The anxiety around is real. Every few days it seems yet another headline announces that AI is coming for another category of job. Analysts, writers, consultants, lawyers. The list keeps growing. If you’re finishing a degree or starting a master’s program and you’re wondering what any of this means for your career, that’s a perfectly reasonable question to be asking.
Here’s what the conversation actually looks like from inside the companies building and deploying these tools.
The distinction sounds small… but it isn’t. The repetitive, low-judgment tasks that used to sit inside otherwise interesting jobs, pulling data, formatting reports, first-draft research, those are going. The judgment, the relationships, the synthesis: those stay.
The numbers back this up. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 41% of organizations expect to reduce their workforce in roles exposed to AI-driven skills obsolescence. At the same time, 70% plan to hire people with new AI-related skills. The same report projects a net increase of 78 million jobs globally by 2030. The picture isn’t one of mass unemployment, but rather one of structural shift.
The professionals who are most at risk are the ones whose entire value proposition was those tasks. The ones who thrive are the ones who were always doing something harder alongside them: making judgment calls, managing relationships, synthesizing ambiguous information, communicating in ways that move people.
Those capabilities don’t automate. If anything, they become more valuable as the baseline rises.
During a recent career immersion session, Francisco Chabrán, Dean of Programs and External Relations at IENYC, walked students through how AI is being deployed inside real organizations right now; not in theory but in practice. The picture he described wasn’t one of replacement. It was one of acceleration.
The companies moving fastest aren’t the ones with the most AI tools. They’re the ones with professionals who can use those tools to do things they couldn’t do before, faster and at higher quality. That requires people who understand the business problem, can evaluate the output critically, and know when to trust the model and when to override it.
Consider what that looks like in practice. A portfolio manager reviews a sudden shift in market conditions. An AI model flags a potential risk based on historical patterns and real-time signals. The analyst’s job isn’t to accept the output at face value; it’s to interrogate it. What assumptions is the model making? What data might be missing? What action should we take, and how quickly?
Those questions are where human value lies. They require context, judgment, and the ability to act with incomplete information.
That’s a human skill that requires domain knowledge, context, and judgment. And that’s the picture Francisco painted: not a workforce being replaced, but one being pushed to operate at a higher level. WEF data supports it: 85% of employers surveyed said they are adopting AI to augment human roles rather than replace them.
Look for programs that integrate AI into the work rather than treating it as a separate module. Look for faculty who are practitioners, not just academics; people like Francisco Chabrán, who bring that real-world perspective directly into the classroom. And look for a location where you’ll be surrounded by the companies actually deploying these tools, because the fastest way to understand what the market needs is to be inside the market.
The WEF report identifies the fastest-growing skills as AI and data literacy, creative thinking, resilience, and analytical thinking. Not just technical fluency, but the judgment to use it well. That’s the profile a rigorous business program is designed to build.
The Master of Science in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at IENYC isn’t a technical AI degree. It’s a business degree that takes AI seriously. Students learn to work with AI tools as part of real business problems, not in isolation from them.
That distinction matters. The market needs people who can use one to solve a client problem, present the findings in a way that builds trust, and adapt when the situation changes. That’s who gets hired.
Casandra Timofte, an IENYC graduate, describes the rhythm of the program:
“You’re given a complex problem, you do the research, you present your thinking and you refine it under scrutiny. That was the rhythm at IENYC, and it’s exactly how I work today.”
Across all IENYC programs, the curriculum is built around live projects with real organizations. The problems aren’t simulated. The stakes are real. And increasingly, AI is part of the toolkit students are expected to use and question in equal measure.
New York City is that location. And IENYC is right in the middle of it.
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Not the good ones. AI is taking over data aggregation, formatting, and pattern recognition. What it can’t replace is judgment, communication, and contextual thinking. Those skills are becoming more valuable, not less.
Not necessarily. The most in-demand roles require people who can translate between technical teams and business stakeholders, evaluate AI outputs critically, and integrate tools into real workflows. A business education with AI fluency is a legitimate and increasingly sought-after profile.
STEM-designated programs like those at IENYC qualify international graduates for up to three years of US work authorization through OPT and STEM OPT. For anyone planning to build a career in US tech-adjacent fields, that visa flexibility is a significant practical advantage.
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Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, Ashleigh now calls Madrid, Spain home, where she has built a career shaped by curiosity, creativity, and a lifelong love of languages. Her work grows out of a passion for learning, storytelling, and meaningful cross-cultural connection, with language as the thread that ties it all together.
Her academic journey took her from studying Spanish and French and Secondary Education at the University of Southern Mississippi to graduate studies in Spain, where she completed a Master’s in Spanish at the University of Salamanca and a Master’s in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Alcalá. Along the way, she has worked across classrooms, research projects, and creative spaces, contributing to academic, multilingual, and editorial initiatives that connect language, knowledge, and culture.
