#60 - The question I stopped asking in 2025

I spent most of 2025 asking myself the wrong question.

"How soon am I going to be replaced by AI?"

Every time I'd experiment with Claude or ChatGPT for fraud analysis, that question would sit in the back of my mind.

When an LLM would write a decent fraud rule in 30 seconds, I'd feel this weird mix of excitement and dread.

Then I'd watch fraud practitioners react to my LLM experiments, and I realized—I wasn't alone in this anxiety.

The fear nobody talks about

I've spoken with dozens of fraud professionals this year about AI and LLMs.

Here's what I noticed: their objections always had merit.

"The outputs aren't consistent."

"It hallucinates data."

"We can't trust it with sensitive information."

"It doesn't understand our specific fraud patterns."

All true, and valid concerns.

But underneath every objection, I started hearing the same unspoken fear:

"If this thing can do my job, what happens to me?"

Nobody says it out loud, but it's there.

And it's making smart people defensive about technology that could genuinely help them.

The false choice

Here's where we get stuck.

We frame it as a binary: either AI is too unreliable to use, or it's so good it'll replace us.

So we pick a side and defend it.

"AI will never understand fraud like humans do."

Or, "AI will automate fraud jobs within five years."

Both wrong. Or at least, both missing the point.

The reality is messier and presents more paths for us to follow than just two. 

LLMs are remarkably good at some fraud tasks and terrible at others:

They can analyze patterns in seconds but struggle with consistency. They can write rules but need human judgment to validate them.

They're not replacing fraud analysts. They're changing what fraud analysts do.

What actually endangers your career

I stopped asking "Will AI replace me?" around July.

I started asking instead: "What happens if I don't learn to use AI while my peers do?"

Now that's the real risk.

Not that AI becomes so good it doesn't need you. But that you fall behind the practitioners who figured out how to 10x their value by using it as a tool.

The fraud analyst who can research and deploy a rule in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.

The fraud leader who can analyze 6 months of data in an afternoon instead of waiting weeks for a data scientist.

The team that builds new capabilities they couldn't afford to build manually.

They're not being replaced by AI. They're becoming more valuable because of it.

And the gap between them and the people still arguing about whether LLMs are "ready" keeps widening.

The question I'm asking now

So now I’m asking myself a different question: "How can AI make me better?"

Turns out, that's a much more productive question.

It leads to experimentation instead of defensiveness.

It leads to learning what AI does well and what it doesn't.

It leads to building workflows that combine human judgment with AI speed.

But most importantly, it leads to staying relevant.

The uncomfortable truth

Fighting AI adoption won't protect your job.

Understanding AI's limitations won't protect your job.

Being right about AI's flaws won't protect your job.

You know what will? Being the person who figured out how to use imperfect AI tools to deliver results others can't.

That's not a prediction. It's already happening.

The only question is whether you're learning alongside it or explaining why you shouldn't have to.

What question are you asking yourself about AI? Hit reply—I'm genuinely curious where other fraud practitioners are landing on this.

In the meantime, that’s all for this week.

See you next Saturday.

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