How AI is Actually Affecting The Labor Market

So I want to talk about how AI is actually affecting the labor market. So here's how AI is actually affecting the labor market. So I'm going to pull up these stats for you to take a look at over here. But if you look at this, okay, this is people on Reddit over here. Okay. So it says graphic designer here. I haven't been fully replaced yet, but the landscape has completely changed. Clients now expect me to use AI as a copilot, generate initial concepts, mood boards, and even rough copy in minutes, not hours. The job is becoming less about executing the first idea and more about curating, refining, and adding the crucial human touch. It feels like I lost my job and more like my job description was rewritten overnight. The pressure to constantly adapt is a real challenge. Here's another one. I was a literary editor for one of the largest sci-fi presses in the world. My boss, the executive editor, retired and the company reassessed their practices. So after 15 years working for the greater good of sci-fi, I got outsourced to a goddamn robot. Let's do one more. Okay. Was making 3D models for 20 years, but since AI became a thing, most people just skip the 3D stage altogether and just generate the final model or image. Final image or video instead. AI is still trash at 3D modeling, but it's great at generating the final product, making the models themselves unnecessary. Working retail now. So you want to talk about how AI is affecting the labor market? I mean, this seems like it's just the beginning. And like one more, the chatbot gets security hole. This entire support team got laid off. I'll say one more thing. I got on a call with a couple of mutual friends today. Okay, so like we do these calls every, you know, 3, 4 months or so. And One person said, I have never been more profitable than ever. For better or worse, I have never been more profitable than ever. We created this support bot over here. We did this.

What kind of company was that?

You've already guessed. I know that you've guessed already.

I have not.

You're correct. It's a software company. It's a software company.

I was going to say communications.

No, no. But communications is working on it too. Communication is the same thing, but nobody's going to say this out in public, right? But if you see people on the front line saying this, And we say behind the scenes people are saying this.

They have a software company that plugs into a bigger platform? Uh-huh, yes, yes. It was one or the two.

Yeah, yeah, but like it's, so I think it's helpful for us to talk about how things are changing. And my thing is like, I was listening to a podcast recently and I shared it with my team on how a creative strategist now is somebody that understands how to play all these things. Like when I, we're interviewing a creative strategist, we just made the offer and they're joining next week. But literally he's got Figma, 6 different designs up. He understands VO3, he understands 3.1, he understands Nano Banana, he understands that he has to 10x or 100x himself. And then on this call today, we're just like, dude, all of us, yourself included, like you weren't on the call, but like it just, we keep saying AI, guys, we gotta adapt, we gotta adapt. But there's still people, like very small percentage people, even though they've had tenure at one friend's company for a long time, it's just like, dude, it, Like we can't keep you forever if you don't adapt. You can't just be scared this whole time. And so what do you think?

When I look at those examples and there's probably many more and there's probably more that are going to contradict my viewpoint, I look at a lot of those jobs as not high-level jobs. I look at a lot of those jobs as you're helping with the ideation, you're helping with one area like editing. I haven't seen AI affect too many people in roles like strategy or executive positions. I've seen it affect a lot of the lower and some mid-level positions. And I look at the workforce as changing from a pyramid where you have a CEO at the top, some management underneath, some mid-level managers, and then a ton of people at the bottom. I look at the pyramid changing more into a diamond shape.

Like an inverse pyramid.

No, not an inverse pyramid.

Diamonds like this, inverse pyramid.

Yeah, at the bottom. Inverse at the bottom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting as the same as a pyramid.

Which is you invert the pyramid.

Yeah, but then flip the pyramid upside down and at the bottom, it's going backwards. So you have a point at the top, a point at the bottom, and you have a fat middle.

Oh, I got it, I got it, I got it.

Right? So think of like this.

It's 2 pyramids stacked on each other.

2 pyramids stacked on each other, but the bases are connected. So the tips are at the very top and at the very bottom. And I look at it as the total workforce amount is going to be lower compared to the traditional pyramid. You're still going to have your executive at the top. You're going to have a lot of amazing mid-level people in the middle.

I'd say executive leadership at the top.

Yes. And you're still going to have that mid-level, which could be both strategy, but they can also help with execution and they're smart in the middle. But you're going to have a lot of people at the bottom who are just doing grunt work that are gone and out of a job. That's how I see the new workforce.

The way I see it is if you're gonna come into workforce today, and then there's a lot of pressure coming, like if you're coming outta college right now, you've got to be both strategic and you've got to be both tactical. So I don't think we can live in a world where you and I aren't like flying high sometimes where we're very high level, but sometimes we're flying our plane very low, which means you and I are getting into the work. Like you and I have always kind of got into the work, right? But the other piece is you gotta fly fast too. And so it's fast, high, and low, and that's how you're gonna win. Because even with this creative strategist role, it's like they got to be really good at strategy, but they also have to be good at implementing. And someone like you and me, if you and I were both in the workforce today working as a marketing manager, we would be a lot more powerful because of our knowledge with marketing. We would know, we would know how to dial up content up and down. We would know how to dial up different, you know, creative concepts up and down because we can do a lot more with what we have. So even if we know a little bit as a T-shaped marketer across the board, we can do a lot more now. And that's kind of what you're saying. We're going to be required to do a lot more. And then the other thing too is, you remember back in the day, we both weren't alive actually, so, but history.

History.

Back in the day when there were lanterns, you had to have lantern lighters at night. Those people were out of a job. When the printing press came out, all the scribes, okay, out of job. Okay, industrialization, okay, robots doing the job. We actually have a lot of robots working today. So a lot of the work that humans actually don't want to, like, does anybody wake up in the morning saying, I want to do customer support? No. Does anybody wake up doing any of these? Like these jobs, to your point, it's not like it's the jobs that no humans want to do and people might complain for right now, but in the long term, people get to do better jobs that they actually enjoy doing.

Yeah, but you nailed it right there. And that's the hard part. People will get to do better jobs, but those people will want to have change and they have to embrace it. And most of them don't want change and aren't embracing it. Those are the 2 things that are really required because If you want to talk about the printing press or whatever it may be, people had to adapt. And what I'm seeing right now is a lot of people are like, dude, this is unfair, and they're complaining instead of being proactive and being like, let me learn this new technology. And a lot of these people aren't talking about all the new opportunities AI is creating.

Yeah.

They're just looking at it as it's sucking out the jobs. Yes, but there's been reports like by McKinsey, and McKinsey ended up stating that There's going to be job losses in marketing, but because of AI, there's going to be more new roles that are created that require AI capabilities. And net-net, if you take away the losses plus the addition of new jobs, there's actually more total jobs in marketing than there were before if you include all the new roles with AI.

Yep.

And people should just be adapting, but you and I see this all day long in corporate America. A lot of people aren't adapting.

Yeah. And I actually think we're actually going to be doing more work. I think you're actually going to need more engineers. I'm going to need more engineers. And so it's— I don't see this as the world is constraining. It's actually expanding. That's how I see it. And then one more thing here on kind of how AI is benefiting society.

Well, let's go back. Go ahead. You're saying you're needing more engineers. I agree with that statement because we've actually been hiring more engineers at this point as well. Why would you say that you need more engineers in this new role?

There's always newer stuff to be built and you have to build faster.

Yes.

It never stops.

It never stops. You have to not only build faster, you need to ship faster, like actually get stuff out. People want stuff shipped on a weekly basis and it's becoming ridiculous.

Yep. By the way, so you talk about shipping at a fast basis right now. So I don't know if you saw this, but the Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy. So Gemma is from Google. And so You can see these models are— okay, there's another one here. I think this is also from Google, bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy. So we're going to have more efficient energy. We're going to be able to solve cancer, I think, hopefully in the next decade or so, 15, 20 years, because cancer sucks, right? So people like to say AI is in a bubble. I don't think that works here when AI is actually starting to cure cancer and solving nuclear fusion. Fusion, fusion, sorry. Nuclear fusion.

There's this girl on Instagram that I follow. She's a VC.

What's her name? Asian?

She's Asian. Uh, she's really good at just breaking down VC and—

I think I know who you're talking about.

What's this? Something Talks.

Sarah Guo?

No, not Sarah Guo.

It's— Something what?

Her username is like Something Talks. Zoe Talks?

Zoe Talks. I don't know who that is.

I think I'm spelling it right. Z-A-U-E-Y. Zoe Talks. She's a VC. Am I spelling it right?

I don't know who this is, but yeah.

She's a VC, I believe, in New York.

Okay.

And she breaks down interesting concepts like, you know, the AI bubble. Yeah, it's a really nice phone. Yeah, you should have got the iPhone Air. I should have got that phone. Yeah, it has a lot of bugs though. I think it's more so the software, not the hardware.

I'll wait for the next one.

Yeah. When she was talking about the AI bubble and she did it in an illustration of like OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, like all the major players, including Meta, Dude, the, what people are tripping out on is all the money going around in circles.

Oh yes. The round tripping.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And that's what people are tripping out about. And I get what they mean. I'm not saying there is a bubble or there isn't a bubble, but if one of those players starts feeling the pinch, everyone starts feeling the pinch.

More so Nvidia than anybody.

Yes. Um, or if OpenAI starts feeling the pinch, it hurts everyone. And when you look at the round tripping that's happening with money, there's a few articles that I read. People have different reasonings and theories on this, but as long as the money going around in circles, these companies are all growing and it's actually causing more growth outside of the money that they're just circulating between each other.

Yeah.

They're saying it's quote unquote not a bubble. But then you also hear people like Altman and a few others go on air and say like, yes, a lot of AI is overvalued and it is a bubble. And my whole take on it is, I don't know if this round tripping or not is going to cause a bubble or not. I think what's really going to cause a bubble in AI is not OpenAI, not NVIDIA.

Not the big ones.

Not the big ones. They're making money hand over fist and they're providing a ton of value.

A lot of small ones will go out of business.

Yes. It's the ones that are like, I do $50 million in revenue. I just raised money at a $10 billion valuation.

Or all these SEO products that have raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I just don't understand where that's going.

Look at BrightEdge.

Yeah.

Right? It's a good enterprise product.

Jim, great guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great product. And I would say it's one of the better tools out there, especially if you're a larger organization. I'm pretty sure they've tried to sell multiple times over the years. They've gotten offers. It's not easy and it's not easy to continually get growth. These SaaS companies, I think BrightEdge is good, but even if you're a good company, it doesn't mean that you're valued at $1 billion, $2 billion, $5 billion. And I'm not saying BrightEdge is claiming that, But a lot of players in the SaaS world have gotten hurt really bad from this. And yes, the big players like Anthropic and OpenAI, they're here to stay.

Yep.

They're going to be valued a lot of money over time. Maybe they're valued over too high right now, but they'll grow into the valuations over time.

That's a problem right now too, that the valuations are very high and then the VCs need to keep investing. They need to keep putting, you know, shots on goal, right? And so, but it doesn't align with all these other founders who think, their company is worth that much, right? All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So you actually mentioned McKinsey, and I kind of want to pull this, this stat up here. So McKinsey claims that 70% of their 45,000 employees use its AI. Do you think that's likely? So the consultancy built an internal AI chatbot called Lily, trained on 100 years of the consultancy's work and 100,000 documents and interviews. It claims 70% of the firm's 45,000 employees regularly use this tool. And so usually their firm rolled out in 2023, those who use it, those who turn to it about, those who use it turn to it about 17 times a week. And it aggregates key points, identifies 5 to 7 relevant internal content pieces, and points users to appropriate experts within the firm. Users can opt to have queries answered by the firm's internal knowledge repository or external sources. So this just kind of more reinforcement here. You're seeing, people are like, oh, what? There's no ROI, it's a bubble, right? I think the reality is, one, the valuations aren't crazy, 'cause you remember Cisco's valuation, the 4 PE multiple? I think it went up to like 30, 40, or 50, and then it jumped up to like 200-something. When you look at Nvidia's PE, What is it right now? The P/E ratio, like 27?

Nvidia's current P/E or forward-looking P/E?

Forward-looking P/E, sorry.

Nvidia forward.

Yeah, Neil's chatting with people right now.

Yeah, you know, this last article here says forward-looking is 29.94.

So it's not crazy is my point.

No, it's not crazy.

And you and I are seeing the usage in our companies too, right? It doesn't feel like, again, like you and I weren't in business in 1999, But you know what I mean?

Yeah, but if you want to look at the hype in AI and marketing, specifically marketing, because I would say we both have a better understanding of that.

Yeah.

AI is definitely here to stay. ChatGPT has grown to a billion searches a day faster than Google has, but you can't just compare how many years it took Google because the internet was very different back then. Just like Threads got to 100 million users quicker than anyone else, but look at where Threads is now. No one really cares for it.

Dude, I get good reach on Threads. Compared to my Twitter.

Me too, because they want to push it due to the fact that no one really uses it. But when you look at marketing and AI specifically, it's here to stay. It provides a lot of value. I would say the biggest value it provides marketers like Eric and I is actually not the tools. It's more so OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which is a new channel to push out our products, our messaging, and our services and get traffic and conversions from. Would you agree?

I agree.

That's actually the biggest change over anything else. It's also given us technology. The technology makes our people more efficient, but the technology hasn't had as big of an impact on our organization compared to the traffic that we can generate from ChatGPT and the conversions. Do you agree with that statement?

I agree with that, yeah.

And in marketing, would you also agree that a lot of people overstated the power of AI and how it's going to replace a lot of marketers?

Yes.

By far, right? Yes. And would you agree Your mid-level, high-level executive positions or mid-level managers, you haven't figured out how to replace them with AI yet.

No, not yet.

Bottom level, some people doing grunt work, you have.

Yes.

And that's why we both believe that the pyramid is now 2 pyramids stacked on each other with the bases connected and the points at the top and at the bottom.

Just call it a diamond. Just call it a diamond.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but when I said diamond to you—

It was a funnel. That was a funnel. Yeah, I had it wrong in my head. Now I can see a diamond.

Yeah, it's a straight up diamond.

It's like an Ethereum diamond, dude. Okay, so you look, you like stats. This will be the last one on AI real quick. So Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs has stated that companies on average are experiencing a 25 to 30% productivity improvement after adopting AI successfully deployed. So whatever that means, right? But here's what's interesting. So Autodesk, about 60% success rate productivity gains when successfully employed.

deployed.

UC San Diego, my college, look at that, 55% or so, right? And then you have like Adobe, Deloitte. Adobe's like pretty high, like 50% or so. So the productivity gains, look, it's here to stay. I just wanted to give more stats with all this stuff because I think a lot of people are doomers and against this. But guess what? All the people that like to complain, I was watching a video. I'm not going to try to go too much into politics, but I had a friend, we had a mutual friend send me a video the other day and it was somebody complaining about what does EBT stand for again? Is it the food stamp program?

I think so, yes.

Okay, so this person basically said like, look, I get that it's important, but like it says I need to work 20 hours a week and it's like, I'm not going to work. I'm not going to work for anybody. Like I'm a boss, I don't work, right? And the problem with that is the companies that are working hard, the people that are pushing hard, they're getting productivity gains, whereas the people that don't want to push, that's what's going to happen. Like you're better off pushing and having more agency for yourself.

That's my point. Yeah, but also when I look at these productivity gains, We're just getting done more with the same amount of people. Most organizations that I've talked to, at least with marketing departments, they're not looking to fire tons of people. They're just looking to get more output out of their existing people and do more because it's a competitive landscape. So they got to figure out how to get more done to try to beat people.

Did you watch the interview with Andrej Karpathy?

No.

Okay, so Andrej Karpathy, you know, he's a big AI guy, like legend, right? He's worked for Tesla before. He actually helped with the self-driving stuff. He, so he did an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, okay?

Who?

Dwarkesh Patel, it's your brother from another mother.

I don't know who he is.

So he's got a popular tech podcast. So Mark Zuckerberg's been on there and all that. So whenever you listen, like sometimes he's got some big interviews. And so the point is Andrej, who's a legend in AI, has said that AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which is where an AI can do everything autonomously, how many years do you think that is out? Like 5 years, 2 years, 8 years, 20 years?

I think 10+ years from now.

Exactly. He said 10+ years out, right? So he's like, we're not quite there yet. The other thing he said too, that's what you just kind of mentioned, is that AI is creating mountains and mountains of slop, right? So everyone thinks that you can just use it to create a bunch of like thousands of articles and not have a human in the loop, and you can't do that, right? You need AI plus human. It can't just be AI on its own, at least for right now.

Dude, I got this. Check this out. You'll love this one. I don't know if I ever showed it to you. How much time are marketers spending on AI sloth?

Oh, I didn't see this one.

Yeah, look at this. This is great.

What's 51 stand for?

This is marketing organization. So people whose team size, not corporate team size, marketing team size is 51 plus, they're spending 76 minutes on average per person per day on AI sloth. Team sizes 21 to 50 average, they're spending 81 minutes per day per employee, When your marketing team size is 11 to 20, they're spending 56 minutes on average a day with slop. And team sizes of 1 to 10 in marketing, 33 minutes a day on slop.

You know, people should be taxed on if they're just creating slop without, they should be paying more per token. That's what should happen. Is it just a bunch of junk that's being— the internet was always a bunch of trash and now there's even more trash on the internet.

So much more. What's funny is, you know, every time I go and give a speech, I always ask the question, how many of you guys are generating more revenue through AI?

Not much, right?

Not much, but now I'm getting a lot more people raising hats and—

Which is fast because we did that at HubSpot.

Yeah, but do you want to know what they're saying right now?

What?

When they raise their hands, I say, how? They're like, oh, ChatGPT drives us sales and traffic. I say, okay, if you exclude that, how about from the technology that you're using within your organization? Still not really getting any hands. And they're saying, a lot of them are now admitting it's actually causing us to have more work with our team because it creates a lot of inefficiencies.

It gets confusing too.

Bad stuff. And they spend their time not just— this is just AI slop, right? AI junk that they had to go and fix. But what we're finding now when we talk to organizations and they don't categorize this as AI slop is their team has shiny object syndrome where they're using AI to do this cool stuff and this cool stuff, like go create a really cool video and they're like, oh, we never needed it. We just want to test it out and do these cool things. And they're spending so much time on stuff that has nothing to do with their KPIs.

Extra unneeded work that ultimately is actually counterproductive. Yes.

And what they're finding is, is those people are struggling to get their normal tasks done that they needed to because they're using AI, but they're using AI for the wrong stuff instead of using it for stuff that impacts the KPIs.

That's actually a good lesson. I think if you're a leader of a company listening to this right now, you actually have to like, sure, you need to champion AI, but you can't say test every tool because that's going to be counterproductive to your business.

Very counterproductive.

Yeah. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.