Upstage

𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀? 𝗪𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. When I was building Papago, a machine translator, I spent a lot of time with human translators. The more I talked to them, the less the word "translation" felt like one thing. There was the part they loved: catching tone, choosing the right word, carrying not just meaning but personality into another language. And then there was the part no one romanticized: broken formatting, copied numbers, document cleanup surrounding the actual act of translation. Both were called "translation." Only one of them felt worth protecting. Years later, I started seeing the same pattern in enterprise work. Take underwriting: the work of deciding whether a company should take on a risk. From the outside, it looks like one decision. But inside the work, there is document labor: opening PDFs, comparing numbers, and checking missing fields. There is also judgment work: understanding why this customer is different, and being accountable for the call. And then there is relationship work: managing and networking with clients over wine. So when people ask, "Will AI replace underwriters?" I think the question is already too coarse. Replace which part? The PDF opening? Please. The missing-field chase? Yes. The judgment? Be careful. The relationship? No. This is what we miss when we talk about automation: input, output, done. We ignore the who, the how, and the why. AI will eventually be able to replace almost anything. But that does not mean it should replace everything. The future of work is not one clean line between human and machine. That's why at Upstage , we're conscious about that decomposition. We want to remove as much of the boring work as possible. Not so people become less necessary. So that they can be more empowered by AI. So that they can enjoy more of their work. So that they can spend more time on the parts where being a human actually matters. #FutureOfWork #HumansInTheLoop