The New Physician: Today’s Difficult Problem

If AI can do 80% of your job, what makes the remaining 20% valuable?

That is the question I think more people should be asking.

Judgment. Trust. Persuasion. Understanding the real problem. Knowing when the machine is wrong.

AI may make some work cheaper. That doesn't necessarily make you less valuable. It may simply change where your value lies.

I’m Sonny Saggar, professional problem solver.

Find me at NewPhysician.org and click Discuss a Problem if there’s something you'd like to talk through.

#AI #FutureOfWork #Careers #Jobs #ArtificialIntelligence #SonnySaggar #Shorts

For 25 years, I was an emergency physician. Then came divorce, federal prison, and an abrupt separation from the medical world I had built my identity around.

For a while, I thought the goal was to get everything back.

Then I realized something surprising: I didn’t want all of it back.

At almost 59, I’m learning that success has much less to do with money, titles, possessions or popularity—and much more to do with how we make other people feel and what we do with the time we have left.

Sometimes bouncing back doesn’t mean rebuilding your old life. Sometimes it means realizing you’ve outgrown it.

My book GROUND, about rebuilding after extreme adversity, is available on Amazon.

— Sonny Saggar
Professional Problem Solver

If AI can do 80% of the work you currently do, what makes the remaining 20% valuable?

That may be a more useful question than simply asking whether AI is going to take your job.

Early evidence suggests the effects of AI may already be showing up differently for younger workers in highly AI-exposed occupations, particularly through weaker hiring. But that does not necessarily mean human value disappears. It may mean that human value moves.

Judgment. Trust. Persuasion. Understanding the real problem. Knowing when the machine is wrong. Taking responsibility for the outcome.

And if AI can handle much of the routine work, someone who understands both their field and the technology may actually become more productive and more valuable, not less.

In this talk, I explain why I think the better career question is:

What is left of my job after AI takes the easy parts?

Whatever is left may be exactly where your value lies.

I’m Sonny Saggar, professional problem solver. Every day I address a difficult problem in medicine, AI, commercial real estate, business, or beyond.

You can find me at NewPhysician.org, where you can click Discuss a Problem and we can talk about anything you want.

#AI #FutureOfWork #Careers #ArtificialIntelligence #Jobs #Business #ProfessionalProblemSolver #SonnySaggar

This Labor Day, I found myself thinking about what work is becoming.

AI is not simply eliminating tasks. It is changing where the value sits. Work that used to require teams, specialists, editors, designers, analysts, and production people can increasingly be compressed into tools that one person can use.

And in this video, that idea became very literal.

I’m Sonny Saggar, professional problem solver. Every day I address a difficult problem in medicine, AI, commercial real estate, business, or beyond.

The real question is not just, “Will AI take my job?”

It is:

Which parts of my work are becoming cheap, and which parts of my judgment are becoming more valuable?

That may be the more useful Labor Day question.

You can find me at NewPhysician.org, where you can click Discuss a Problem and we can talk about anything you want.

#LaborDay #AI #FutureOfWork #ArtificialIntelligence #Business #Productivity #ProfessionalProblemSolver #SonnySaggar

When I was a teenager, Tommy Hilfiger was everywhere, and I kept wondering: who the hell is Tommy Hilfiger, and why does his name mean anything?

Years later, I realized that question contained a surprisingly useful business lesson.

A brand isn't really a logo, a color scheme, or even a name. A brand is what people have learned to expect when they encounter that name.

In today's talk, I look at how an ordinary name acquires meaning, why personal brands work the same way, and a simple question you can use to define what you want your own name to stand for.

I'm Sonny Saggar, professional problem solver. Every day I address a difficult problem in medicine, AI, commercial real estate, business, or beyond.

Find me at NewPhysician.org and click Discuss a Problem if you'd like to talk through a problem of your own.

#Branding #PersonalBrand #Business #Entrepreneurship #TommyHilfiger #ProfessionalProblemSolver

When I was a teenager, everybody seemed to wear Tommy Hilfiger. I remember wondering: why does this particular name mean anything?

Years later, I realized there was a business lesson hiding inside that question.

A brand isn't really the name. It's what people have learned to think when they hear the name.

I’m Sonny Saggar, professional problem solver.

Find me at NewPhysician.org and click Discuss a Problem if there’s something you’d like to talk through.

#Branding #Business #Entrepreneurship #PersonalBrand #SonnySaggar #Shorts

AI can give you a polished, confident answer and still be wrong.

The question is not just whether the AI sounds intelligent. It is:

What checks the work before the answer creates a real consequence?

I think of that check as a referee.

If an AI reads an invoice, the referee might be the purchase order, the receipt, and the arithmetic.

If it answers a policy question, the referee is the current approved policy, not merely a real link to an outdated version.

If it runs a website workflow, the referee may simply be the test: click the button, submit the form, and confirm that the result actually happened.

The important part is not pretending that the referee is perfect.

It is building a process where important outputs can be checked, uncertainty can be escalated, and someone in the business owns the exception.

The operating rule is simple:

Use AI to do the work faster. Give it a referee before you trust the result.

I never set out to become a web designer.

But people started asking me to build websites, and I realized that AI has completely changed the economics of the work. Tasks that once took a week, or sometimes much longer, can now sometimes be completed in an hour, or even minutes.

The important shift is that the hard part is no longer just technical execution.

The first question should be:

What does this website actually need to accomplish?

Does it need to establish credibility?

Generate an inquiry?

Take a payment?

Collect a submission?

Support an existing customer?

Once that outcome is clear, AI can dramatically accelerate the structure, wording, forms, logic, mobile design, and even much of the work behind the scenes, including deployment, DNS, integrations, and APIs.

But speed is not enough.

AI can build something impressive that still fails to solve the business problem.

The real skill is combining judgment, clear instructions, technical understanding, and AI to get from:

“We need this.”

to:

“Here. It works.”

The bigger lesson goes far beyond websites:

What can you already do that becomes dramatically more valuable when AI removes the slow part?

You do not need to become an AI expert.

You need to become exceptionally good at using AI inside something you already understand.

Recently, I have heard the same warning from a construction professional, a physician, several business owners, and others: people who refuse to learn how to use AI risk being left behind.

That does not mean blindly trusting it. Using AI badly, accepting bad answers, and then blaming the technology is not sophistication.

I compare this moment to the early automobile era. The important question eventually stopped being whether cars were perfect. It became whether you knew how to drive one.

At almost 59, after decades in emergency medicine, business, hospitals, and commercial real estate, I am not trying to compete with a 25-year-old software engineer at being 25.

I am combining experience and judgment with a tool that gives both much more leverage.

AI can generate answers quickly. The increasingly valuable skill is knowing which answer matters, which is wrong, which is dangerous, and which one you should actually act on.

The advantage may not belong to the person who knows the most about AI. It may belong to the person who can make AI useful.

A difficult case can have tens of thousands of pages, conflicting experts, competing medical explanations, and a client waiting for a decision.

My approach is to stop adding information long enough to identify the real decision, map what is known and disputed, find the hinge fact, stress-test the opposing theory, and only then decide whether another expert, deposition, or piece of evidence is actually needed.

The objective is not another enormous summary.

It is a decision-ready case map.

Sonny Saggar

newphysician.org