HR.Salon Podcast

Will AI Take My Job? with guest Matt Rouse E1 HR.Salon Podcast

• Andrew Biernat

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In this episode of HR.Salon, Andrew sits down with author and marketing agency cofounder Matt Rouse, the mind behind Will AI Take My Job and its sequel. Together, they explore the accelerating tension between human expertise and automation, uncovering what the “AI arms race” means for HR leaders, employees, and the future of meaningful work. From job applicants using AI to beat hiring algorithms to companies reshaping entire workflows, this conversation blends realism, strategy, and hope.

In this episode, you'll learn:

  • How employees and companies alike are using AI—and why it’s becoming an “AI vs. AI” hiring game.
  • Why the smartest organizations aren’t replacing people with AI but partnering with it to gain a competitive edge.
  • What it really takes to stay employable in an AI-driven economy and how HR can lead the cultural shift.

As AI continues to reshape the world of work, one truth rings clear: the winners won’t be those who resist change, but those who learn to work with it. Tune in for a grounded, thought-provoking conversation that might just reframe how you—and your organization—approach technology and talent.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, welcome to HR Salon. Today I'm joined by Matt Rouse. He is the uh an author, uh marketing agency, co-founder, and the author of Will AI Take My Job? And Will AI Take My Job Too? Welcome to the show, Matt. Hey, how you doing, Andrew? Absolutely fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. This, I think, is going to be a very hot topic for a long time to come. And I we're already seeing uh kind of ripple effects around AI and jobs and layoffs and uh you know, downsizing and return to office and you know, stealth firings and all sorts of weird things that are going on. It feels like every every month there's like a new HR workforce type phrase that comes out describing the bizarre nature of what's going on in the workforce right now. And so, not to bury the lead, let's just let's just go right for the heart of it. Will AI take my job? Let's let's just start with that. What what do you see on the horizon?

SPEAKER_01:

Your job specifically, I'm gonna say probably not. But the thing, the thing with the with the thing with any technology is most people don't understand that the technology that they think is in the future is already here now, and it's just not evenly distributed to everyone. So what happens is we sort of get this idea from news media and you know, rumors in our industry and things like that of what's coming down the pipe, but what's actually coming down the pipe is uh more advanced than what we think it is, and the thing that we think is coming is already here. Let me give you an example, right? So you've got job seekers out there looking for jobs, but it takes a lot of time to look for jobs, sift through all the job boards and do all that kind of stuff. So what are they doing? They're using AI, right? So they have the AI research tool or they're using a job seeking tool that automatically goes out and does the job research and finds them the jobs. When it finds the jobs, they use a resume AI tool or something like Grammarly or ChatGPT to match the job to the cover letter or whatever the information on their resume is to update their resume specifically for the jobs that they found with the AI research. Then they use an AI tool to submit the jobs. All of those three are also built into some tools so the job seeker can pay, you know,$20,$30 a month or whatever it is, put in their information for their resume, and it will go out and seek the jobs, find the jobs, rewrite the resume, and send it. Now your HR people are opening up a position, just like we were talking about, you know, before the show, sifting through a thousand applicants for one job, right? Sometimes some of these jobs are 500, 1,000. I even heard of somebody who said they were hiring for four positions, got 10,000 applications. Oh my word. So what do you do? You can't physically go through that. You don't have enough HR staff. So you gotta use an AI tool to sift through all the resumes, right? So, and then also you gotta have ways to weed people out. Even if you get to a point where you bury that down to, you know, say 60, 100 resumes. Now we're using AI testing tools to kind of screen out applicants who we think may not be qualified or or whatever reason that you're trying to weed people out based on whatever the criteria is. But the job seekers are also using AI tools to pass the AI tests. So you've got the AI on the side of the job seeker and the AI on the side of the HR people. At that point, I'm not even entirely sure how anyone gets hired. Yeah. Like, and and how do you know who you're hiring? And if you're on the the job seeker side, how do you know who you're working for? Like it's just this this AI versus AI battle that is, you know, an escalating uh battle over time. And I don't see how that's sustainable.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and and I think you're bringing something really interesting to to the head here is like how how can you how can you trust anything? And uh to to bring the human point home here, I I read an article absolutely fascinating. And it was talking about this lady who was uh you know doing some online dating, was kind of texting back and forth with this guy, and like, man, he's smart, he's witty, he's charming, he's got all this, like he seems like he's got everything going for him. Like he looks, you know, seems like we got uh some sort of connection. And then she meets him in person, and like he's kind of like quiet and reserved and like not all that witty, not very funny. And she's like, it felt like two different people. Like, this is weird. Okay, maybe he was just nervous, right? First date, maybe he's just nervous, right? Um, so then they go on a second date, and same thing. Like, he's still just kind of weird and just doesn't it didn't seem like the same person that she was texting with. And you know, so looking back, you know, she kind of ended that whole thing and she's like, I feel like he was just using AI to just come up with like these way to banter with me and way to create conversation connection. And like she just felt so like just used and weird, and just like I was just like talking to a computer, basically, and she just you know, a sense felt felt played and and misled. And I feel like we're getting into this weird reality where we're not gonna be sure what's real and what's not, we're not gonna be sure the human element is is accurate, or if it's just being portrayed to be a certain way to get us to feel or think or do something in particular. Um, so yeah, it's a it's a very strange, strange time that we're finding ourselves in. And you kind of talked about it. It feels like an arms race in some ways, right? Like, you know, every company is doing this against the other companies in the market, like employees and employers are kind of going back and forth on a lot of this, and and people are just trying to find the the next best way to use this to make their lives easier. All that to be said, I feel like making your lives, our lives easier is great. I think it's a noble thing, and I think it's really cool. And I do think that it can, you know, reduce some of the repetitive nature of certain jobs and it can it can change the nature of work. Now, my opinion, I see AI as a tool. I see it as something that that we as people use, much like a wrench or we use a car, or we use you know, these more advanced tools to help us find efficiency and help us find uh better uses for things. And I think, you know, I think kind of the core of what we're talking about here is is we're never going to be able to replace human connection. Human to human is is still currently uh in the realm of um of untouchable so far uh in terms of AI. And so so curious for you though, you know, looking at AI in general taking jobs, we're seeing tons of layoffs right now. We're seeing a lot of market shifts, a lot, a lot of things happening. And and in reality, are people losing their jobs to AI? Are companies just kind of downsizing just because kind of like a profit measure and they're blaming AI? Like, how do you see things shaking out right now?

SPEAKER_01:

I think both of those things are happening. So there's sort of this double-edged sword with every technology, right? Um, but with AI, the weird thing about it that kind of seems to be happening right now is a lot of companies are downsizing or like right sizing because they overhired, you know, kind of post-COVID, they overhired and now they need to kind of trim back down. Um, there's economic problems, and depending upon where you live in the world, right? Maybe the economy's not great right now for the industry that they're in. So they could be doing layoffs. But another thing is if they're a publicly traded company or something like that, or they're looking for investment rounds. Their investors are saying, you know, when are we gonna get the benefit from this AI initiative? Or, you know, what is this happening? And they can say, Well, we're laying people off because of AI, you know, whether that they saw the benefit or not. Right now, again, there's another problem in the idea of what productivity benefit there is from AI, because like you had the the MIT study where they said 95% of AI initiatives fail, but then if you look at the study, they only looked at 50 companies who were volunteered to give the information. So, you know, 95% of 50 people who agreed to talk to them is not exactly uh you know representative of the market. Yeah, yeah. But you you look at some other companies, right? Where I saw um I saw a company the other day. You know what? Their name immediately escapes me. Um they're a tech company and they had 318% growth since they started using AI for their coding and their systems and their data analysis. Right. So companies that figure it out get a massive benefit. Companies who don't figure it out still got some time, but not a lot of time, right? Because okay, here's the thing everybody says this all the time. I'm sure you heard it a thousand times. They say AI is not gonna take your job. Somebody using AI is gonna take your job. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think another company who has solved for AI productivity, their business will outperform or outstrip the other businesses, and they're gonna purchase your company or they're gonna put your company out of business. So it's a difference there. And I think a lot of people say AI is a tool, you know, just as you mentioned. But I like the idea of partnering with AI, yeah, AI in general. I don't mean a specific tool like Chat GPT or something, I mean AI in general as a concept. You partner with AI because you want it to be sort of like a really, really smart intern who is really good at at some things and really not very good at other things, maybe not the most personable person in the world, you know, maybe doesn't uh doesn't really understand uh a lot about humanity, but also they have the knowledge of every book that's ever been written. So you have to be able to leverage the right tool for the right job, and leveraging the right tool is where you're gonna get the most productivity benefit and kind of second along those lines. And this is an important bit is companies generally fail because they want to hand over an entire process to an AI system and have it run through the whole process and be perfect. Instead, they should be breaking everything they have down to small components and saying which part is my AI tool best suited for and put it in place to do that part of the process, and saying which parts of our process should be human, right? Which parts of our process require personality or require understanding of human condition or knowledge or expertise. Yeah. And so, as you say about layoffs, right? Are companies laying people off? Yes, they are. They also are hiring, but they're hiring in different industries differently. So if you're in some kind of knowledge work, they are hiring, they cannot get enough experts. If you're at the top of your field, you are in high demand when AI comes to town. Because the AI is generally speaking, for most tasks, it is better than average. So if you're a below average person in your industry or your company or your task or whatever that is that you do, then you got a problem. Because AI is already better at than you are. And the company has no reason to keep around people where the AI systems can do the tasks that those people do. Um and this also comes into two things. Number one is the cost of the current AI system to do a task drops 90% per year. So if I wanna I I got a piece of software that I've written and I'm running ChatGPT 4.0, so that's last year's version, it would have cost me, you know, I I don't know the exact number, but five dollars for a million tokens last year, it's 50 cents for a million tokens this year. That means the cost of intelligence drops 90% per year. And then the current AI system doubles in its ability to do tasks every seven months. So just like Moore's Law is computing power doubles every 18 months, AI doubles every seven months. So I had a conversation with a guy. I had a conversation with a guy, and his company does essentially web design for a certain industry. And I said, How long do you think it's gonna be before the AI can do basically all the stuff that your company does, like all the tasks? You know, minus somebody running it, selling it kind of thing. He says, Oh, well, the technical tasks. He's like, We're at least three generations out, right? And I'm like, Okay, so you got not even two years. He's like, Oh my god, right? I mean, that's a problem, right? Right, yeah. And so this is what happened. This is why I wrote the book in the first place. When Chat GBT came out, we have I I have a tech background, my business partner has a tech background. We used to work in data centers, we understand programming, we understand automation systems and things, you know, even though we're a marketing company, we have all these other skills. And I saw it come out and I started to extrapolate it, and I'm like, our company's gonna be out of business five years. Like, for sure. Like, there's we might not be like immediately out of business, but we're gonna be on the downside towards bankruptcy at that point. If we don't change what we're doing and how we do it. Yeah. So we started to do that, we started to pivot the things that our company does and how we do those things, and not only that, like how much work can we perform for the same amount of money for our clients. And then I realized when I was talking to people that nobody else seems to know this, right? Like nobody sees the wave on the horizon, right? And that that wave is gonna be a tsunami by the time it gets here. And so if you think about that, every seven months doubling in power, and just kind of to relate this, to circle back to your original question is somebody who's a CEO of a company or they're in charge of generally in charge of staffing, you know, either the head of HR or whatever, they can be looking at their technical staff or support staff, customer support, technical support, other you know, kinds of industries, and saying it's only good enough to do 10% of those jobs now. But you know, if it doubles seven months from now, it's gonna be able to do 20% of those jobs, and seven months later it's gonna be able to do 40% of those jobs. So we can probably safely you know get rid of ten percent of our workforce. That's a calculation that they make because for most companies uh you know, staff, benefits, all those kind of things for the highest cost, right? Biggest expense. But my argument is with companies like mine, is we said we can produce five to ten times the economic output with the same number of people, and we're outpacing basically any competitor at what we do in our industry. So what we're actually doing now is we start hiring more people, and I swore I wasn't gonna hire more people. I was like, AI is gonna do all my stuff, I'm not gonna hire anybody, you know. Me and my business partner are gonna run our company, and that's it. But now we're hiring people because I can hire someone and I can have them do five times as much work as my competitor, yeah, with them not having to like work overtime. Right. So everybody has a better work-life balance. Yeah, we have a massive advantage, and not only that, our clients have an advantage over their competitors. So that's what I mean about a company solving for AI.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And so so you look at that, right? You look at the the micro effect of that is you get to run a more successful business. You find more success in the marketplace. And, you know, dog meet, dog world, like that's that is capitalism at its finest, capitalism working, right? Like the best, the best are winning, which is great. Um, the challenge is when there is major disruption like this, when there are losers, there's you know, there's problems that come with that, right? People are now unemployed, people are not facing some of that. Um, and uh and so so now we're looking at this this massive disruption, which is good, in my opinion. I think it will massively improve our lives, right? You look back to, you know, yeah, you know, internal plumbing for the home, like that was a pretty big deal, right? Being able to have electricity wired to your house, like that was pretty sweet, being able to have internet run into your home, like pretty awesome. Now being able to rely on kind of like this external brain for yourself to do more, um, and to do more even while you're sleeping, right? To do more uh, you know, tasks that maybe you don't even really like, right? I like doing this other work, right? This this is kind of the busy stuff I don't really want to do. Uh and I just got to set it up and run it, right? And now just it handles itself. And and you look back, for me, I love I love context. I love looking back in history and and kind of seeing other times of disruption, other times things have changed. And uh, you know, history never repeats itself, but it rhymes. Forget who said that. Um, but but the the the changes we've gone through um are especially unique right now, right? We're in, you know, some some sort of new revolution, I'm sure it'll have a name eventually. Uh, you know, the AI revolution or the robotic revolution, or who knows. But you look back, right? And and the guy in the 1900s that was, you know, shoveling out poop from horse stalls, like you'd probably look at his job and you'd say, like, you know, paid a living, you know, and it was an entry-level job. Uh, but man, wouldn't he have liked maybe a different job, right? Maybe he would prefer to sweep the floors of a factory or something like that, right? Um, and then you look, you know, even further forward and skip ahead a little bit and like, man, cool, wouldn't it be cool if we had a robot that just swept the floors instead, right? It's to the vacuuming. Great, easy. Uh, and so that person now can do maybe a little bit more advanced work, right? Maybe something a little bit more interesting. Um, and so so we're I think we're probably seeing a little bit of the nature of work starting to change. And there's there's been some talk in in a lot of industries of you know, issues for entry level specifically, entry-level roles either being act completely or like there's just nothing available because the entry-level type work is being handled by AI. And so it's it's in a sense kind of creating this the second cast of people that were just too young to have gotten any type of experience. And now they're just kind of floundering, experienceless, unable to get a job to get the experience they now need in order to be successful. I guess do you see? Just the nature of entry-level roles changing to the point where these younger, not as skilled workers uh are going to be able to latch on to something? Or is this kind of a fundamental change in the way that businesses are going to work and and these these individuals, in a sense, are just at born at the wrong time, unfortunately. What what do you see here?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, there's that the issue there is kind of twofold, right? Is the industries want experienced people, but you can't get experienced people if nobody's hiring anybody who's inexperienced, right? But the other side of the factor uh of and this is something that's happening right now, is if you question workers who are in their companies and they're using AI tools for their job that are not, you know, they haven't been trained on, or maybe their company doesn't have AI policy, which is most companies, right? Um the majority, like the vast majority, hide the AI use. And the reason that they hide it is number one, they don't want it people to think that they're bad at their job or they're cheating or something, right? They also don't want to use AI for their job and then have the company think, oh, I could just replace them with AI, right? And the third thing is they don't want to use the AI to reduce their workload and then be given more workload, right? Um, and those were the the number the top three answers when they were surveyed. And when you ask CEOs, why have you not implemented more AI initiatives in your company? The number one answer is we don't have anybody in our company who knows how to use AI.

SPEAKER_00:

But they do, they're just but they do, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, and I think that this honestly, I think this falls in the HR world, right? This is how do we get programs and initiatives going in our companies that can show that we have, you know, people who are trained to use AI, or we can bring in new people who know how to use it. And maybe they're not experienced at whatever that role is, right? Maybe they're not an experienced software developer, but they've been at home using cursor for six months. I will hire that guy in a second, right? And so, anyways, there's there's definitely a gap there that needs to be filled between the expectation, the training, and the hiring.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And and you look at it, I heard this phrase, uh, I forget where. The the idea of like sometimes you should hire a lazy person because they're gonna find the easiest way to get that thing done.

SPEAKER_01:

They are gonna find the shortcut, they are gonna find the old uh Bill Gates quote, right? Yeah, right. Find the guy, the laziest guy in your company will find the fastest way to accomplish the task.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep, and they'll get it done. Right. And and you look at it now, like if if if we have these AI tools, we have these other opportunities, that person can do a significant amount more work. Uh to like to your point, right? Like that that person can can 5x their their output. And for you, you're harnessing it in a way to in a positive sense, right? And and likely like your people are doing probably pretty well for themselves. Like, okay, cool, you're because we're dominating our market now, right? You we are 5xing the the opportunity of of everyone else. Whereas I think a lot of other organizations, like you said, there's a scarcity mindset, right? Where like if I talk about my AI use or if I you know let them know that I'm you know making things more efficient, right? I'm just gonna get piled on, or I'm gonna get more stuff I have to deal with. And and you can just you know go on Reddit and go over to any of these other forums and you hear about these people that, like, okay, yeah, like I set up all this stuff and like I'm working two hours a day now, uh, you know, and it's in a sense for those individuals, like that's awesome. Congratulations. Like, you you found the cheat code. But also at the end of the day, there's only so long that those gravy trains roll for, right? There's only so long that you get that extractive benefit um before other people get wise and before you know someone else comes in and kind of blows up the whole um the whole thing. And and to your point, you made earlier with organizations you know out competing each other, um, and and with that kind of secretive knowledge base of like now we have this competitive advantage, eventually it's no longer going to be a competitive advantage, it's gonna be the industry standard, right? Because the ones that did it, they won, or the ones that didn't do it fall behind until they did it to catch back up or at least maintain their ground.

SPEAKER_01:

So the goal though is to if you can if you can get started soon or now, right? It's like the the best time to plant a tree is yesterday or 20 years ago, right? Or I know it's 20 years ago or today, right? Yeah, it's you have to start as soon as you can because you get a cumulative advantage, right? Because once you know how to use some AI tools, then you will start to wander to what other things are out there that we can also use, or what are the problems our current tools don't solve? What tools do we need to solve those problems? And your accumulation of productivity over time is very similar to compound interest, right? It's gonna grow and grow and grow, and soon it'll grow so fast that you're gonna outpace, you know, most of the people in your industry. And that works especially well right now for small businesses because you're fast, you're nimble, it's cheap enough to get the tools. You can get people trained up super fast, they can train themselves because AI is one of the first tools that you can use that will tell you how to use it, right? You couldn't ask your hammer how to pound a nail, you can ask your AI tool how to better use your AI tool, right? And the other thing I think is that a lot of companies are starting to discover automation, thinking that automation is AI, but it doesn't matter if it is or not, right? If you partner automation with AI, those two things together will revolutionize your business. There are always things that you do repeatedly that need tiny decisions to be made along the way. And most AIs now are smart enough to make those tiny decisions reliably, and your automation system can automate the pieces between those decisions. So if you take your day-to-day tasks and you write them all down, everything that you do every day, all day, and you do that every day for who knows, a couple weeks, a month, then you need to go back and say, which ones do I do all the time that I could automate? That's gonna get you the biggest kind of bang for your buck. And it also kind of depends on your industry, right? So like you were using the example of somebody, you know, shoveling the poop out of the stalls at the at the stable, right? There is there a robot now that can do that, and the answer is yes. Is it affordable? No, right? Is it gonna be in 20 years? For sure, right? But that doesn't mean there aren't gonna be people who still do it, right? Airbnb came to town, there's already full self-driving cars in the world, you know, there's all these things that were gonna displace other industries, and everybody says it's the end of the world, you're not gonna see, you know, when rideshare comes to town, you'll never see another taxi again. There's still taxis. Right. So there's always some kind of components of those industries that get that behind. But the other thing is my book, it's actually it's broken down by industry, right? So you've got like separate industry chapters. So one good example is the medical industry. Medical, it doesn't matter if you're in the United States with, you know, like a for-profit insurance-based medical system or a single payer like UK or, you know, socialized medicine like Canada or Sweden or something like that. There is never enough people in the medical system, especially with our current aging population. So you've got young people declining in numbers and older people getting older fast and needing more health care, those industries will never run out of needing more people, right? At least not in the foreseeable future. So if you feel like you're in an industry that is under threat, the best industry to go into is probably the medical industry. Also, you have to think about is it cost effective compared to the risk and for whatever that industry is. So I saw a good one the other day that was interesting. It was this like giant bowl thing that you would put over someone's head, and the AI figures it out and measures their whole head and and and gives them a haircut, right? But the machine only works on people with a certain type of hair, and it only works for basically for men, and you know, there's all these caveats to it, and it costs them like three million dollars to build a prototype of this machine. And if it was like a humanoid robot, right? What's the liability of having a robot with a pair of scissors next to your eyeballs and your ears doing something that is a complex task? It's high risk, right? For small reward. Because I'm not saying that being a hairdresser is not good money, it can be very good money, right? Lots of people make a living doing hairdressing, but it would be cheaper or more cost effective to make a robot that does something like goes, drives into a burning building and shuts off the gas before there's an explosion and saves people's lives. And, you know, that's worth a lot more value than the value the company's gonna get out of potentially stabbing somebody in the eye trying to make a haircut robot. There can also be, like with AI systems, if you are, let's say, a finance person, a lot of people are not gonna be comfortable handing over their life savings or their retirement fund to an AI system. And they're gonna want a human to talk to them about it, who they can look in the eye, who is you know responsible to them for the results. And even if that person is using an AI tool, that's fine. You're still gonna need somebody there who's watching it, explaining it, keeping an eye on it, right? So those are other industries, and as well as there might be some uh regulation around it, right? Like there might be a regulation where you have to be a licensed person to do this thing, in which case the AI tool can't get licensed for that. So, you know, so there are some industries that are safer than others.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, we and we can definitely see that, right? Like there's there's some, like you mentioned, healthcare, right? There's never going to be enough of that. Um, and it's interesting, like there's there's certain manufacturing type organizations or um, you know, skilled labor type organizations that like they just can't find enough people, right? And the and the talk now is is talent pipeline, like finding that younger, younger group of people and especially trades them up. Yeah, yeah, trade-based work, like they they they need people, they need people bad. Um, but you look at, you know, in in the context of our conversation so far, I think some of this comes down to organizational culture and and kind of the general approach to like how are we handling AI, how are we actually dealing with this, you know, and obviously with with your company, small, nimble, like, you know, your your will within that company is felt relatively quickly, right? It's just a couple other people, and like, here's our direction, here's what we're doing, here's how we're gonna do it, right? It's easy for you to to kind of galvanize and convince and kind of bring people along, right? Whereas I think a lot of these larger organizations, right, it's it's tougher to get a mandate like that to push through every single layer. And you mentioned HR as is probably the the one with the biggest opportunity in working with employees to leverage these new high-leverage opportunities, right? To to 5x or 2x or you know, massively increase productivity and uh and in a sense, create that competitive advantage within the organization. How do you see HR actually getting that to work, right? From like a person-to-person level, how how can someone convince someone else or work with someone else to get them to understand that like it's we're not just gonna pile a bunch more work on you? We're not going to just, you know, make your life worse because you shared a couple of your AI secrets that helped the rest of the team, right? How how do you get that level of camaraderie, teamwork, or whatever is required to actually make that difference, not just for the individual level, but throughout the organization?

SPEAKER_01:

So almost any organization that's over like a hundred employees, AI lives in IT, right? So your IT help desk people are the owners of AI in your organization. And they are not necessarily being one of those people, are not necessarily the best face of HR for the company, right? When it comes to using a certain type of technology or product. Um so what you need to do from an HR standpoint, the people you're gonna want to get together are obviously somebody from IT who handles how we would roll out these processes, what are the security implications of using artificial intelligence, what can we put into a system or not put into a system, licensing, all those kinds of things. Legal probably needs to be involved because you're gonna have to get buy off on you know what IP are we allowed to use, you know, within our system, you know, if if it's an enterprise, usually they'll have an enterprise chat GPT license or something like that, where or from Anthropic or something where that is stored in their own private cloud, and then you can kind of get around the legal problems, and then you know, your C-suite team, they have to have their goals and objectives that need to be met. And then I think from there you've kind of got the framework. You've got, okay, we got buy-in from all these groups, now we gotta go out to the people and try and get their love on this, you know, uh idea as well. And a lot of times having like an AI council is a good idea where you have representatives who are not necessarily the owners of departments, because usually the department head wants to stay informed but are too busy to work on that. So you need other influential people within those departments to come together. That's gonna be you know, marketing, sales. Um, you know, in uh if you have depends how your kind of company is structured, right? Your knowledge workers, and you know, if you have people who work um front-facing, customer facing, customer service reps, sales reps, anybody, you know, so manufacturing, it really depends on the type of organization. But you need to get those people together who are interested in AI and also are like they want to be on the forefront of using it. And if you want to keep your job, I would suggest you join the AI council at your company or get on board with the AI initiative. Because you know who they don't lay off is the one who knows how to use AI better and trains other people how to do it. Because if your company gets it in their head, their board of directors comes to the CEO and says, We need our company to be an AI first company like Shopify or you know, like these other companies who are doing it now, they're gonna do it. And if they're gonna do it, they're not gonna lay off Janice, who's the head of the AI council, right? They're gonna lay off the people who they think are doing tasks that are the easiest replaceable by the AI systems, and it also could be robots if it's a labor work, uh, but we can get into that in a minute. But um, yeah, the people generally speaking get laid off based on the job description that they were originally hired for. And we all know that that job description is rarely what people do on a day-to-day basis, and so a lot of people are measuring how likely they are to get laid off or replaced based on what they do on a day-to-day basis and not based on what the file says that they do. And the document that says what their job role is is what the higher ups in the company are gonna base the decision on to get rid of them. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's super actually, that's super interesting and terrifying, especially for like tenured people or people who have been there for a bit, or uh, or even people that came in and in some sort of hybrid type role, right? And like, oh, okay, well, I'm I've I've I've taken on a lot more than than the original intention of this role, right? I've expanded to do other things. And so, you know, it's interesting you bring this up. I I knew a guy um and and probably about 15 years ago, he's he was working within um within within uh the healthcare realm. And one of the things that he did was he he purposefully made himself indispensable. Is like he he became, you know, like an assistant to you know one of the directors. Like he like he found these ways of like, oh, cool, yeah, I'll take that on, I'll fix that problem, right? And then like he solved the problem and he had the keys to the solution, right? And then he kept doing that, he kept getting keys to other problems and solutions, and like he kind of just became the key master of all these things. And like you let that guy go, and like a lot of that system falls apart, or it's gonna take a lot of work to rebuild whatever that person had cobbled together. And now, in one sense, from that individual's perspective, that's a that's a great way to go, right? It's a great way to create job security from an organizational perspective. That sucks because of that.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, even if because if your whole department gets laid off, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but you know what you're saying about being the one who solves the problems. If you look at roles like customer support, customer service, technical service, AI is gonna lay off 90% of those people. Like it's just it's gonna happen. And I don't I don't care what anybody says, like the the statistics, the writing is on the wall already. It's gonna happen. And maybe, okay, maybe somebody could argue they can't lay off every okay, maybe it's 50%. That's still a lot, right? But no one ever says we're gonna lay off 100% of our technical support staff. You know why? Somebody has to handle the edge cases, somebody's gotta be there to do the thing that's never come up before that the AI doesn't understand. Somebody's got to be there to roll up all the statistics and everything that's happening in the department and report on the department, you know. So there's there's usually a small group of people in those roles in those industries who are like, you know, the five people out of a hundred who know how to do the things that nobody else does because they volunteered to fix the hard problems.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I think that's that's a really, really interesting point. So especially for those that are in roles right now and uh you know, there's a new phrase going around, you know, job hugging, right? If you're in a job hugging phase of your career right now, uh find find a way to become indispensable, find a way to Be a problem solver that's fixing big things or educating others on how to fix big things or yeah, you know, attaching yourself to AI-based initiatives or, you know, honestly, any major initiative that is gonna, you know, produce change within your organization, um, regardless of potential for success or level of success, like you can you can be part of that change agency, right? You can be part of that opportunity to become indispensable, right? Right. And um, and and I think that's you know, from an individual level, absolutely critical. Like now, now is not the time to be resting on your laurels or to be passive uh in a sense of like, you know, just oh, I've got I've got tenure, I've got enough seniority, like, you know, I'm I'm I think I'm indispensable, right? Is it's critical to continue to become indispensable and remain indispensable. Um, but to to that end, you look at certain times in history where there is major disruptions, and many of those times there's actually more work from people that needs to be done. Do you see that with this AI revolution? Obviously, it's gonna displace a lot of work, it's gonna change a lot of work, and certain roles are no longer gonna be necessary, but is that gonna open up whole new fields? Is that gonna be opening up whole new realms of roles that we would never have considered because AI is now doing this different type of work? Uh or yes and no. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I was gonna say yes and no, because in some ways, yes, in some ways no. So if you wanted to have music in your house in the old days, you had to play the piano in your house, right? You'd you'd play the piano and you'd sing or whatever, or or you know, one one of the parents would play the piano and the other parent would sing in the family, that's how they had entertainment kind of thing. And then, you know, the phonograph came along, you didn't have to. So people stop buying pianos, you know, for the most part. So they start laying off the workers of the piano factory. Well, you just retrain them to make phonographs, right? It's easy, it's it's not that difficult. But it's a lot more difficult when you lay off 75% of the knowledge workforce in the world, you can't suddenly train everybody to be a roboticist. You know, like there's just not enough jobs to go around for that. And the other thing is when you look at these huge kind of sways in in kind of new technological systems that come around that are societal changing systems, there's always like a six to twelve month gap of unemployment, heavy unemployment, where nobody can find a job and everybody in the industry's been laid off and companies are going broke and the stock market crashes, and there's a reshuffling of of how things happen in society. And I think people need to be prepared for that. Um I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but I'm saying there's a chance it could happen. And you know, I would way rather have enough available food, cash, credit, whatever I need to be able to survive for, you know, three to six months. If there's a huge gap in the workforce, then not be able to. And I know that's not something everybody could do, but it's something to think about. And uh I think the other thing is that the world goes a couple ways, right? Number one is let's talk about the bad one first. So the bad one is something I call job cascade failure. Job cascade failure is knowledge workers in general start losing their jobs at Company X, right? And they go out and there's no one hiring for that job because everybody else is starting to lay off those people too. And so now none of us are going in to work. We're we're not at the office. The office doesn't need as many janitors, but they've replaced most of them with cleaning robots anyway, so the janitors are out of work. And I don't need the security staff because there's nobody at the building, and I don't need HR people because there's nobody we're hiring because we've fired everybody with that. We don't need as much legal because we don't have as much AR, we don't have as HR, we don't have as much staff, you know, and so on and so on. And then we don't need the cafe and the haircutting salon and all the stuff in the convenience store in the building because there's nobody in the building. And, you know, this kind of cascade failure goes throughout society. Restaurants start losing their job, going out of business and bars because nobody's going to them, because nobody has any money, and then nobody's buying anything. So the producers start going out of, and you know, the manufacturers start losing their jobs, and this is a cascade failure. The only way that I can see that getting better is some kind of universal basic income. Kind of like during COVID when they sent out checks to people, right? And at least in Canada, they sent out, you know, several rounds of payments to people that you didn't have to pay back. They just gave you money, right? And if robots and AI systems and other computer systems can do, let's say, half of the work and we don't need everybody to work, then we need a new system for people to pay for food, you know, and rent and all the things that go along with that. Universal basic income is one of those systems. I would recommend looking into it. If you look at the studies, it's very beneficial. Um, there's obviously arguments against it, but I'm saying this is a way to stop cascade job failure from collapsing society as we know it, kind of thing. Yeah. The other thing you could get is this sort of golden age, right? This is the AI gets so good, it becomes self-improving, it starts to solve all our problems, and we don't need to work, right? We got robots in the fields making the food, and we got manufacturing all the stuff, and and everybody gets kind of some kind of basic income kind of thing, and everybody lives happily and does whatever they want. And then the more likely of these between these two, really bad and the really good scenario, is the more likely scenario. Which is things come out of the the AI becomes the framework that used to be like the internet that software was based on, where most people work now, is software based on top of the internet. There will be a soft software layer based on top of artificial intelligence that creates all these new jobs and opportunities that we've never thought of before, right? It's like asking somebody in the 1970s if they think in 20 years their kid should be a web developer when internet didn't exist yet. The web didn't get you know invented till after the internet, and you know, so on and so on. So, you know, your kid in the future might be like a quantum game developer or something, because we don't know because that hasn't been invented yet. And that's what's likely to happen, right? Is there's gonna be some disruption, there's gonna be some problems, but in the end, it will all kind of work out, um, hopefully, you know, for the better for everyone. Uh, and that's kind of my hope. I, you know, I hate to think that people are gonna lose their jobs or that they're gonna have problems, but every time there's a technological technological shift like this, there is always some job displacement. And I think you really want to focus on trying to be uh, you know, that person who handles the edge case, the one who helps the company be on the AI council, the one who's, you know, AI forward trying to solve their problems, because that could get you through, you know, to the next uh the next evolution, let's call it, of humanity with the least amount of pain.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. No, I think that's super sharp. And and you look at, you know, universal basic income. Like I it was something that was fascinating to me before it was even a buzzword, right? This is you know, probably 10 years ago. I yeah, I first started like hearing little bits about it, like, oh, that's really interesting. Um, and and for me, I read a lot of science fiction books, right? And then in some of the sci-fi books I've read, like there, there's this like basic income class that doesn't work, right? And they just they just live. They just live based off the productivity of everybody else. Um, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. They just don't get to maybe have as much or get to do as interesting of things as perhaps other people, right? Um, and so you you look at the the opportunity and challenge ahead, you know, there's you know, for so many, like it's you know, UBI has become this kind of politically charged thing, right? Like it's oh, one side likes this, one side thinks it's crazy. Um, you know, I think eventually some common sense solutions are just gonna make sense. And, you know, you're talking about like the checks during COVID. My hope is that it's non-inflationary. Whatever UBI is, is not a we're just printing more money to throw at people that's gonna be more useless money. Um, it's actually, you know, there is some sort of a tax, there is some sort of a uh AI fee, or there is something uh where like the you know, the magnificent seven or whatever becomes in the next, you know, 15 years, you know, maybe that fills out to be 10 or 15 organizations that have just become monolithic, right? Um, you know, there's there's a different tax rate for those organizations, right? There's a different way that we are um, you know, bringing in income. But then you also look at through displacement like that, you look at, you know, hen Henry Ford opening up, you know, another day per week for his workers to go have leisure time, uh, right? Well, if they have a weekend, they can go drive their cars, right? They can go do stuff. Um, you know, that does open up the opportunity for more work in that sense, right? If there's more leisure time available because we have massively increased productivity, if we have more leisure, then there is gonna, in a sense, be more demand for different things, right? Maybe more demand for vacations, maybe more demand for entertainment, maybe more demand for the floor.

SPEAKER_01:

I think there's gonna be more demand for live experiences, like you were talking about things being artificial and stuff when the pendulum swings both ways. The other way is as things become more artificial, uh, especially in the entertainment world, then the craving for quote, real, you know, in-person real life experiences will go up and the value of those experiences will go up.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Exactly. Right. And so then you look at it like, okay, cool. You want the AI experience, that's a different price point, right? You want the in-person or you want the this is an actual person experience, right? That's that's gonna be a different price point. And then people can kind of self-select into whichever category they want. Um, and man, we can get into the nature of storytelling and how I think that's gonna be democratized and changing, right? If if everyone, you know, the next 10 years has a uh, you know, the technology that a hundred million dollar budget movie would have, like, what kind of cool stories are we gonna find? And and what who are the next creators, the next storytellers, those next people uh that are gonna be gonna be serving the world that way. But that's probably another episode. And looking at our time here, we're we're we're in wrap-up mode. So for a conversation we've had today, obviously for for those listening, check out Matt Rouse, follow him on LinkedIn, check out his um his content, definitely get one or both of his uh of his books. So refresher on those books. Um, you know, will AI take my job and will AI take my job too? So for you, Matt, if you had to leave us with one closing thought, what do you want to leave the listeners with today?

SPEAKER_01:

I think you need to take a hard look at what are the tasks that you or that your organization do on a regular basis and figure out which of those should be a breathing, thinking, creative human experience or human being with human experiences, and which of those are tasks that should be assigned to a system that can do those on your behalf.

SPEAKER_00:

Love it. Great final word. Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it.