AI as Exoskeleton: Why Augmenting Humans Beats Replacing Them
Sometimes it feels like AI has two destinies — and the choice between them is already being made not by engineers, but by accountants.
I build products at the intersection of AI and real human work — document processing, search, recognition, routine automation. And the further I go, the clearer a simple rule becomes: AI shouldn't "replace humans." Its purpose is to augment them. Make work more precise, faster, safer. Not to squeeze extra salaries out of the system, but to return extra productivity to society.
The paradox is that many companies look at AI through a narrow lens of profit: "cut the team — improve the margin." Sure, it looks great in the quarterly report. But for the common good — questionable. And even for the business itself — not as obvious as it seems.
I recently came across an idea that struck me with its historical simplicity. Henry Ford at the dawn of the automobile age didn't just build an assembly line — he tried to build a market.
His famous "five-dollar day" (the wage increase of 1914) is usually explained by various factors: employee retention, reduced turnover, increased efficiency. But there's a broader logic at play: a worker with decent pay becomes not just a cog in production, but a participant in consumption — a person who can actually buy what the industry produces.
And here I return to IT.
Over the past decades, the IT industry has created a massive "buyer class": developers, analysts, designers, product managers, DevOps — people who don't just earn a salary, but spend it on digital tools. Subscriptions, services, plugins, clouds, infrastructure, automation. SaaS largely grew because the world was gaining more "knowledge workers," each with their own stack of paid helpers.
Now imagine that the primary strategy for AI adoption in corporations is to cut this class.
Seat-based SaaS (the "pay per user" model) becomes especially fragile: if there are fewer "users" inside companies, the market shrinks on its own. Not because the product is bad, but because the number of those very jobs that sustained the subscription economy is decreasing.
Markets and media are already noticing — there's growing discussion of how AI is changing the very nature of SaaS and pressuring familiar revenue models.
The result is a strange picture: IT companies (and their clients) chasing savings may be "shooting themselves in the foot" — shrinking their own consumer base, reducing overall demand for the very tools they live on.
If we continue the Ford analogy, what we need today is not a "universal robot," but a new version of the "five-dollar day" — in digital form.
It doesn't literally mean "pay twice as much." But the idea is the same: share the gains from productivity. AI acceleration can be channeled not into layoffs, but into:
Because AI is not an excavator that replaces a digger. It's more like an exoskeleton: it makes a person stronger. But only if the person stays in the design.
And perhaps the key question of the coming years isn't "how many people will we cut," but "how much human potential will we unlock — and where will we direct it."
In this scenario, everyone wins: business, society, and the market that continues to be a market — because people still have work, income, and a reason to participate in the economy we're building.
If AI and economics interests you, I explored adjacent questions in another essay:
→ Zeitgeist Returned — But Not as We HopedThis article was created in hybrid human + AI format. I set the direction and theses, AI helped with the text, I edited and verified. Responsibility for the content is mine.