Something new is coming to Cocoon! Over the past few years we’ve had the privilege of working inside leading companies, workforce development organizations, designing career programs, building corporate partnerships from the ground up, and coaching professionals who are talented, driven, and ready for more. Most working professionals are not lacking ambition, they are lacking the right framework, tools, and support at the exact moment they need it.

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99helpers built a free self-assessment tool that lets you search any of 341 occupations and see exactly how exposed your role is to AI displacement. It pulls real Bureau of Labor Statistics data like salary, employment numbers, growth projections, and layers on an AI risk score from 1 to 10. You can look up your title right now and get a read on where you stand. 

The score is built on four factors: 

Cashiers score a 9, General office clerks, a 9. Registered nurses, a 3. Electricians, a 3. Roles that live in the body, in trust, or in complex human judgment tend to sit lower on the risk scale. What makes this tool worth your time is that it doesn't pretend to know the future. It offers three scenarios, and all three are worth sitting with. 

We explored a version of this in Chapter #61, when the Anthropic Economic Index showed that AI goes after the high-skill tasks first, like research, analysis, planning, and not the grunt work. This tool gives you the next layer with your specific occupation, your specific exposure, across all three possible futures.

Here's what to actually do with it. Don't just look at the score. Look at the breakdown underneath it. A high number driven by routine tasks is a different problem than a high number driven by weak regulatory protection. One calls for skill diversification. The other calls for strategic repositioning, certifications, a lateral move, or getting closer to the parts of your work that machines can't replicate. The professionals who tend to land well in disruption aren't the ones who predicted it earliest. They're the ones who asked the right questions before the answer arrived as a layoff notice.

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I had a coaching session recently with a candidate. They’re sharp, early career, maybe 24, who told me something that stopped me mid-sentence. She said she actually wanted to go back to the office, full-time if she could. I pushed back a little and asked her why, especially in a market where most people her age are fighting for remote flexibility. She said the people she was learning the most from were not on Slack. They were in the building and she had figured out that being near them consistently was making her better faster than anything else she was doing on her own.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. Here is what I know from years in the workforce development space. The professionals who build real career momentum early are rarely the ones who outworked everyone from their bedroom. 

Research from Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Virginia consistently finds that younger workers are more likely to go to the office than other generations, not because of mandates, but because they are actively seeking mentorship, connection, and career growth. Gen Z is making a strategic bet on proximity, and most of them have not even named it that way.

Now, that does not mean every return to office(RTO) mandate is worth complying with. Some of them are not about culture at all. Companies issuing five-day mandates in a slow hiring market are sometimes making a calculated bet that a percentage of the workforce will voluntarily leave, saving the company the cost and visibility of a formal layoff. The most skilled employees are the most likely to walk. 

So here is the real question and the one I want you sitting with whether you are 24 or older, what does showing up actually do for your career right now? If the answer is it puts you near people whose judgment you respect, in rooms where real decisions happen, and in a position to be seen doing work that matters, then the office is a tool you should use intentionally. If the answer is that you are commuting two hours to sit on the same Zoom calls you could have joined from home, then you are absorbing a personal cost that serves someone else's real estate strategy, not your future.

The office is not the enemy, but attendance without intention is a waste of your time that could be spent actually building something.

There's a version of the AI displacement story we've told before. The one where jobs quietly disappear before anyone bothers to explain why. You’ll hear things like “restructuring",  "efficiency gains", or "rightsizing". That jargon has always been careful to protect the company, not the worker.

A bill moving in Minnesota through the state House,  HF4369, the Safeguarding Human Intelligence and Employment in Labor Displacement Act, would require employers to give workers 90 days' notice before deploying AI technology that could eliminate their roles. During that window, pay continues, reskilling is offered, and workers have time to figure out their next move instead of hearing about it on a Tuesday afternoon through a calendar invite titled "Important Update."

The federal WARN Act, written in 1988, requires a 60-day notice for mass layoffs. It says nothing about automation. What Minnesota's bill proposes is essentially a WARN Act for the AI era, one that treats the deployment of displacement technology as seriously as a plant closing.

What makes this interesting beyond the policy is that Minnesota ranks as the most at-risk state in the Midwest for AI-driven job loss, with roughly one-third of all jobs in the state exposed to generative AI. Knowing that, I get the sense that they are watching the clock.  Now, will this bill pass? Maybe not in its current form. Even if it does, the harder question is whether 90 days is enough, or whether companies will treat the reskilling requirement as a genuine investment or a compliance checkbox. 

The point is that the rules governing how AI replaces workers are being written right now, state by state, bill by bill. If you've been waiting for federal protection, don't. The mid-career professionals who come out ahead in this transition won't be the ones who waited for a law to save them, they'll be the ones who started treating their skills like a hedge before anyone required it.

Watch what states like Minnesota, California, and Illinois are doing. That's where the signals are. And if your company is deploying AI tools that are changing how your role functions, start documenting it. Not out of paranoia, but out of preparation. The worker who understands their own transition has leverage. The one who doesn't, finds out on a Tuesday.