Ana Altchek

Coverage of how AI and workplace shifts are reshaping careers and leadership is Ana Altchek’s focus at Business Insider, where she is a senior career and leadership reporter and hosts the “Get Better at Work” and “Work Shift” series. Her reporting connects executive strategy, frontline worker experience, and practical advice to show how technology and management trends translate into day-to-day work life. She writes in clear, prescriptive formats, often anchored in specific interviews or research and aimed at helping readers adapt their skills, habits, and career decisions.

AI and the future of technical careers

Altchek consistently covers how artificial intelligence is reshaping software engineering roles and technical career paths. She reports on workers who feel underprepared for traditional software engineering jobs and are pivoting into adjacent roles such as data analytics, using as-told-to narratives to show how AI is changing entry-level expectations and job searches.

Her coverage includes pieces on “AI-proofing” jobs, where she lays out concrete steps workers can take to protect their roles and stay relevant as automation spreads across white-collar work. She tracks emerging job categories in the AI ecosystem, including safety, governance, and specialist roles, highlighting the rapid growth of AI safety positions and other new titles created by the technology. Altchek also writes about the demand for cybersecurity professionals with AI skills, describing a “fever pitch” war for talent and explaining how AI is transforming security work into one of the hottest technical job categories.

Across these stories, she focuses on skills, adaptability, and agency, using interviews with experts and executives to spell out what technical workers need to do to thrive in an AI-driven job market.

C-suite leadership and workplace strategy

Executive interviews are a central part of Altchek’s reporting, and she regularly uses conversations with C-suite leaders to illuminate broader workplace and technology trends. She has interviewed dozens of executives in a single year and distilled those discussions into takeaways on leadership, career progression, and managing teams through rapid change.

Her pieces with global consulting and professional services leaders examine how companies misunderstand AI, what they get wrong about its business impact, and how executives are rethinking workforce strategy and skills. She writes about CEOs and founders across sectors, including cybersecurity, venture capital, consumer brands, and remote-first companies, to show how different leadership styles and organizational choices shape productivity, meeting culture, and innovation.

Profiles of well-known operators, such as retail and technology leaders, often focus on how they build stores, teams, and products, linking operational detail to decisions about delegation, focus, and culture.

Her interview with Chipotle’s chief operating officer, for example, follows his routine of visiting restaurants and sampling food each week, using his day-to-day habits to illustrate hands-on leadership and quality control. In these stories, Altchek stresses concrete behaviors and frameworks rather than personal color, keeping the attention on what executives do and how their choices ripple through organizations.

Practical advice on career growth and everyday work

Altchek’s “Get Better at Work” series provides direct, actionable guidance on habits and behaviors that can help people stand out and advance in their careers.

She writes about specific meeting habits that increase visibility, showing how small changes in preparation and participation can make workers more noticeable to managers. Her advice pieces cover persuasion techniques for influencing coworkers, including structured approaches to framing arguments and building consensus without formal authority.

She offers detailed guidance on saying “no” at work without harming a career, outlining language, timing, and boundary-setting tactics that protect both workload and reputation. Other stories focus on avoiding “doomjobbing” and becoming more strategic in a job search, drawing on career experts to map out step-by-step ways to prioritize roles, tailor applications, and reduce scattershot applying.

Altchek often packages these insights in list formats and clear headlines, pairing expert commentary with specific examples so that readers can see how a given tactic looks in practice. This service journalism strand sits alongside her AI and leadership coverage, with both aimed at helping workers navigate uncertainty while building durable, promotable careers.

Worker narratives in an AI-shaped job market

Altchek frequently uses first-person and as-told-to formats to bring worker experiences into her beat, especially around AI and software roles. She has documented a recent graduate who shifted from computer science into data analytics after feeling that AI had raised the bar for software engineering roles, using the story to explore how new tools change what entry-level jobs require.

In other pieces, she follows job seekers who have applied to thousands of software development positions and secured only a handful of offers, illustrating how saturated and competitive the market has become. Her reporting includes accounts from engineers and managers at large technology companies, describing how only a small fraction of engineers are thriving in the AI era and what differentiates them in terms of skills and mindset. These narratives are set against expert and executive commentary on topics like high-agency mindsets, soft skills in the AI age, and strategies for staying relevant as roles evolve.

By alternating between worker stories and leadership perspectives, Altchek creates a beat that treats the future of work as lived experience rather than abstract trend, mapping how AI and management decisions show up in individual careers.