AI changed my work. Learning brought us here.

Will AI take away my job?

I began asking that question when AI started doing parts of the work I was paid to do. I cannot predict what will happen to every job, but I can tell you what happened to mine, and why my family and I started Osman Academy.

I am Osman Mohammed, a senior software engineer and AI solution architect in the making. But I didn't start there. I studied Electrical and Electronics Engineering in India. After graduating, I worked as a contractor on Google Maps. One of my jobs was to find house numbers in Street View images and type the numbers I could see. It was data labeling, although I didn't think of it that way at the time.

Years later, learning about AI made me look back at that work differently. I still don't know whether the images I labeled were used to train a particular system.

I went on to earn a master's degree in Computer Science and Information Technology in the United States, then built a career in software engineering. By the time ChatGPT brought conversational AI into everyday use, I had more than seven years of experience as a software engineer. Writing, testing, and deploying code was my bread and butter.

I remember eagerly waiting to try ChatGPT. When I finally did, my first reaction was: Subhan Allah. Humans created software that can mimic human intelligence. I knew something about how language models worked and that they could make mistakes, but using one still felt unlike any software I had known.

As coding assistants improved, I began using them day in and day out. They became increasingly capable at writing code, the very work I did for a living. I wasn't opposed to automation. I believed it could free people to spend more time on creative and innovative work. But I could see my own work changing, and I needed to change with it. That was where my quest to learn AI began.

For the first time in many years, I found myself experienced in my profession but still a beginner in an emerging field.

The hardest part was changing how I learned. Years of writing, testing, and maintaining software had given me a mental map of the systems I worked on. I understood them because I had lived with the code.

AI could now help carry out parts of that process. It could also help me brainstorm and refine ideas. I had to learn how to stay engaged with the work: how to explain what I wanted, understand what the system produced, test it, and make sound decisions about the result. Some habits from years of software engineering helped me. Others took effort to rethink.

I started studying more seriously. There was so much AI education available that I found it difficult to decide where to begin and which sources to trust. I focused on material from leading companies building these systems. At the same time, I wanted to understand the ideas that carried across their products, then practice applying those ideas with real tools.

I took notes as I learned, but my notes were organized mainly for me. My wife, Firdous Osman, saw how much clearer the journey could be. With her background in teaching and instructional design, she helped me think about how to introduce a concept, where a learner might get stuck, and what kind of practice would help it make sense.

I was also talking with my brother, Abdul Bari Mohammed, about how AI might change his work in business analysis. He brought questions about real business workflows: which parts could AI help with, what would need to change, and how would we judge whether it worked? Our conversations connected what I was learning technically to the work people do in organizations.

The three of us were facing this change from different places. I understood software systems. Firdous Osman understood how people learn. Abdul Bari understood business processes. We decided to document what we were learning and turn it into e-books, hands-on projects, and courses that could help others facing similar questions. That is how Osman Academy began.

The more I worked with AI, the more I came to see it as an intelligent tool. It can do remarkable things, but people still need to understand the problem, guide the work, question the output, and take responsibility for what they build. A tool is only as good as the human using it.

That belief shapes what we teach: understanding the foundations, questioning results, and building dependable systems that serve people.

Firdous Osman is a wonderful wife and mother who cares for our children while bringing her skills to this work. Osman Academy is in her name, and I am building it for her and our family. We want to help people through what we create, and we hope to earn a living from making it useful. Both reasons are honest parts of our story.

Honestly, I don’t know. But my experience has led me toward this view: people using AI systems will automate more of the digital work that you and I do manually today. Behind that change are people and organizations deciding what to automate and why. The responsibility for those decisions remains human.

Seeing parts of my own work become easier to automate pushed me to learn. I wanted to understand how these systems worked, what they could do, and where my judgment still mattered. That curiosity became the beginning of Osman Academy.

So, how can an AI system do digital work that a person would otherwise do? And what does that mean for the person?

If those questions make you curious too, start with AI Fundamentals. We’ll begin with the foundations that helped me make sense of the changes in my own work.