Mark Quinn’s story usually begins with the ending: an experienced tech executive at companies like Apple and Amazon, in the ultimate tech irony, was fired for AI. But the title missed the real story. Layouts are not the end. It was the moment when the world changed, and it was the beginning of a journey that turned him to the technology that made his work obsolete into his closest collaborator, career consultant, and even parenting coach.
This is not just a story about technological destruction; in the face of obsoleteness, it is a profoundly artificial description of adaptation. Here is a roadmap for what happened after the initial shock, and when fear fades, a terrible question remains: What about now?
For Quinn, the answer begins with revelation. Before he set out in May 2023, he went through a core that shocked him. As an experiment, he and his team have been working hard for four months to solve an operational challenge.
“In 30 seconds, it spits out not only the answer, but the complete methodology, which we think is the clever adaptation we found,” Quinn recalls. “When I saw this, I realized that the world had changed. At that moment, I said we had to go all out.”
He gave his all, but soon he came out. The efficiency he achieved by reducing the human workforce with AI by 3,000 people ultimately eliminated his role. He is the ghost in the machine he helped build.
But instead of succumbing to grasping so much fear, Quinn made a conscious choice. He decided to learn the language of ghosts.
“For me, it’s a time to wake up the phone to realize what’s really going on,” he said. “The world has been turned upside down. The world is no longer circular. Now it’s a triangle and I have to navigate in the order of this new world.”
His first step is to reject a shared view of AI. He begged people to do so. “Don’t think of AI as a tool. Don’t think of it as a search engine,” he insists. “These companies do a huge damage by making them look like chatbots. They are not. You can think of AI as collaborators, which is the best expert in the world because whatever you need to sit next to you, the more you can get out of it.”
Quinn tests this theory and begins what he calls “self-ai aiming youpsion”. He built a custom GPT, a private AI agent to guide him. He provided a resume for this, his skills and fears, and asked a simple question: What should I do?
The result is a detailed 120-day AI application program. It tells him what to learn, who to talk to and what tools to master to browse his new “triangle world.” This is a course of survival, prescribed by the forces that threaten it.
This new collaboration achieved the most amazing results when Quinn was looking for a job. He came across a position that played a role on Pearl.com, but initially passed. “It simply doesn’t read like the kind of work I’ve done in the past,” he said.
A week later, he saw it again. This time, he ran it through his “Professional Partner” GPT. The response of the machine is a revelation. “It comes back and says, ‘Mark, I know it doesn’t look like a game on the surface, but you have to be deeper.” It explains to me the connection I didn’t see. ” AI rewrites his resume and cover letter. He gets a job.
The contrast between his past and present is a vivid snapshot of the future of knowledge work.
“Previously, I led thousands of large, operational, complex groups,” Quinn explained. “Now I lead a zero team. It’s me and my agent. I’m on the desk, and there are four different computer screens, and about six different agents running at any time. That’s my team.”
His new job is to reconnect the entire company to leverage AI, transform the job and its people, a role his AI collaborators found for him, which doesn’t exist in his old world.
But perhaps the deepest transformation is not in his office, but in his home. The ghost has been domesticated. Quinn is a divorced father who brings his AI collaborators into the closest corner of his life. He built a “kid coach” GPT and sowed with his own parenting philosophy to help him everything from setting allowances to helping kids through tough social situations.
The most powerful example comes from his 13-year-old daughter, who has learning challenges. Her social studies textbook is the source of nightly conflict. Text-to-speech software is robots and rasters. So Quinn started putting chapters into AI tools and turning them into engaging podcasts.
“It’s me having to argue with my kid every night to get her to read it completely, and her expectation has to time it because she loves it so much.”
However, this proximity to artificial intelligence has also surfaced deeper anxiety. The story involves the question of his eldest daughter, which responds to global fear. “She said she was scared,” Quinn shared. “She asked me, ‘Will AI take all our work?’ “Will artificial intelligence sweep the world?” “She doesn’t mean a question of abandonment.
This is the moment of the whole narrative. Quinn is full of optimism and understands fear because he gets along with it. His response to his daughter is the same as his message to the world: the concern is effective, but the only way forward is through engagement rather than avoiding. We have to build guardrails to make sure the AI is doing well.
This leads to a problem that even Scout Mark Quinn can’t answer this strange new territory. When conversations turn to the future, AI performs the world of all entry-level work, he is asked where the next generation of leaders will come from. How do you gain experience when entry points are automated?
His answer was refreshing. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I think that over time we’ll see my theory, but it’s loose, it’s something we’ll see like an extended apprenticeship program where companies are essentially hiring workers who haven’t done a lot of work to develop them over the years.”
This is the amorphous conclusion of amorphous time. Mark Quinn has no crystal balls. The story he has is a story where the power that feels like a destructive ghost can also be a creative companion. He was once caught off guard. Now, his life is to make sure that others don’t have to. His message is clear: Don’t be afraid. Leave the stands.
The game has begun.
