old school, new school

This week I listened to a podcast about artificial intelligence coming for the metals industry.

A young founder, sharp as anything, describing software that finds your next customer in fourteen seconds. Fourteen seconds to do what used to take a salesperson a week of phone calls and a legal pad. He said one line that made me laugh out loud, alone at my desk. Saying you use AI because you asked ChatGPT is like saying you use software because you went on Google.

He's right. And I sat there, a young 48, and felt two things at the same time that I don't think are supposed to fit in the same chest.

Pride. And fear.

I grew up in steel. Not the way people mean it. My father helped build one of the largest steel companies in the country, and the language of the mill was the language of my childhood. Tonnage. Spreads. Mill certs. Aged inventory. I knew what a service center was before I knew what I wanted to be. The industry didn't just give me a career. It gave me a self.

So when someone tells me the work I have done for almost twenty years can now be done by a machine in the time it takes to pour a coffee, I feel it somewhere that isn't professional. It's personal.

Here is the thing nobody in my world says out loud. The skill that made you valuable for thirty years can quietly become the thing that makes you replaceable, and no one mails you a warning. Steel taught me that before any algorithm did. Steel is patient, and then it isn't. It holds its shape for decades, and then the market moves and the floor moves under you, and you find out fast whether you bend or you break.

I have learned this the hard way, more than once. You can be the name on the door one quarter and a name on someone's list the next. One minute you are the person they swear they cannot run the place without. The next minute a decision gets made in a room you were never invited into, and you are standing in your kitchen at midnight, trying to remember who you are without the title.

So I have a decision to make about the machines, and I have made it.

I am going to learn them. Cautious is fine. Behind is not. The people pulling ahead in this industry right now are not the ones with the flashiest tech. They are the ones who picked one problem and solved it well, and then went and did it again. That is true of service centers. It is also true of starting over at 48 with a laptop and your own name on the door.

But I am also going to hold on, hard, to the one thing the fourteen-second software will never touch.

The call to a person who has known me for seventeen years and picks up because it's me. The handshake. The trust that gets built one honest deal at a time and cannot be crawled, scraped, or enriched. The machine is going to get very good at finding the company. It is never going to be the person that company believes in.

That is the part they cannot automate. That is the part I spent a lifetime forging. And it turns out the value was never the title. It was that. It was always that.

The mill is changing. The whole world I came up in is changing.

And I am not the metal that cracks when the heat comes up.

I am the metal that was made for it.

— Julie