Sales, AI, and a Question I Can’t Answer Yet

The sun was shining that morning, but it was not warm.

That is how the conversation began. The Mayor asked me if the birds were singing in my world, and I said yes, they were singing, but it was windy, and we only had five degrees. He told me he had ten.

It was a normal beginning. Weather, small talk, a little joke. But then we came to a topic that does not feel small at all.

Future jobs. Artificial intelligence. My work. My son.

When I hear the word AI, I do not first think about robots or science fiction. I think about my daily work. I use AI every day. In every situation where I have to search something, I use AI.

AI is my new Google.

That was my first honest answer. I use Perplexity a lot. For me, in the last months, it was very good. But today there are so many tools. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity. My partner Julia is writing her doctoral thesis, and her topic is AI. She uses Claude. Maybe Claude is on top now. Maybe next month it is ChatGPT again. Then Gemini. Then something new.

The Mayor said something I understand very well: sometimes it is better to stay with one system and not waste too much time testing every new tool. I think that is true. For my job, the big tools are enough. I do not need the perfect one every day. I need one that helps me work.

But sometimes it is also a little bit spooky.

Perplexity knows too much about me. Sometimes I search something and it feels like it says, “Ah, Alex, you work here. You have a little son. You have a partner. You drive this car.” Of course, it is not really speaking like that, but the feeling is there. It knows things. Or it connects things. And then you ask yourself: is this normal now?

I think we have to live with it.

The Mayor said AI is fantastic, but he also said one problem is that maybe five or six people on this planet control a very big part of this future. I think he is right. It is not only about work. It is about power. And maybe it is already too late for governments to stop it or really regulate it. I do not know. I only know that AI is here, and I use it.

I cannot remember the first exact day I used AI for work. I think I started seriously when I began working at CRC. Maybe one and a half years ago. My first real use was simple: AI wrote or helped me write follow-up texts after customer meetings.

After a meeting, I write everything down. All information. All details. What the customer said. What he needs. What I noticed. Then I have a very long text. Before, I had to read it, sort it, and make a follow-up myself. Now I put it into AI and say: please find the important things. Please compress everything.

That was my first step.

It saves time, but not as much as people maybe think. If a follow-up took me sixty minutes before, maybe now it takes forty-five. I still have to check the summary. I have to see if it is correct. I have to see what is missing. AI helps, but it does not take away my responsibility.

Over a whole day, maybe I am one hour faster. But I do not close my laptop and go home earlier. I use that hour for my employer. There is always something else to do.

The Mayor asked me where the border is between Alex and the robot. That is a difficult question.

Some emails I let AI write almost completely, especially if they are long or complex. But when I write to a colleague or my boss, I often do it myself. It depends. AI is now so integrated in my process that sometimes I do not think about it anymore. It is like using a laptop or a phone. It is just there.

But I still think the human part is very important.

AI is good for ideas. It is good for structure. It is good for analysis. But you need creativity to know which work you give to AI and which work you do yourself. That is maybe the new skill. Not only using AI, but knowing when not to use it.

I remembered one example.

I had the idea to record the shelves with our products at customers. I wanted AI to analyze the video and create an Excel file with all products, item numbers, and information. That would save a lot of time. It would be great. But it did not work. I could not find the right AI. The video analysis was not good enough. The Excel file was not right.

So I stopped the project.

That was frustrating, because doing it manually takes a long time. But sometimes you learn that a project is still too complicated. Maybe in two years it will work easily. Maybe then I will laugh that I had problems with it. But now, for this specific task, the robot was not better than the human.

We also spoke about thinking.

Some people say AI means nobody will think anymore. I am not sure. I think it depends on the job. In my job, I maybe have to think differently. There is a study, I said, that in the morning your brain is fresh, but with every decision your brain gets slower. So maybe it is good to give small decisions and small tasks to AI, so you have more energy for the important thinking.

The Mayor explained how he uses AI for his campaigns. He does not ask it what his goals are. He knows his goals. Then he uses AI as a thinking partner. He gives it information, results, screenshots, ideas. It challenges him. It gives him options. He observes, decides, changes.

That made sense to me.

AI should not replace your direction. You still need to know where you want to go.

Then we moved ten years into the future.

April or May 2036.

I had no answer.

Everything is moving so fast. Maybe in ten years you do not need a salesman like today. Maybe every customer has an assistant in his inbox. Maybe the assistant answers all questions, checks stock, compares products, sends orders. Maybe one system talks to another system. Maybe the customer presses one button and says: I want CRC, Peka, WD-40, all brands in my shop. And all the data goes automatically into the system.

That is not so unrealistic.

Maybe the products are picked by robots. Maybe delivery comes by drones. Maybe from Belgium to Germany it takes two hours. Maybe the only human left was the truck driver, and maybe even he is not needed anymore.

The Mayor asked what my colleagues and I will do then. Play golf all day?

I said, “I hope so.”

But behind the joke, there was something more serious. He asked me something that stayed with me longer than the future itself.

What does your mother think about all of this?

I had to smile a little bit when he asked that.

My mother belongs to another generation. She did not grow up with smartphones, with the internet, with all this speed. I remember when I helped her install her first smartphone. Before that, she always said, “I don’t need WhatsApp. If I want to talk to you, I can call you. I can write an SMS.”

And she was right, in a way.

Today, she uses it. She uses WhatsApp. She uses the internet. She adapted, step by step, like she always does. But AI is different for her.

She has a worry that I understand.

She thinks that if everything becomes automatic, people will stop thinking. That maybe in ten years, we will all become a little bit stupid because the machine does too much for us.

I don’t think she is completely wrong.

And in that moment, I realized something simple but important. In my family, we are standing in three different worlds at the same time.

My mother learned technology late.

I learned it while growing into my work.

My son will never know a world without it.

For my mother, technology was something new she had to accept.

For me, it is something I have to manage every day.

For my son, it will just be normal life.

He will not compare. He will not remember a “before.” For him, asking a machine a question might feel as natural as asking his father.

That thought stayed with me.

Because I want him to use these tools. I don’t want him to be afraid of the future. But I also want him to think. I want him to have patience. I want him to try first before he presses a button.

Maybe this is what each generation gives to the next one.

My mother gives me caution.

I try to give my son curiosity.

And somewhere between these two, he has to find his own way.

At home, I already see how strong technology is in my own life. I sit in front of my laptop all day. Then I finish work, and I take my phone. Instagram, messages, scrolling. Too much. I even deleted the screen-time function because I don’t want to see how much time I spend on it.

The Mayor laughed and said he doesn’t want to know either.

We both know it is everywhere. You can try to escape it, but then you switch it off and after ten minutes you want to do something, and you need it again.

Could I live completely offline? Maybe for one week. As a challenge. But not longer. I would need everything back.

That is the strange thing. It makes life easier, and at the same time, it takes something from you if you are not careful.

At the end, the Mayor asked me the hardest question.

What if one day my son asks me: “Papa, how do I stay valuable in a world where machines can do so much?”

Valuable is a big word.

I had to think about that.

Is he valuable because of his job? Because he earns money? Because he understands AI better than others? Because he works with his hands, like a craftsman, a baker, a plumber?

I don’t know.

But I think the most important thing is something simpler.

He is valuable if he has a good character.

If he is friendly to other people. If he is honest. If he is reliable. If people trust him. If he listens. If he understands how others feel.

Machines can do many things. Maybe one day they can do almost everything.

But they cannot replace how a person makes you feel.

I don’t know what job my son will have. Maybe it doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it will be something with AI. Maybe something completely different.

But I hope that when that day comes, when he asks me that question, I don’t need to give him a perfect answer.

I hope he already knows it from how he grew up.