can't get there with fear in the building. Every idea held back out of self-preservation is a step we don't take. So the fear goes, and the offer stands. Two years' salary. Replace yourself with AI.