The K Curve Is Real. Here's What to Do Before It Curves Past You.
A conversation with Dustin Schodt, Co-Founder of ClearPath Innovation Partners
There's a moment in a lot of the conversations I have with professionals right now where I can feel it. The question underneath the question.
They'll ask about the job market, about AI, and about what companies are looking for. But what they're really asking is: Am I going to be okay?
I want to address that directly. Because the answer is more honest and more hopeful than most people are getting right now.
Recently, I sat down with a friend of mine, Dustin Schodt, and I want to give him the introduction he deserves before I tell you what he said.
Dustin is the Co-Founder of ClearPath Innovation Partners, where he and Mark Dunning are building what they call "forward-deployed intelligence." It's a fundamentally different model of consulting that installs proprietary AI-powered GTM infrastructure directly inside companies, owned by the client and not rented on a license. It's a category they're defining in real time, and it's catching on fast.
But the reason I trust what Dustin says about AI isn't ClearPath. It's everything that came before it.
He spent nearly twenty years inside some of the most operationally complex organizations in healthcare and supply chain. The kind of environments where decisions have consequences, where margin for error is thin, and where the gap between leadership rhetoric and front-line reality is measured in patient outcomes and revenue. At Vitalant, he ran BioCARE Operations with $400M+ in annual revenue across 25 distribution centers and grew the division from $280M to $400M while adding exactly one person. At Creative Testing Solutions, the world's largest donor testing laboratory, he delivered 600+ documented process improvements in a single year and led the integration of both American Red Cross and Grifols testing labs during back-to-back acquisitions. At Sequoia Consulting Group, he built and led the AI Operational Excellence team, saving over 100,000 hours of manual work and raising client NPS by more than 90% in twelve months.
He carries a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He has co-developed three patents in the insurance and healthcare space. He is an advisor and investor in Graphio.ai and a VIP Connector in the Phoenix AI and technology ecosystem.
He is not a pundit. He is not an AI enthusiast who started posting about it last year. He is one of the most serious operational minds I have encountered, someone who learned the fundamentals of process excellence at age eight from a father who worked inside Fujitsu's lean manufacturing culture, and who has spent the two decades since applying those fundamentals at every level of enterprise complexity. When AI arrived as a real capability, Dustin didn't pivot to it. He absorbed it into a framework he'd been building his whole career.
That's who I sat down with. And what he said about where we are right now is worth your full attention.
The K Curve Isn't a Metaphor. It's What's Happening.
Dustin laid it out plainly: we're on a K curve.
Some professionals and organizations are going up. Others are going sideways or down. And the split is widening faster than most people realize.
Meta laid off thousands. Block cut 40% of its workforce. At the same time, those same companies are posting new roles, and the bar for those roles is fundamentally different than it was three years ago. AI fluency is no longer a differentiator. It's baseline. The job posting might still say "Software Engineer." But what they're actually hiring is someone who can do the work of three people because they know how to leverage tools that make that possible.
This is not doom. But it is a restructuring. And the professionals who come out ahead are the ones who treat this moment as exactly that, a restructuring opportunity, rather than a storm to survive.
What the People Going Up Are Actually Doing
Here's one of the most striking things Dustin shared with me.
Three weeks before we recorded our conversation, he'd sent a message to someone navigating a career transition. A healthcare sales professional with a PhD, no coding background, no prior experience with any AI development tools. Two paragraphs. Here's how to get started with Claude Code. Here's how to get started with Claude Co-Work. Go build something. Anything.
Two weeks later, that person came back with three fully functioning applications. One automated the entire manual workflow of a personal chef friend, covering photos, client communication, and scheduling. Another was a supplement recommendation engine that analyzed blood work results. Another patched gaps in his company's own CRM.
No prior code. No dev background. Two weeks.
The point isn't that AI is magic. The point is that the gap between vision and reality has collapsed. It used to cost a team of engineers, significant capital, and months of runway to bring an idea to life. Now it costs a Claude subscription and focused attention over a few weekends.
The people on the upward slope of the K curve know this. They're acting on it while others are still deciding whether to believe it.
The Squeeze on Middle Management Is Real, and Instructive
Dustin made an observation that I think every mid-career professional needs to hear clearly.
The most significant pressure point right now is middle management.
Not because middle managers aren't valuable, many are, but because AI is compressing the distance between top leadership and front-line operators. The leaders at the top need to understand what's happening on the ground. The people on the ground are the ones deploying and evolving AI strategy in real time. The traditional connective tissue of middle management, translating, synthesizing, coordinating, is increasingly something AI can assist with or replace entirely.
This doesn't mean every middle manager is at risk. It means the question every mid-career professional needs to answer with honesty is: What unique value am I actually delivering that AI cannot replicate or assist with?
That's not a hostile question. It's a clarifying one. And I'd rather you sit with it now, with time to act, than have it answered for you by a restructuring you didn't see coming.
The Antithetical Case: What we Should Actually Worry About
I asked Dustin to take the other side. To tell me, knowing everything he knows, what genuinely concerns him.
He didn't hesitate: cybersecurity.
Legacy infrastructure is riddled with vulnerabilities that there isn't enough time or talent to patch. The new generation of frontier AI models can identify those vulnerabilities at a scale and speed that no existing workforce can match, which creates a window of real exposure. He referenced the Anthropic situation with their Mythos model, held back specifically because testing revealed hundreds of critical infrastructure bugs. That model hasn't been released publicly for exactly that reason.
This isn't science fiction. It's the current landscape.
But here's where Dustin lands, and I think it's the right read: fear of attack is actually accelerating AI adoption inside organizations, not slowing it. Companies that might have been in a wait-and-see posture are now moving because the cost of not moving has become visible. That acceleration, painful as it is in the short term, is hardening systems and building institutional capacity that wasn't there before.
The macro risk is real. The individual response to that risk is still in your hands.
The Advice That Will Change How Some People Move This Year
If I had to compress what came out of this conversation into something actionable, something you could take into the next 30 days, it's this:
Stop waiting for permission to upskill. The tools are available right now. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been and will ever be again. The cost is a subscription, some focused time, and the willingness to not be good at it immediately.
Find the companies investing in their people. If the company you're at isn't actively developing your capacity to work with AI, to think with it, build with it, operate alongside it, that tells you something about where they're heading. And it should inform where you're heading.
Treat a layoff as information, not a verdict. Dustin said something I'll carry into client conversations for a long time: getting caught in a layoff at a company that didn't value the work you were doing might be a feature, not a bug. The question is what you do with the time that opens up. The people who come out ahead are the ones who use that window to close the gap between where they are and where the market is moving.
Be on the K curve you want to be on. That's a choice you make now, not when the pressure arrives.
One More Thing Dustin Said
Near the end of our conversation, he said something I keep returning to.
"Your vision can actually become reality. That gap is not multi-million dollars and a whole team of engineers away. It's about learning the fundamentals."
I've been in talent and coaching long enough to know how rare it is to sit across from someone who genuinely believes that about other people, not just himself. That's what I heard from Dustin. Not a pitch. A belief.
I think that belief is worth more right now than almost any tactical advice I could offer. Because the professionals who will thrive through this aren't necessarily the ones who knew about AI first. They're the ones who decided to believe that the door was open for them and walked through it.
This Is What I Do
I work with leaders navigating exactly this kind of transition. People who are talented, experienced, and trying to figure out how to move with intention through a market that's shifting underneath them.
The tactical stuff matters: how to position yourself, how to tell your story, how to run a search that's targeted and high-signal rather than exhausting and scattered. But underneath all of it is the harder question: Who am I in this next chapter, and how do I lead with that?
That's the work I do. And if this conversation has you thinking about your role, your trajectory, or your options, I'd welcome a conversation.
Watch the full conversation with Dustin Schodt here →https://youtu.be/qmiicbIZDVM
Learn more on how we support Career Moves → https://www.erikcharlesconsulting.com/coaching
Erik Rasmussen is the Founder of ECC Talent Advisory, a coaching and talent practice built on 14+ years of recruiting experience and 600+ hires made across industries and levels. He works with executives and senior professionals navigating career transition, pivot, and the harder questions that come with both. For companies that need to hire with precision in a saturated market, Erik and his team are the first call.
