Eric Siu discusses how AI is reshaping jobs across industries. Graphic designers, editors, and support teams are seeing their roles rewritten, while demand for engineers is climbing. Workers now need both strategic and tactical skills to stay relevant as the traditional workforce pyramid shifts into a diamond shape.
Chapters
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, generating 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. You're correct. It's a software company. It's a software company.
I was going to say communications.
No, no. 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? If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side.
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.
Yeah.
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 there's— It's 2 pyramids stacked on each other. 2 pyramids stacked on each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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 gonna be required to do a lot more. And then the other thing too is, do you remember back in the day, we both weren't alive actually, so, but history.
Yeah.
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 their job. We actually have a lot of robots working today. So a lot of the work that humans actually don't wanna, 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?
Because 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.
