University of Phoenix is running a free webinar on Thursday, November 19, 2026, with a title that sums up the mood of a lot of remote workers this year: “When AI Changes the Work, How Do You Stay Relevant Without Starting Over?” It’s part of the school’s Bridging Perspectives series and runs on Zoom, with registration through a link in the university’s announcement.
The panel hasn’t been named. The topics have. Which skills keep their value as a role changes. How to drop old ways of working without throwing away the experience behind them. Learning across generations. And reskilling as an ongoing habit rather than a one-off course.
What the survey numbers say
The university’s Career Institute research is more upbeat than most headlines. 53% of workers say advances in AI make them more confident about building skills, and 81% say AI helps them find new ways to use the skills they have.
Read those next to Visier’s figures from this week and the picture gets messier. Visier found 48% of employees admit to exaggerating their AI use or skill, and 59% say their employer has no clear plan for how AI will change their jobs, or they don’t know of one. People feel positive about the tools and unsure about where their employer is taking them. Both can be true at once.
Why it matters for remote and freelance workers
Remote workers feel this first. A contractor in Lisbon or Chiang Mai rarely gets a company training budget or a manager who explains the AI roadmap. They find out a task is automated when the work stops coming. The practical answer is the one the webinar is circling: know which part of your work is judgment, client trust and context, and sell that part harder, because it’s the part a model is worst at.
We looked at a related cost last month in Remote Workers Who Use AI in Their Own Language Pay a Tokenizer Tax of Up to 17 Times. Staying relevant isn’t only about skills. It’s also about which tools you can afford to use well.