“It was easy to see we were basically one step away from having the technology cut the vegetables,” Shuler remembers. “That was kind of a wake-up call where we thought — this isn’t just about industrial kitchens. It’s about every setting you can imagine.”

Fast forward a few years, and the world has evolved. Shuler is now the president of the AFL-CIO, having moved into the top spot in the summer of 2021, following the death of the organization’s longtime leader, Richard Trumka. Thanks to artificial intelligence, anxiety about technology’s impact on job security has only increased — not only among kitchen workers, but also white-collar professionals who long saw themselves as immune from disruption: writers, lawyers, health care professionals, marketers, financial analysts.