The AI Wake-Up Call: What Happens When Technology Outpaces Humanity?

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce today Jason Lowe, professor at the University of Utah, creator and host of AI Diatribe, public speaker, and really just generally great guy. Thanks so much for joining us, Jason.

You're so kind. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Anytime I get a chance to talk with you, I'm happy.

Well, me too. And I've wanted to have you on the podcast ever since we had our Go-To-Market Live annual event, and you absolutely crushed it. Crushed the last panel. We had more people at the end of the day than we had at the beginning of the day. And hearing you and the head of ML at Meta go back and forth about the future of AI, I was like, oh my gosh, we got to talk about this more and dive deeper. And so my question for you, Jason, is how'd you get started with this? Tell me a little about your background.

Good, good question. So I've been a tech head since I was like a little kid. I mean, in high school, I sloughed class to go help set up the the Mac environment and set up the network in the Mac lab at my high school. And I just jumped right into tech. I started coding. I taught myself how to code, became the chief, you know, application developer at a company for a long time, got into the tech sales type of stuff, which was really fun. Hence the GTM relation there. And got into sales engineering, got into product management while I was a solution architect at a large technology solutions distributorship firm. That's when ChatGPT-3.5 got released and I decided to grab that tiger by the tail. And so I really worked hard to establish an AI practice at that distributorship. I was going everywhere doing public speaking and educational events for a year. I ended up hitting Diamond that, like last year, and it was just a little nuts, which was new cuz the closest I'd ever come was like barely qualifying for Platinum the year before. So it. It was a lot of fun. I just, I love technology. I like it almost as much as Kip on Napoleon Dynamite. And it's just a great place to be, especially right now, having written code in the past, understanding how artificial intelligence works at an architectural level is just fascinating to watch these different models become more and more capable and all the different things it can do in a variety of different business practices, including generating revenue. So. That's why I'm here. That's why I love what I'm doing. It's just a blast right now.

Well, it is a blast and there's so much change. In fact, we are doing an event at Dreamforce coming up called the Great Go-to-Market Reset because everything's up for grabs right now. You know, things like traditions that have, that have been like tried and true business practices for 100 years are now like, I don't know if we should do that anymore. You know, everybody's like rethinking everything and it's really interesting. Really, really interesting time.

We're in a very pivotal moment. I mean, it's just like when gunpowder was invented, warfare changed completely. You couldn't use spears and bows and, you know, swords. It's a total remapping of how you do business everywhere.

It is a complete remapping and it's very, it's a little scary for a lot of people, especially in this macroeconomic environment. We've got some layoffs going on. We've got some shifting going on. What do you think people should be worried about with the coming of AI?

Ooh, we're gonna go doom and gloom. So are we talking about some more tech?

Let's do doom and gloom first and then we'll end like with the sun coming out.

Okay, sounds good. So, so are we talking primarily, like you said, macro, so more of a socioeconomic perspective? Is that kind of—

That's what I'm really curious about. Like I'm, I'm a, you know, citizen of the US. I'm looking at the job market. The job market's bad. You know, like, what are we looking at in, like, in terms of, like, AI? Are they going to take a bunch of our jobs? Do we need to be worried?

Well, worry is relative, right? So I think, okay, let's go back to a little bit of an analogy. How about when the Model T was released and we had so many horse trainers out there and people that were professionals using horses for all sorts of things. And suddenly this mechanical horse comes about and starts doing these really great things. And what we had was a shift. I mean, economic creative destruction, as you know, is just simply the principle of society and an economy allowing itself to change and people changing occupations based on the need for certain types of labor. Previous industrial revolutions, the pace of development and the pace of innovation was such that economic creative destruction could keep pace with that. In other words, the workforce had enough time to really adapt. So over a period of 10, 15, 20 years, a whole bunch of horse trainers said, well, dang, they don't need my horses as much. So I think I'm going to learn how to fix me a car. So then they go and they start fixing cars. And, you know, suddenly you don't have as many horse trainers. You have some auto mechanics because autos are really proliferating and life is good. Everybody's happy. Kumbaya. We go into the distance and we have a fully adapted economy. But AI is evolving at such a rapid pace and it's innovating so quickly. And affecting the way that we work, yeah, it's going to get a little disruptive. It probably wouldn't be so bad if it was just white-collar work that was being affected, right? All of these industrial revolutions we've had in the past have affected either white-collar work or blue-collar work, and rarely have they ever even come close to affecting both at the same time. But we're in a very unique time in history where AI is affecting white-collar work now, today, And robotics is advancing at such a feverish pace that it is starting to affect blue-collar work at the same time. And if you take a fully tactile, nimble, able-to-work robot body and compare them to an electrician, what's the difference between the two? Well, it's the knowledge in the electrician's head and the way that the electrician can actually do certain types of work that is specific to electricity. You take that knowledge and put it in a robot body. What do you got? You've got a robot that can be just as effective as a human, but doesn't call in sick, you know, doesn't get injured, maybe gets repaired instead of injured, you know, doesn't complain about its pay, you know, all of these different things. And so now we're at a pace of innovation in both white-collar and blue-collar work that it's, it's going to cause issues. Anyone that thinks it's not going to cause issues is playing ostrich. There's just no way around it. It's—

that's right. Head in the sand while everyone else runs around. I totally agree. You know, it's interesting because one of the CEOs that I used to work for, I worked with him to take a tech— to digitize pathology slides. It was a very, you know, basic business, but we digitized pathology skin cancer slides and used AI in the background. And it was very cool and interesting. And I was talking to him last week He is now working on something really, really cool with related to AI. And we got talking about where AI is being used now that we have no idea. Did you know that there are over 2 million robots working for Amazon right now?

Yes.

I didn't know that. I just found that out and it kind of scared me a little bit.

Yeah, the hiring pattern at Amazon is for the last 3 years since 2022, the number of human employees has actually stayed level, but the number of robots have gone from 750,000-ish in 2022 to just over a million in 2023. At the end of 2024, it was around 1.5 million, and now it's eclipsed, and yet the number of personnel has hovered around 1.5 million. They now have more robots working for the company than they do actual human employees, and the number of human employees has stayed the same over the last 4 years. Crazy.

That is, that is fascinating. So scary and interesting.

And so, for sure.

Yeah, that's interesting. So what do you think we should do, Jason, to, as humans, to prepare ourselves? Do you think that we should all just like try to become coders as fast as we can? Should we all just like try to, try to find places where there's a moat? For human work that is needed? Are people going back into the trades? What do you think?

That's an interesting question, and it's not an easy one to answer because AI is changing things so rapidly that how do you adapt to something where you're not going to see what the landscape looks in 5 days or 10 days from now? Things have changed that quick. So it's really interesting, and I kind of broached this on the panel discussion that you had me on. Thank you very much for that. And I had initially 3 C's that I talked about, but I inherited 2 more from that panel discussion from some really great input from my fellow analysts. And I have this thing that I talk about a lot, which is the skills that people are going to need to really develop moving forward to stay pertinent in an AI-driven society. And those are communication, collaboration, creativity, curiosity, curiosity, and critical thinking.

A million percent. And one thing that became very interesting when you said that, the whole room got quiet. And we all started thinking about that. And what was very interesting to me is that in the past, those skills have not been prioritized in the workforce as much as analytical thinking and, you know, like some, some things like that. And so to me, it's like people with relationship skills are going to thrive. And I find that fascinating and very interesting too.

Well, and it's not only communication with individuals, but it's also communicating with this other you know, nascent society of artificial intelligence entities that we're going to be working side by side with for the rest of forever. If you can't communicate effectively with it, then you're not going to be able to utilize it the right way. In the short term, people need to understand that those that are going to get ahead and stay ahead and are going to maintain relevance are those that are not only working hard at what they do, but then being able to utilize AI to do things more optimally. In their job and actually have a comfort with using AI tools and AI, I wanna call them entities because we're reaching that level of autonomous agent type capability now. If, if you're comfortable doing that and utilizing AI to do your job better, you're gonna last longer. If you're not comfortable with using AI or you're scared of it, you better change or you're gonna be a horse trainer in a Model T world. It's just not going to be very good for you.

It's true. I mean, we all learned how to use the telephone. We all learned how to drive a car, we all learned how to use a computer, most of us. Yeah, we all have cell phones now. The next step is being able to, be able to use AI well and to have, I think, having, having it be in its proper place. I was at GTM 2025 a couple of weeks ago, and the chief customer officer of Entrust said something super interesting. Her name's Harini. And I was chatting with her and she said, you know, we have to remember that we control the technology. The technology does not control us. And that's sometimes hard to remember in this day and age, right? We think, you know, there's so much going on. I did a podcast just yesterday with someone who had, is rolling out to B2C small businesses, an autonomous voice AI that can take you all the way from calling up and ordering a pizza all the way through payment. And he played it for me and I literally thought it was a human. It was the, it was just absolutely nuts. So the technology is really, really good right now.

It really, really is. Yeah.

Can you repeat those 5 C's again?

Those 5 C's are communication. So an ability to talk not only to your fellow human beings, but also to these AI entities. Collaboration, because just because you can communicate doesn't mean that you work well with others. And so an ability to collaborate and work well with others is very important, including utilizing AI the way that it can most complement and enhance your productivity. Then there's creativity, because we need to be able to think outside of the box. This is something that AI yet in the short term is not able to really do that much. Curiosity, because that's what drives innovation. That's what drives a new way of doing things. You know, Einstein was curious. AI is not that curious quite yet. It's It's getting there. It's getting pretty close, but it's not quite there yet. But then the most important is the critical thinking, because one of the things that we have discovered with LLMs, large language models, and other AI entities that are based on mathematical or probability-based next character or next phrase or next token output, it tends to be a little sycophantic unless you really make sure that you're telling it not to. And so it will oftentimes not communicate with you in a way that would be considered critical thinking in that it just kind of outputs what it is that it's being asked for. It's up to the human to find the holes. And when I say that—

I agree. Mm-hmm.

When I say that, you also need to be able to tell the AI how to help you find the holes because AI will only do what it's instructed. It's this great tool. It's this great enabler. It's going to make you so much better at everything that you do, but you have to realize that you can do just about anything with AI. Or at least what we're calling AI today, to do both good and bad things.

That's right. It's, so for example, I did a product market fit document for a company and a potential acquisition for a different, for said company. And so I went through it and I, you know, I had them like, I had to give them the structure, them, them, my AI bot, I had to give them the structure And then, you know, went through everything and then I got the output and I was like, eh, it got me about 80% of the way there. It's going to save me a crap ton of time, but a lot of the, the main points were missing and there is no way they could have known that because there's nowhere on the internet that it talks about that. So they only can pull what they can pull from, right? And so that creative thinking, I think there's still there's still room for us as humans to be creative, which is good.

Very, very much so. And I think that we're going to be okay for a little while. We're, we're starting to get to the point where it can start being creative. There are some autonomous agentic systems right now being used with scientific studies and that are able to conceptualize some of their own studies, figure out how to do them, figure out the experiments to run, facilitate those experiments and come to their own conclusions and publish. We are within 12 to 18 months of that starting to be a regular occurrence in the scientific community. And that's when things are really going to take off. I mean, we think things are good now. We think things are developing at an exponential rate now, which they are. Maybe people don't see it quite as obviously as those of us that are keeping our finger on the pulse of things for, you know, the last however long. But recursive improvement in the scientific world is about to happen. And things are going to get crazy over the next 3 to 5 years. I mean, just absolutely crazy. It's going to be so much fun to watch. A little precarious, a little nervous, a little anxious. Are we going to go to Skynet or are we going to go to WALL-E? I don't know. It's going to be one direction or the other, but the future is looking very, very interesting.

It absolutely does. Okay. So besides becoming really good at the 5 Cs, what else can we do to protect ourselves, to protect our jobs? And to plan for the future.

I don't know how dystopian you want to get, but I would say—

Lay it on me. What's the reality here, Jim?

All right. Do we want to go the individual route or do we want to go the corporation or system route?

Individual first.

Okay. And then, yeah. I truly believe, and you know, listen, I'm not a robots are coming, sky is falling kind of guy, but you cannot look at the pace of innovation and how AI is having an impact on the way people are doing their job and not realize that we are going to face, quite frankly, economic upheaval because a market-based economy is based on plenty and scarcity. I mean, we all know the invisible hand moves things around based on supply and demand. Price is set by, you know, how much something is in supply combined with how much demand there is. Labor is the same way. I mean, we make money based on us being able to do what others cannot do. Our wage is based on the scarcity of our skillset. That's the bottom line. And this is even more true in sales, right? Because people that are out there actually selling product and moving product are really pivotal to the business process. It's something that has to be done. And those that can do it really well, they get compensated quite well. But what happens if you have an AI entity that can be more convincing to a human being than another human being can be? And so what happens is a world where suddenly this very thing that I am quite frankly, basing my identity on is now becoming commoditized. We are in this economy that is based on supply and demand. When we go up to someone new and we start talking to them and asking about them, what's one of the first questions we ask them, right?

What do you do for work?

What do you do for work? This is something that we identify ourselves with, and this is suddenly going to be not necessarily really important because all of a sudden everything that we do that sets ourselves apart from others is commoditized. And so it's going to be a situation where from the ground up, processes, positions, types of work being done is really going to start becoming more and more automated until we hit that truly autonomous, agentic AI, possibly artificial general intelligence level where it can start to be creative, where it can start to think outside the box, where it can start doing some of these things on its own, and then it will rapidly start to replace human beings at all levels of an organization, not just from the bottom up. So I think we're going to go through some socioeconomic upheaval. I really do. I know that sounds dystopian, but I don't see any way around it, especially with blue-collar work being affected just as much as white-collar work. We're going to have— we're already seeing this in the tech sector. We're already seeing this in computer science majors not being able to find a job. We're already seeing this in junior analyst positions in finance where previously they would walk out of school with, you know, 5 or 6 offers. They're lucky if they get one now. And this is not due to economic downturn. This is due to the fact that automation and agentic AI is really starting to replace those positions. And it's just, I hate to say it, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We are going to have to do some sort of adapting as a society. We are going to have to migrate away from true capitalist-type economic structure somehow. I love him or hate him, you, I can't render judgment on President Trump. I'm not going to do it. I'm just simply not going to do it. But one thing that he did do that I think was personally very pertinent and timely was this initiative called the Stargate Initiative, where he has the government actually having a stake in building the AI compute infrastructure in the United States, facilitating and making possible a $500 billion investment in compute in the United States over the next 5 years. That's twice as big as the relative and adjusted for inflation size of the Manhattan Project when it comes to the end of World War II. This is a big deal. And now we also see the federal government investing almost $9 billion in Intel. We are starting to reach the point where some of these means of production are going to need to be owned at the very least, and revenue captured from these by the United States so that we can take advantage of the fact that these are the first steps towards a universal basic income, something like that, where as people's jobs start to maybe flounder and people are wondering how they're going to pay their bills, well, we need to have a better wealth redistribution system in this nation that's going to serve its citizens a little bit better. UBI is a good first step in that direction. And so what's being put in place now certainly helps, but we all know that the government takes a while to respond, right? There's going to be a time where unemployment just exponentially increases. Companies are benefiting, they're generating more profit, and things are being done faster. Innovation's happening faster, but the general population is going to be going, well, what do I do? How do I make a living? And so there's going to be this period where, again, I don't want to be too horribly dystopian, but I think people that are prepping a little bit, you know, we've had years and years where having a bomb shelter under your house, that was definitely prepping and didn't ever come to pass. But having yourself a little bit prepared now, not a bad idea. Not a bad idea at all.

Well, it clearly, you're at the top of your game. You know what's coming. You can see what's happening. How do you stay at the top of your game in business? That's my last question for you today.

Ooh, be open to the change. It's really interesting, and this is why I'm here, and this is why strategic AI consultation is in demand, because as a business with AI doing what it does, you know, it's not like you can go out and buy 5 AIs off the shelf. This is not something that's fully black box prioritized. You have to be very strategic about how you're going to incorporate AI in existing processes and in existing business functions in order to really utilize its efficiency-generating capabilities and positioning yourself where, in the future, when things become more capable, you're set up to gradually adapt instead of whole-scale adapt. The way that I like to use it analogously is, let's say, Amy Cook, that we have set up a 100-meter sprint. Okay. And we're going to allow two methods of starting. We can see a rough countdown of when the gun's going to go off.

Mm-hmm.

Or we have a pretty good idea. We see the person going, on your marks, get set. We know they're going to hit the trigger sometime soon. We don't know exactly when. We're not making it so people are starting in the starting blocks from zero at the starting line. We're going to allow people to maybe get a walking and maybe at the right time, a little bit of a running start so that when the gun goes off, maybe there's someone starting from zero. They have no acceleration or velocity when the gun goes off. But then we have someone in the lane right next to them that's already built up some velocity and some acceleration, and they've got themselves going. Gun goes off. This person's going to get ahead and it's going to be really hard for this company to catch up. Yeah, this person that got a running start. Yeah, they've expended a little bit of energy before the race started. But they've got momentum. And so business needs to look at the investment in artificial intelligence the same way. You need to start doing the strategic planning. You have to start seeing from a process analysis perspective, what foundational elements of incorporating artificial intelligence in my business are not only going to serve these short-term use cases that may or may not have this massive ROI, But I'm doing these prequel elements that are definitely going to serve future use cases that can provide even more ROI and allow us to maintain that running start that we got before the race even started. Sorry, long analogy. I know I rambled.

It's a great analogy. I love that. Well, Jason, thank you so much for coming on. It is— I am very excited to tune into your AI diatribe and learn more and more and more about what you have on the horizon and also what we can expect as a nation and as a society and as a world. And I really appreciate you coming on today.

Thank you so much for having me. I always enjoy my conversations with you.

Thank you. Me too. Thank you so much.