Mathew PaquetTemplate · 4 min read
The Paragraph Test for Your Job
Write one weekly task as a paragraph for an agent, see which part of your job is getting cheaper, and practice the three parts no paragraph can hold.
A year ago, an automation agency owner said plain English would build most workflows within twelve months. On direction, he was right: you describe what you want, and the AI builds it. So follow the money. It says two things at once.
PwC sorts jobs into two tracks:
When AI makes something easy for anyone, it stops being scarce. Building automations used to take a specialist. Now it takes a description. This data shows where pay is growing, not why. So here's a test you can run on your own job.
Take a task you do every week. Write it as a paragraph, the way you'd brief an agent.
What goes in: [THE INPUTS]
What comes out: [THE RESULT]
The steps: [STEP 1, STEP 2, STEP 3]
What good looks like: [HOW I KNOW IT'S DONE WELL]
Could an agent do this from the paragraph alone? [YES / NO]
What the paragraph can't hold:
Is this task worth doing at all? [MY ANSWER]
How do I know the result is right? [MY ANSWER]
Who is going to see it? [MY ANSWER]
Why would they believe me? [MY ANSWER]
If an agent could do the task from that paragraph alone, that task is getting cheaper. It's on the democratised track. What pays is the bottom half of the template.
Worked example
You're the marketer at a small company automating lead follow-up: every form fill gets a personal email within five minutes. Write the paragraph. An agent can build that today. So your value is in the three things the paragraph couldn't hold.
To automate, you need to know what to automate. Is slow follow-up even what's losing you deals? Or is it the price? Or the wrong leads? In a ZipRecruiter survey this summer, 59% of employers said judgment and decision making matters more in hiring than a year ago.
Getting it seen
Your agent writes a great post. So does everyone else's. A Graphite study found that by late 2024, more new articles on the web were written by AI than by people. HubSpot says about half of Google searches now show an AI overview (an AI-written answer above the results), so many people never reach your page.
Practice: pick one channel. Post once a week, and put one thing in it that only you could know: a number from your business, or a question a customer asked you on Tuesday. An agent can write the post. It wasn't in the room.
An offer people trust
A Gartner survey found that half of U.S. consumers would rather do business with companies that don't use generative AI in the content and ads they see. What they still trust is a person who stands behind a result.
Practice: write what you sell as an outcome with a number. Not "we build automations." Then have five conversations a month with customers. Yourself. No agent in the middle.
Film example: "Every lead hears back within five minutes, or you don't pay."
The paragraph keeps getting longer. Salesforce and Anthropic announced a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, like meeting prep and pipeline review. So the skill that lasts is noticing, early, when a piece of your job just became a paragraph, and moving your time to the piece that didn't.
Sources
Mathew's LibraryLibrary card
Keep reading free with your library card
One email opens this template and all 53 resources in Mathew's library. No account, no password.
Pick one task you do every week and write it as a paragraph for an agent, using the template in section 02.
Saving works best in your phone's browser. A copy is also in your inbox.