Jason M. Lemkin says 20-40% of workers won't survive the AI shift without reskilling, but most won't actually pursue it. He points to recent layoffs like Microsoft's 3% cut as the beginning of much larger workforce churn ahead.
20–40%
3%
The truth is, and this is true for startups too, it's probably 20 to 40% of your teams are not going to make it in the AI age. That sales rep that told me if I wanted to come to Saster next week is not going to make it. He's not aggressive enough. Okay, it's tough. Your CMO still running the same human content SEO team from 2021 and that's his best idea today, is not going to make it. Not going to make it. The CRO that doesn't believe in AI and the sales team except for some maybe enterprise stuff is not going to make it. Certainly we have a great CCO summit coming on here today. Hundreds of the best CCOS folks that think that customer success experience from that junior folk that said he had one hour, dude, next week, they're not going to make it. They're not going to make it. So I don't know how this will all play out, but I think the notion that everyone wants to be reskilled, a lot of folks don't want to be reskilled. A lot of folks are comfortable working in slippers from home three days a week. They don't like it when I say it on LinkedIn, so I'm just saying it among friends. I don't believe that they want to be reskilled. I don't believe they want to learn. I don't believe using ChatGPT once a week to ask about recipes is the same as being reskilled. So this is not only do is everyone have to move twice as fast, but it's tough. I don't think 20 to 40% of our teams want to change and we're going to see people are like shocked that Microsoft did a 3% layoff this week. 3% layoff, okay, but those are folks that can't change. They need new people to exchange. We're going to see this trend accelerate. We're going to see more and more layoffs of companies that are doing well and the net headcount is not going to go down. They're just got to reskill people. It's brutal. But if you don't do it, you're going to fall behind. You're going to fall behind.
