Be Irreplaceable in a World of AI

The AI conversation in Pharma and Biotech is generating a lot of anxiety, and a lot of misplaced action. Women are either chasing every new tool or avoiding the whole conversation entirely. This episode cuts through both reactions to get at what the research and the data actually say about what protects a career right now.

The skill most likely to determine who gets promoted, who survives a reorg, and who gets called first is not the one most strong technical performers are investing in. That gap is what this episode is about.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the women who will be hardest to cut in Pharma are not the fastest AI learners, and what they are building instead
• What the actual drivers of biopharma layoffs are in 2025, and why they matter more than the AI narrative
• How AI raising the technical baseline changes what gets you promoted, protected, and noticed in a matrix organization
• Why strong technical performers in Pharma systematically underinvest in the skills that determine advancement
• The one relationship move to make this week that compounds in ways credentials never will

Get the Book: Your Worthy Career: A Science-Backed Method to Build a Meaningful Career in Pharma and Biotech here.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

If you're someone who wants to find out just how good your career can get and how much of a difference you can make in the pharmabiotech industry, you are in the right place. Welcome to Your Worthy Career, the podcast for women, building meaningful, high-impact careers in pharma and biotech. I'm Melissa Lawrence, career and leadership coach, organizational psychology expert, and the founder and author of Your Worthy Career. I spent over 12 years inside this industry and talent development across biotech and large pharma, and I've been coaching women in this space exclusively ever since. I bring you research-backed strategies, an insider perspective on what's actually happening inside industry organizations, and the perspective shifts that get you real results. Here we build careers that are meaningful, aligned with who you actually are, and positioned for the impact you're capable of making. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I hope that you are doing well. In Maryland here, it has been winter one day and summer the next. So it's really been all over the place. Now, today we're gonna talk about AI, but maybe not the way that you would expect. Now, I've been learning a lot about AI tools this year, and it's been on purpose with a specific goal to eliminate the administrative and routine tasks on the back end of my business so that I can have more human touch points with you to protect my voice and to protect my thinking and the relationships that are really at the center of the work that I do. And I've been taking trainings on different platforms to help cut back time on research and repurpose my six years of content that I've been doing. As if you've been around here for a while, you know between the podcast, the emails, the webinars, the trainings, the social media, I have a book now. And instead of always creating something new, which is so fun for me, I have to protect my time a little bit more. And so there are some really great pieces of content that I have taught over the years that really help you and have made a difference. And they just deserve to come back into the limelight. Also, something we've done in my business the last couple of years is really building more automation into onboarding and offboarding new clients. So what this means is instead of manually adding a new client to your client members area, we have an automation to immediately give you access when you enroll. So that helps you and it helps us. I have a private podcast for my clients, and we have an automation to add you to that so that you can listen right away. Same with evaluations. We evaluate your progress each month, and I have AI help with reminders that your evaluation is coming due and the link to it. So each client who is on their own path, on their own schedule, has personalized reminders and don't get lost so their progress can continue to be measured and celebrated. These are some really great ways we've used automations and technology over the last couple of years. I actually even just built a new scheduled task where AI will tell me my priorities for the day based on looking at a number of different sources and tell me outstanding emails I need to reply to, reviews and approvals that my assistant might be waiting on, meetings that I have, and it really just sets my day with focus. It's been so helpful. So my goal is to cut down on those administrative tasks so that I can be focused on writing original content for you to learn from, delivering to my clients and increasing their results and creating more touch points like retreats that will be inclusive only for my clients. So many exciting things to come. And here is what I've discovered kind of in this learning process. The faster the technical robots become part of our work, the more that human interaction matters. And I've seen this across the board in the industry. I've seen this with my clients that are getting traction in their job search, that are getting offers and promotions. I've seen this with women getting ahead for many, many years. Every week there is a new article about which roles AR are going to eliminate, which tools you need to learn, which certifications will keep you relevant. And every time I open any sort of platform, I'm inundated with the latest expert who wants to show me the way and another tech layoff headline. Like it is just everywhere, right? And what you're seeing in company announcements and people that might be coming across in ads, everyone is just trying to capitalize on AI, good or bad. And that can create some anxiety. And I hear it from women across the industry all the time. And I totally understand when things change this fast, we can have an instinct to like hold on to the past or hold on to what we know. And that might be learning. That might be, okay, I'm gonna learn the tech, I'm going to learn the tool, I'm gonna try to stay relevant in a way that feels comfortable. And some of the people that I talk to are so focused on finding a job that won't get consumed by AI rather than focus on how they can be irreplaceable if it does. How can you be irreplaceable in the world of AI instead of trying to find the most manual role that AI can't yet replace? Or maybe you're doing the opposite and you're not learning AI at all. You're like resisting completely, pretending it's not there, hoping one day you just like wake up and it all went away. I think I definitely felt that way. Actually, no that I felt that way for a period of time a couple of years ago that I was like, let's just see how this passes. Like, I don't really want to get into all this. Both reactions make sense, but let me give you some data to consider. Now, Biospace, this is from 2025, they tallied to show how biopharma layoffs rose, and they rose about 47% year over year to roughly 42,700 affected employees. And those cuts hit major companies like Novo, Bayer, CSL, Merck. Bayer specifically eliminated more than 12,000 jobs since 2023. And so these cuts are happening across HR, regulatory, legal, medical, compliance, manufacturing. So when I tell you that like this threat and this anxiety is real, like I really want to honor that. Like, you know, I'm not gonna gaslight you and tell you these things aren't happening, they're happening. But here is what the data also says. According to industry analysts, AI is playing a secondary role to those layoffs. So AI is not the main reason for those layoffs. The primary drivers are the capital being tight in like funding, patent clips, mergers and acquisitions, pressures, innovation pipeline failures. AI is changing how companies think about staffing, but it's not yet the reason that these cuts are happening at the scale that we've seen them. The reason that many cuts are happening and that we've seen the last couple of years are for reasons that were always there. Pharma was never a completely stable job where there was never any layoffs. Like I had worked in this industry, gosh, like 17 years now. And there's never been a time. The very first pharma industry company was a CRO that I worked at, they had layoffs, and that was in 2009. Like this isn't new, which means that the women rushing to learn every new AI tool because they think it's gonna save their job, they're solving the wrong problem. And here is what I believe, and really what I've been seeing in my client work too the women who will be most irreplaceable in pharmatech over the next five years are not the ones who became the fastest AI guru, right? They're the ones that got better at being human. So let me tell you this, McKinsey, which a lot of people are familiar with, so they did a report late 2025, and it said current technology could technically automate about 50% 57, excuse me, 57% of US work hours. But it also argues that social and emotional skills will grow in importance. Let me say that again. Social and emotional skills are growing in importance. McKinsey's earlier and related research projects, 11% to 14% US demand growth for those skills by 2030. So social and emotional skills, McKinsey projects an 11 to 14 percent US demand growth by 2030. Especially, now listen to this because this is important for you, especially for roles requiring empathy, leadership, communication, and similar human-centered abilities. These are things that AI simply cannot do. And in pharma and biotech specifically, this is exactly what I've been saying for years. The judgment calls that do not have the SOP or protocol to tell you exactly what to do or are vaguely defined. The cross-functional meeting where you have three stakeholders from three different departments and three different priorities, and someone has to get them all to the yes so that you can get your project done on time. The regulatory conversation, where the relationship you built six months ago is the reason the reviewer gives you the benefit of the doubt today. The VP relationship you've built, where they call you first, not because of your title, but because you are the one that they trust. These are not just soft skills, these are the hardest skills in the industry. This industry is based on technical competence and elite education. Okay. These other skills, these are the harder skills. AI does not touch them. And here's the thing that really just should continue, should just really, really can like really just concern you. When AI raises the baseline on the technical work, which it is, right? When computers can do some of the technical work, the analysis, the documentation, the protocol execution, that technical layer it becomes less important. You can go into a tool, for example, like perplexity and fact check and find credible resources, reducing the need for hours of research. It's just one simple example. What will get you promoted, what gets you protected in a re-org, what gets you noticed, what makes you harder to replace, that becomes about human aspects. The things that make you you, the things that make AI work better, be more accurate, the critical thinking, the team interventions, the leadership, the ability to communicate at every level. And that is the skill most strong technical performers just haven't invested in. The women who get passed over, they're rarely missing the credentials or the degree or the hard work. The clients I work with, they start communicating their impact in the language that makes sense to a business leader, not just a scientific one. They build specific relationships intentionally with the right people who have influence over what comes next and who currently don't know them well enough to advocate for them. They fix that problem. That is the work. In some ways, I understand this kind of sucks. Like we have information that used to take a lot of time and effort to learn and acquire, and it's all just at our fingertips now. And for those of us that went to the years and years of school and grad school or got a PhD, and now people can just kind of like go Google things. It can be annoying, right? But think about it from this perspective. Kodak, if you remember back in the day, Kodak went out of business because they didn't get on board with digital pictures. They literally, Kodak literally invented the first camera, and they went out of business because they refused to change and adapt with technology. And as women, we have to rise up. This is our time because we have a competitive advantage that others don't. The skills that Pharma needs, the skills that will protect your career and everything you worked hard for, guess what? Those are skills that women are often best at. You're already ahead of the game, my friend. Women are naturally better at empathy, communication, leading teams, and all you have to do is become exceptional. Instead of using your natural talent and stopping there, that's good enough. Instead, invest in doubling down on these skills, and you will be impossible to ignore and impossible to stop in your career. So, again, let's give some examples to what this means day to day. Critical thinking across like complicated, ambiguous, high-stakes situations. The kind that happens when a study has a deviation, the path forward is not an SOP, when leadership asks for your opinion on a strategic decision and they actually want it, they need it, they need that critical thinking that you have. Relationships that are built before you actually need to call on them for an opportunity for something you need, specific relationships of people kind of in the outer rings that you might work with right now. Maybe it's a colleague at another site who responds immediately because you invested in that relationship two years ago. The executive sponsor who mentions your name in a room that you didn't even know that you needed to be in, but it opened an opportunity, a hidden door for you. Communication that makes people listen and want to know more, framing your work so a business leader understands why it matters, not just what you did, knowing how to have the conversation most people avoid because they're uncomfortable, being the person in the room who will do it, connection to the patient, the deeper why behind your work, innovation beyond what is currently known, the ability to lead high-performing teams. These skills they compound and grow in a way that credentials and technical skills just cannot compete with. Every relationship that you build, every hard conversation you handle well, every room you walk into, advocate for yourself, those do not depreciate. They grow. They get better with practice and time. That is the career that holds up. And you're probably already better than most. You just need to get better. Because this is what's going to protect you through reorgs, market shifts, whatever comes next. You create this future because you invested deepest in the skills that make everything around you work better, that make your technical education actually worth it. Actually listened to down the road when someone could Google it and said the ones that cannot be automated because they require you to be in the room because they want your thinking on the topic. Now, hear me clearly. I am not telling you to ignore AI. Two things can be true at once. AI is the biggest shift our industry has seen since computers replace pen and paper. You should learn about it. You should be able to stay relevant in the conversation. You should use the tools where they make you more effective, like I'm doing in my business too. Don't become like Kodak, brilliant but stubborn to change. What I'm telling you is that AI is not the most important thing for you to lean into right now. The most important thing to lean into is the area that AI cannot touch. Your judgment, your relationships, your communication, your visibility as a leader, your ability to be the human when the decision gets made. Hard work has never been a guarantee of career stability or growth. It never has. And it's even less of one now. Developing your communication skills and your visibility as a leader is not just smart for your career. It's what is going to make you the exception when AI takes on more and more of the technical work. Now, I care about you too much to let you pour all of your energy into LinkedIn learning AI courses and tool tutorials without doing this strategic skill development that actually changes what's going to happen to your career now and in the future. So if you resonated with today's episode, I want you to do just one thing this week. Identify one person in your outer ring of your career that maybe you don't talk to every day, someone who's maybe two levels up or in another function, who would influence what comes next for you and who currently does not know you well enough to advocate for you. Then make a plan to start that relationship from a very genuine place, human to human. And if you want help building this kind of strategy specifically for your role and your career, your goals, and the skills that you personally need to build most, that is the work we do inside the Right Move Protocol. The link is in the show notes. You can learn more, apply, and book a consultation. All right, I will talk to you soon. Have an amazing week.