On Hosting Laura Dottori-Attanasio: What I Learned About My Own Future

Toronto French School | April 2026

Earlier this year, our grade was asked to choose our six IB subjects, which is, more or less, the first formal decision a student makes about what direction their career will take. I had already been thinking about business. But around the same time, I started reading more about AI replacing white-collar jobs: finance, law, business management, even medicine and computer science. The fields I had been considering were the ones the headlines kept naming. I am not even sixteen, picking subjects that would shape my university applications, and I genuinely didn't know whether the careers I was preparing for would exist by the time I was ready for them.

I founded Market Mavens, my school's investment and stock market club, in the fall of grade 10. When I promoted it, I told students I'd bring in speakers on markets and finance, but I hadn't picked a topic yet. The IB selection changed that. I realized the question I actually wanted to ask wasn't how do you analyze a stock? It was the question I couldn't stop asking myself: what does a career in business even look like in ten years? I reached out to Laura, the CEO of Element Fleet Management, whose perspective on AI I thought students would benefit from hearing and asked if she'd be willing to come speak to the club. I gave her the title I wanted: AI Is Coming for White Collar Jobs: Are You Ready? She said yes.

What followed was weeks of logistics I hadn't fully anticipated. Booking the right room, coordinating with IT for the projector, promoting the event to teachers and clubs and through the morning announcements, because someone of Laura's caliber could not be brought into a half-empty room. At one point I had to send Laura a draft of my own introductory presentation, and a permissions setting on my school email kept blocking her access to the file. I would get her replies at 6 in the morning or 11 at night, times I could see, how busy her days were and how generously she was making space for a high school student's project. Each email I couldn't get through to her felt like a small betrayal of how grateful I was that she'd said yes at all. I was terrified of wasting her time. Eventually I figured out the issue, sent the file from my personal email, and the problem resolved. But the feeling that I was being trusted with something more valuable than I knew how to handle, stayed with me through the day of the event.

For the first few slides of Laura's presentation, I was scared. The numbers were stark, 300 million jobs impacted globally, 85 million displaced by automation in the next year alone. I sat in the room thinking, I am sitting here because I wanted reassurance, and instead I am being told to be more worried. But slide by slide, the talk shifted. She started showing us the other column, the work that wasn't going to be replaced. In finance: strategic advisory, complex deal structuring, client relationships, ethical investment decisions. In law: courtroom advocacy, complex negotiation, ethical judgment. In business management, the vision and organizational leadership, culture, stakeholder relations, crisis management. There was a line near the bottom of one of Laura's slides that I keep thinking about: AI gives me better information; it doesn't make the call.

That was the first shift. The fear didn't disappear, but it sharpened into something more useful. The question wasn't will AI replace my career? It was which side of the slide do I want to be on?

The shift went further when she put up a slide titled The Skills That Will Make You Irreplaceable: critical thinking, emotional intelligence, creativity and innovation, ethics and judgment, AI fluency, adaptability. I read through them and noticed something I didn't expect, three of them I already had. IB has been teaching me critical thinking for years. I've been told I'm a creative person, and emotional intelligence is something people who know me have called out specifically. That left three I needed to actively develop were ethics and judgment, AI fluency, and adaptability. For the first time in months, the future of my career felt like a list of things I could work on rather than something I could not control.

The slide that stayed with me longest came near the end. It was about what Laura looks for when she hires people. The bottom line read: The C.V. of 2035 won't list GPA. It will show what you built, what you solved, and how you used AI to amplify your thinking. I think about that sentence all the time now. It changed how I see my own portfolio, not as a list of activities to accumulate, but as evidence of the kind of person an employer in ten years will be looking for. Every project I take on now passes through that filter: am I building something? Am I solving something? Am I learning how to use AI well?

The final slide of the presentation said: AI will not replace you. A person who knows how to use AI will. You're young. You have more time to prepare for this than any generation before you. The students who win won't be the ones who feared AI, they'll be the ones who mastered it.

I started organizing the event because I was afraid of the future I was choosing. I ended it feeling something closer to lucky, that I was sixteen, that I had time, that someone with real experience had taken an afternoon to tell a room full of high school students that the future would still need people like us if we were willing to do the work.

The event was well-received. The school featured photos in the hallway. Students who had missed it asked me for copies of the slides. But what I took away wasn't about the success of the event. It was the realization that the question I'd been asking , will my career exist?, was the wrong question.

The right questions is the one Laura's presentation handed me: what kind of person am I building myself into, and is that the kind of person AI can't replace?

I'm still working on the answer. But I have a much clearer idea of what work that requires.