At two or three recent meetings, we had presentations on AI in my specific area.

We're trying to figure out how to use it.
AI is really "scary" to some aspects of my job area, because of it's ability to put together pieces from various areas. I see that only growing and being more common. For example, my field has a fairly long learning curve because it's kind of small community. It both exciting to see how AI can help train new people, and scary to see how AI gets some things very very wrong (and dangerously wrong! Think the problems with black Nazis in generative AI images, but now applied to a process that could potentially kill someone if done wrong like that!)

I do think AI will become a big part of what we do, but I don't think is really "replacement" in my field. AI probably can never actually DO what we do (for both technical and administrative reasons), but I also think AI will become a tool we can't imagine working without.

Let me give a semi-specific example. We have a test that we do all the time. 20 years ago when I started, I made a suggestion for a way to improve that test. Mentor said "Yeah, I thought about that 10 years ago as well, but the data we'd get out would be too complex and too convoluted to extract meaningful information." And he was right. Well, at a meeting recently, a new young kid just starting out in the field gave a talk about trying that same idea, and it was funny to see all the "grey beards" in the room nod and say "Yeah, we thought of that, but..." The young kid said "And the data that comes out is really complex and convoluted, and nearly impossible to interpret" (Yep!) "BUT with modern machine vision coupled to AI, we CAN actually extract meaningful data" and the whole room said "OH....."

I see alot of THAT in the future in my field. Stuff we couldn't do before that AI will allow us to do now.