Welcome back from leave. Your job is completely different.

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI Ashley Wallace returned to her job after six months of maternity leave and met a new coworker: Claude .

Before her leave, Wallace used ChatGPT to answer questions and some basic automations for notetaking or recruiting in her role as head of talent at the AI language-learning app Praktika.

"I came back thinking, oh, I'll ease myself in," she says.

"It definitely isn't the case in the landscape that I came back to." During her absence, the company had ushered in Claude Cowork — and Wallace didn't even know where to find the new system everyone was talking about on her computer.

Add to her new reality that AI has rocked the job hunt process .

Instead of the typical few hundred people applying for open roles at the startup, Wallace returned to find more than 1 ,000 vying for some jobs .

Candidates sometimes come to interviews unable to answer a single question after she suspects they padded their applications with AI, forcing Wallace to come up with new ways to weed out unqualified applicants earlier.

In the few months that she had been away with her baby, AI had made the job she knew foreign to her.

"Ever seen someone give someone a mobile phone that's never had a mobile phone before?" Wallace says.

"That's like how I felt when I came back." A leave of absence from work often results in a frenzied email inbox and missed office gossip, but, as companies unleash AI into every corner of their business, some people now return to a job they don't recognize.

There are new enterprise systems, workflows, and AI sprint experiments that rise and fall — all under the shadow of the threat that AI will end up taking your job anyway.

In a world of constant AI updates, going out of the office, even for a few weeks, can feel like moving toward obsolescence.

Nearly half of workers say their companies have adopted AI, up from 38% last fall, according to a Gallup poll published in July.

Forty percent of workers at large companies said in a McKinsey survey this spring that their firms are scaling their use of agents, up from 27% last year.