How AI Is Changing the Way We Work

[COLD OPEN]

DANIEL: If jobs are being both created and destroyed, who's winning? And how do you get on the winning team?

RYAN: AI to date has still just been the faster horse. It hasn't really been the car. It's still just a hammer. It's not a quantum shift in the way we think about things.

RYAN: Your skills have an expiration date on them. And so the question is, if you're in one of these sectors, how do you evolve?

RYAN: And he said, "Are we going to use AI?" And he said, "No. Because we have the largest supercomputer on the planet. We have thousands upon thousands of human minds, because the human mind is the most advanced computer on the planet."

RYAN: Tech jobs are probably more vulnerable than minimum wage workers. AI can code, but it can't fix your broken toilet.

DANIEL: This recent study from McKinsey found that millennials are 140% more likely to use AI tools than any other generation. But Gen Z actually overestimates their AI capabilities.

RYAN: That does not surprise me.

DANIEL: So here's the real question.

Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast.

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[THE BIG WHY]

DANIEL: So I've got a friend who has really good experience in corporate comms. He's worked for a couple of large organizations in their PR and corporate communications. Recently lost his job. Lots of good experience, multiple companies. Got laid off because his company is switching to AI tools.

But here's the crazy part. While they're laying him off, they're also posting jobs for new positions for AI specialists in the corporate communications department. And I think this is not just unique to this one company or to corporate comms. I think this is happening everywhere.

The World Economic Forum has just shared some data that completely shifts the narrative on how we need to think about this. AI is both destroying and creating jobs. And so here's the question: if jobs are being both created and destroyed, who's winning, and how do you get on the winning team?

RYAN: I'm still struggling with, is this just the next big thing? Don't get me wrong, evolution of technology is going to change things. But I'm looking at the line here. It says if 170 million new jobs are being created, but 92 million are being displaced, who actually wins in the equation? That's 78 million new jobs.

DANIEL: If the math holds.

RYAN: If the math holds. But then the very next line right here says your abilities have an expiration date now, and they're way shorter than you think.

uestion. Let's go back to the: 1960

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: And then in the 80s and 90s, the same thing happened with administrative assistants. Schedules and emails and calendars were all managed by people. And now they're all managed by Microsoft or Google. But people still have bookkeepers and people still have assistants.

DANIEL: They do, but they do very different things. You used to have three assistants and now you have like one. You have one assistant and one project manager. She's doing very different things than returning phone calls and booking meetings for you and making copies. That's not what she's doing.

RYAN: Yeah, but it's still a fraction of my job.

DANIEL: So software has eaten those jobs. They're gone. They're never coming back.

RYAN: But my point is, we still have bookkeepers and assistants today. So they're doing higher level activities.

DANIEL: Right. But they're checking the things that the AI is doing. They're not doing the thing that the AI is doing.

at cusp. Because I bet in the: 1960

So how much of this, if we're creating 170 million new jobs but displacing 92 million, how much of this is just an evolution?

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[BY THE NUMBERS]

ded to be done by hand in the: 1960

Once Excel came in, that job disappeared, because your manager now with Excel could do the job that he plus a team of people used to do. And so the only person who keeps their job is the manager, and all of the entry level jobs just disappear because now software can do that.

And I think that's the problem. If you're 21 years old and you're trying to start your career, 22, 23, you just graduated from college, there are no entry level jobs, because all of the jobs that used to be entry level are now being done by AI.

RYAN: I'll be honest, I don't like how you're saying "entry level jobs." I think it's not about entry level jobs. I think it's just a fundamental shift.

Farm workers, the biggest growth, 35 million new positions. Because of the age of industrialization and things moving more online and just the evolution of technology, we lose like 100 farmers a day. We only need so many people to grow food and crops. And so now no one really has the dream. I'm sure there's a few people out there that have the dream of "I'm going to have a farm and grow crops," versus now it's these mass teams.

DANIEL: I didn't tell you that I'm a prepper and I've got my own farm and chickens and everything.

RYAN: A prepper is totally different than a farmer.

DANIEL: You've met my wife. You know that's not what I'm doing.

RYAN: Somebody who wants to be a farmer and somebody who wants to be a prepper, two totally different things. Their product is growing crops and food and selling it off. Whereas there's incentives for being farmers today, and with the technology that is in farm equipment, you can farm more land more efficiently, faster.

And I love this quote right here: "High tech jobs are probably more vulnerable than minimum wage workers. AI can code, but it can't fix your broken toilet."

The global population of the world is still going up. Which means we are going to create more. There's going to be more houses that need to be built, more electrical wires that need to be run, more toilets that need to be fixed.

DANIEL: I hate this game.

RYAN: The more things that we buy from China, or that we manufacture China-esque, the more things are going to break. We don't make things like we used to in the 50s.

DANIEL: Yeah, I've got a client that does truck fabrication. Welding. I don't know if AI is welding yet. Maybe it is. But welding components together to custom specifications, I don't know if AI is doing that. But it's certainly writing marketing copy.

RYAN: Right. And I think this is just the technology sector going through an evolution like every other sector in the world has gone through. Going back 100 years, back when we went from the horse and plow to the mechanized plow, you displaced the farm hands that raised the horses.

DANIEL: Every major economic shift creates this kind of displacement pattern, where some jobs become obsolete and new jobs get created. The Industrial Revolution did this. Agricultural jobs, farming by hand, began to decline. Factory jobs started to grow. The internet killed retail, but started e-commerce. And I think AI is now doing kind of the same thing. But maybe it's something different. It feels different.

RYAN: Well, what's crazy is I work for about a dozen technology companies, and we've instilled AI in a lot of them.

DANIEL: I love the fact that you work for a dozen technology companies.

RYAN: All of them instilled AI. AI is at the forefront. Everybody's using AI. But what the heck does that mean? For development, we are using it to write code. We're using it to write unit tests.

And what I've seen in the smaller companies is we have not got less engineers. We didn't fire engineers and go straight AI. Now, I'm talking smaller companies, so this is different than a Microsoft or a Meta or something like that. I think what you're seeing in the smaller companies is they're getting more competitive because their code is cleaner. They're producing less bugs. They can do QA testing they didn't have the bandwidth for. They were sacrificing some of these components: unit testing, QA testing, documentation. There were shortcuts the business was taking, or not doing, and just focusing on core features and supporting the customer. Versus now, by putting AI in, yes, we didn't hire those people, but those companies really weren't going to hire those people anyway, at least in the next 12 to 18 months.

But what we're also seeing is a change in development. Yes, we are able to do things more efficiently now, but you still have to know how to prompt to write the code. And we're getting better with things like Lovable and Replit.

DANIEL: And there's a dozen others like it.

RYAN: Though those are making it easier, you still need a human in the loop. And so I think what you're seeing is, yes, anybody that could have been a developer and picked up code and wrote code, there's going to be a thinning of the herd. Those people might move on to doing something different. And I think you'll just see the equation being balanced.

So I agree, but like we said earlier, it's creating what, 78 million net new jobs?

DANIEL: Yeah, I think so.

RYAN: And so the topic of our podcast is 39% of your skills are already obsolete. Your skills have an expiration date on them. And so the question is, if you're in one of these sectors, how do you evolve?

DANIEL: It's interesting. I was reading an article this morning from Bain about AI. And what it said was that 40% of a software developer's job is developing software. And AI is doing a fantastic job. Not perfect, but a really good job of replacing that 40%.

But that is less than half of what that job description requires. And the other 60% is the intangible things. Are we building the right thing? Why are we building this and not this? Have you thought about this weird edge case, this weird situation that could conceptually happen? What would you want the product to do in that circumstance? Those are things that AI isn't yet, at least in my experience, prepared to handle.

And so even though AI is advancing at a rapid pace in the software development world, it's still probably only 40 to 50% of the job. There's a lot of thinking that AI is not yet ready to handle on its own in the wild.

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[WORK RECEIPT: WIKIPEDIA SAID NO]

RYAN: So I was at Web Summit in Lisbon two years ago. And one of the keynote speakers was one of the founders of Wikipedia. And mind you, this was November of '23. Generative AI was a new buzzword. It was a hot topic. I think we were still working on one of the earlier versions of ChatGPT, pre-4. And none of the coding platforms existed. So this is just right on the cusp of it.

And he said, "Are we going to use AI?" And he said, "No. Because we have the largest supercomputer on the planet. We have thousands upon thousands of human minds, because the human mind is the most advanced computer on the planet. And we have thousands upon thousands of them processing our data."

He says, "Now, will we use AI to do validity checking and some automation and stuff like that? Absolutely. But our articles are not going to become AI written, because the human brain is still the most advanced computer for processing this kind of data." So absolutely, we're not implementing AI any time in the near future to write historical articles, and to describe the intent, the mission of Wikipedia.

And so I think when you think of it from that context, and what AI has been, AI to date has still just been the faster horse. It hasn't really been the car. It's not a quantum shift in the way we think about things. It's the way we always thought, just better.

DANIEL: I mean, here's a data point for you. Only 1% of companies have actually reached AI maturity, despite a 92% increase in investment.

RYAN: Yeah, we still haven't figured that out. That doesn't surprise me. But the things that we are doing with AI today are making the day to day job easier, faster, more efficient. And at the end of the day, you're making everybody's job more efficient.

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[SPICY TAKES: ARE COPYWRITERS COOKED?]

DANIEL: Now, here's an interesting one for you. Copywriters. I would not want to be a copywriter right now.

RYAN: I think they're going to be more valuable. I think they're more valuable today. Because people can tell when something is written by ChatGPT. Good copywriters, not crappy ones, not people that just AI prompt.

DANIEL: All right, so I have a friend. She's actually the wife of one of my former roommates. And she just launched a copywriting business. She's a solopreneur. She does copywriting. And I'm like, that's the worst idea I've ever heard at the worst time ever. But I'm not going to say that to her. So I want to hear your thought here, because I think I'm pooping all over that idea. So convince me otherwise.

RYAN: So I think this is the fallacy of the unskilled individual in a particular area. I'm not a copywriter. I don't have a copywriting degree. I don't have a writing degree. I don't like writing, blah, blah, blah. I pull up ChatGPT, I throw something into a prompt, I think it's great, I put it out there. And it's just noise. If anything, AI has created more noise in the copywriting space.

And you know what's funny? We used to love putting emojis into text. Now, that's a younger generation, millennial and Gen Z thing. But now people perceive emojis in text as AI and automatically dismiss it. We've already trained people how to sniff out AI and dismiss the information.

So where a copywriter is going to be more valuable is they're going to be able to put the human element on it. You can still tell when something is intellectually written as opposed to emotionally written, especially when you're talking in a marketing sense. The job is to emotionally connect the person to the product or service to get them to make a buy, not to intellectually. Part of it is intellectual, if you're stating features, but it's also emotional. And if AI can't get that emotion, it can do good, but I think that copywriter, again, the best computer they have is their own mind. And those copywriters are going to be more valuable.

But what you're going to see is the mediocre copywriters, those are going to fall by the wayside. The mediocre developers fall by the wayside. The mediocre graphic artists fall by the wayside. The truly skilled, the ones that can actually do it, there's science and art in a lot of these fields. The ones that actually have the skills of the artistic side of it, that can use AI, are going to come out on top, and they're going to charge a premium for their service.

DANIEL: Those that are skilled in those areas but do not use AI, they're not going to be able to keep pace, because they're going to do things the legacy way. Correct?

RYAN: Right. And if you're doing things the legacy way, you're never going to be as fast or as efficient or as good. You'll get left behind. It's still just a hammer.

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[SPICY TAKES: WHICH GENERATION IS ACTUALLY AI-READY?]

DANIEL: All right, so this recent study from McKinsey found that millennials are 140% more likely to use AI tools than any other generation, but Gen Z actually overestimates their AI capabilities.

RYAN: That does not surprise me. Here's why. And this is why I'm still a millennial fanboy.

DANIEL: Because you're a millennial.

RYAN: Because I'm a millennial.

DANIEL: And I can say that because I'm Gen X, so I'm the old man here.

RYAN: We grew up at this juncture in time. Millennials grew up at the ideal intersection of technology and legacy. We can bridge the gap between the old way and the new way, especially some of the older millennials. The younger millennials, sorry, you're a little bit more screwed.

DANIEL: All right, I'm going to argue with you, because there's a subset of a subset called Xennials that were born between '78 and '82. And they're half millennials and half Gen Xers. And that's where I fall. And I think we're the best, because I remember pre-internet. I remember phone books. I remember dial-up. I remember all of that. And I think you're too young to remember that.

re a group that took the late: 2000

DANIEL: Totally.

RYAN: But Gen Z came in too far. They grew up with the iPhone in the world. And so they don't have enough. They have a lot of good ideas and a lot of great vision. But when it comes to using AI, they think they can just put a good prompt in and it's going to do what they want. They're missing the soft skills to maneuver the AI to get it, whereas the millennials have enough of the soft skills from the legacy. We were right there on the tail end of technology phasing out.

if you look at the time from: 2000

So it does not surprise me that 140% are using AI tools and Gen Z is overestimating it, because they've got a lot of book smarts. They don't have the smarts that millennials have. And Gen Xers and boomers have too much legacy baggage.

DANIEL: I'm going to argue with you there. You're a younger Gen Xer.

RYAN: You're one of the youngest Gen Xers.

DANIEL: I'm one of the youngest Gen Xers. You can't get much younger than me and still be Gen X. You start moving into millennial. So I'm right near the cutoff. Born in '78. But I remember building regression models by hand. I know how to do that. And those kinds of skills, all the stuff that AI is built on today, is being built on foundations that were set 20 and 30 years ago. And I was doing those things by hand. So I know when some of those things are not working, because I've done them before.

And one of the challenges of millennials and Gen Zs and certainly Gen Alphas is they've got no context for this. So if an answer is totally out of the ballpark of reality, they don't know, because they don't have the foundational knowledge.

RYAN: I agree. And I do think there's a level of, how much are the older generations holding things back? How much, let's say boomers for a second, boomer business owners, where they've got a legacy mindset?

I love this quote right here: 22% of boomers are AI ready, according to a McKinsey survey. I think that's way too high.

There are a couple of business owners that I work with that are middle-age boomer, I guess you could call it mid-tier. And they are like, "What is this AI crap? I don't understand it." But they're more on the retired side of the spectrum. They're on their way out. They think it's neat, but they just don't want to bother with it.

Then you've got some on the younger boomer side that are probably closer to older Gen Xers. Actually, there's one individual I'm thinking of. He's all over AI. Now, he is definitely the boomer results guy. And he is definitely doing the results through chat. He's using ChatGPT like an old sales guy would use a phone book. And getting to results fast. And it's like, okay, no, let's back this up a little bit here. That's all results with no journey.

But how much are some of the legacy business owners holding things back because they're wanting to hire people because they don't get it? You're getting younger employees in that want to use AI. How much of this is just going to hit a rupture point?

And here's the example I'm going to use. You and I did not have backup cameras and lane indicators in our cars when we learned to drive.

DANIEL: Heck no.

RYAN: But we have those today. I don't know about you, but I'm kind of bad when I rent a car in Europe and it doesn't have any of the features.

DANIEL: Just drive on the right side of the road.

RYAN: Well, I was in Spain, so I was on the right side of the road.

DANIEL: Drive in the UK. Let somebody else do the driving there.

RYAN: But our kids, especially mine, my youngest is about to drive, my older one's been driving. They're never not going to have a backup camera in their car. And though they were taught to look behind them and look around their surroundings, the backup camera is still a tool, and the indicators and all this and the other. Do they really need to learn how to back up without a backup camera? And if the camera goes out, AI will do it for you.

DANIEL: Well, we're going to get to a point where humans won't even be driving very soon. It's close.

RYAN: It's one of those things where technology is going to allow things to operate differently. And I do think some things in the job market, if I use the backup camera analogy, that's where I think the millennials and especially the Gen Zs, as we advance technology a little bit more, there's going to be a level where yes, the Gen Z AI proficiency may be overstated, but the technology and the tools and features will catch up around them, and it just doesn't matter.

And I'm going to equate that to when the backup camera just became a standard feature in cars, with the backup indicators. You don't need to know how to use it.

DANIEL: I'll be honest, I'm going to guess if your backup camera goes out, you're probably going to figure out really fast how to back up your car without it.

RYAN: Right. Or you're going to turn around and look behind you. You're either going to learn how to do it without costing lots of money, or you're going to create an incident that costs you a lot of money and you're going to learn the hard way.

So that's where I'm at with this technology in the job market thing. It goes back to upgrading your skills.

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[VISION, JOURNEY, CULTURE, RESULTS]

DANIEL: All right, so let's talk for a second about how this connects to the Vision, Journey, Culture, Results framework, because I think there are a lot of companies that are really missing this. So if you were leading an organization and you wanted to be AI first, what would you be thinking? What would you be doing? What would you be communicating?

If you owned a company and you were truly dialed in to what's going on from a technological standpoint and the impact that AI is going to have today and in the future, how would you be communicating to your people? What's the message there?

RYAN: So I find it easy, because it's mission driven and leading with the vision. If I came out and said, "I want more profit, and we're going to squeeze profit and not hire people and hire cheaper people and do AI to augment all this stuff so I can be cheap and make more profit," obviously you're an idiot if you're doing that.

But for me, what I look at is, okay, how can we make our work not suck? Exactly what the podcast is about. How can we get everybody working smarter? How can we use this to get more output from the existing team without making you work harder, pedal faster? Can we work 30-hour weeks and achieve more output than we currently do? And if we can do these things, it allows people to take more PTO, time off, or work more remotely and not have to be tethered to things.

How can this help us enjoy life more by using the tool to get more output, or better serve our customer, or even on-call, for example? If I can have an AI chatbot that scans our knowledge base and is able to do after-hours assistance, and I cut back the after-hours support by 70, 80%, that's not waking somebody up in the middle of the night to answer a stupid question.

DANIEL: Right. 20% of the questions drive 80% of the calls. Why can't we use AI to answer those questions, so only 20% of the time somebody gets woken up in the middle of the night?

RYAN: Exactly. So when I approach it with an AI-first vision, it's all about that. Because I like keeping a tight-knit team. And I don't mind hiring people. A growing company is going to require hiring people. But I'd rather keep a tight-knit team and only bring in people as we need them. Not so we can squeeze more out of everybody. But if you go hire 15 people tomorrow and just throw bodies at it, it will dismantle your culture.

So if we value our culture, and we want to get the best bang for our buck and allow our people to work less, or take more time off, or be less stressed, then this is a tool to help us achieve that.

DANIEL: Yeah, I would maybe say that in a slightly different way, but I think it's philosophically still aligned. I don't think AI is a vision. I think AI is a journey to help you achieve your vision. But if you're not clear on your vision, sprinkling some AI on it is just going to get you lost faster.

I think you've got to be really clear on why you exist, and the value you add, and the customers you want to serve, and the problems you want to solve. And if you're clear on that, AI can be very helpful. But if you're not clear on that, AI can be a real problem, because it can get you way off track very quickly. It can produce some results in the short term, but they don't actually align with your purpose.

RYAN: Oh,: 1000

If you're trying to push results and you're not getting traction, you go start with the vision. And then you've got to incorporate the AI into the journey of your business to achieve the vision. And if it's not aligned with the vision, you're never going to get there. Then the third one is culture. Your culture is never going to align if the journey and the vision aren't in alignment. And you'll never get to the results.

What did we say earlier? Only 1% of companies have achieved AI maturity, but 92% are investing. That's because AI cannot give you purpose.

DANIEL: AI cannot give you a vision. If you have a vision, and you have a purpose, AI can help you get there more effectively, more efficiently. But it cannot give you a purpose.

f the past. This is from like: 1920

And I think the hurrier you are to implement AI, the behinder you're going to get, because you're going to disrupt the journey, which will disrupt the culture and keep you from the results.

DANIEL: I like that. That's good. That's really good. I would not expect that from Vogue magazine.

should have been born in the: 1950

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[GEOGRAPHIC MISMATCHES]

DANIEL: All right. So if you're somebody who is listening to this podcast, you're hearing about how rapidly skills can decay, how quickly AI is evolving, what's happening with the geographic mismatches, which we haven't even talked about yet. Maybe we should talk about that first.

How much of what is happening is geographically driven? If you live in a major city... one of my clients lives in a very rural area and they're in a service business. It's a blue collar business. They're doing really well. They're making probably 15, 20 million dollars a year in revenue, healthy profits. But there's just nobody around who is tech savvy and more of an urban citizen, because their company is based in a very rural area. What advice would you have for them in the context of this conversation around how quickly skills become obsolete?

RYAN: Oh, that is a good question. I may not be a good person to debate that one, only because I work more on a global level. When you made that statement, my mind actually went to people I work with in Serbia and Bulgaria and the Eastern Bloc countries. I understand how AI is impacting those groups of people on that side of the world, but as far as rural America, I don't know. That's a good question.

DANIEL: Ryan's like, "Sorry, I don't understand. I'm a global citizen. I was just in Spain last month and in England this month."

RYAN: Yeah, that does make me sound kind of like an asshole.

DANIEL: Yeah, that's a douchebag answer.

RYAN: Yeah, I guess it was. I guess it's because of how connected we are. There have actually been a lot of people, and I don't know the statistics, that are moving into rural areas that still have good internet because they can work from anywhere.

DANIEL: I think you're seeing people in rural areas that are looking for better work and coming into the big city. I think you're seeing a mix of both. I would say just because you live in a rural area doesn't mean that the changes that are happening globally are not coming for you. They might be a little bit delayed, but they're coming.

RYAN: Well, okay. Let's take that one. I think if you're in rural parts of America, there's still going to be the local coffee shop and the local bakery, and those small communities are still going to thrive. I think there's a level of that coming back. Shop local. That's a big global initiative, not just a US thing.

But as the world evolves, it's one of those things where we contract and then we expand and we contract and expand. I think what we're seeing right now is we're starting to see an expansion, because we've had so much consolidation. You can't even go to the grocery store now and get what you want, because retail is a dying breed. Now you've got to order online and wait two days if you can't get it same day with Amazon.

But in more small-town things, I think you're starting to see a lot of that being preserved. So that's one of those, hey, if you don't want to adapt to AI and you don't want to be in a high tech sector, you could probably take a slower pace of life and move into a smaller city and find something local.

DANIEL: I wonder if there's a bifurcation here, this split where if it's digital, if it's online, it doesn't matter the geography. But if it's in person, if it's an experience, then local matters. And so I wonder if you need to think really carefully about the business that you're in. Is this the kind of business where local touch, that in-person experience, really matters, in which case everybody has to be here? Or is this the kind of business that could operate anywhere, and we want to create a great experience, but that great experience is more of a remote experience? And so whether I'm doing that in rural Alabama or in rural Angola doesn't really matter.

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[WHAT STAYS HUMAN]

RYAN: Well, I do think, and I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but as we evolve as a society, why do we have so many restaurants? Because we're bored and we like to eat and we like variety. I don't want to eat the same thing every single day. I want variety. So I go to five different restaurants every week.

And even as we evolve now, travel. People are traveling internationally more than they ever have in history. Yes, it's a little expensive right now and people would say ticket prices have gone up. But compared to back in the day, where it was just the wealthy and business individuals that flew, now people are flying all around the world every day.

We're evolving as a society where it's all about actual experiences and things that you're not going to replace. You're not going to AI scuba diving. Sure, you can put AI in a dive watch, but you're not going to AI the dive instructor. You're not going to AI the hot air balloon guy. You're not going to AI skydiving. I think most experiences are going to be AI proof.

DANIEL: And I think one-on-one human-to-human experiences are going to become a luxury good. That's going to be the high margin luxury good, and then everything else is going to be a race to the bottom.

RYAN: It's just going to evolve. As technology progresses more and more into our every day, it means we should in theory have more time.

DANIEL: I think a lot of people would argue they're probably working harder than they ever have before.

RYAN: Right. But that's the tipping point we're getting close to. I think experiences and individualization are going to become how we fill our pastime with more things to do. And I think that's going to open up different business opportunities.

Let's talk about escape rooms for a second. Sure, you can put a lot of AI features into an escape room and have a lot of technology there. But you still have to build it and operate it and staff it. And that's also going to open up new tech sectors, new tech companies, and they may be developed by AI developers with AI agents.

Actually, here's probably the best way I would describe all of this. The Next Generation Air Dominance package that the Pentagon has put together. It's the sixth generation fighter. Air Force and Navy have one. What they're looking at right now is how they can build a weapons platform where you've got a plane with a pilot and a series of drones, so that instead of having one plane per pilot, you can almost have five planes with one pilot.

DANIEL: Interesting.

RYAN: So you don't need as many pilots as you needed before, because you've got the platform. I think that's the future of development. You're going to have one developer with a handful of agents that support that developer.

And the same thing in restaurants. You're going to see a lot more automation. Instead of having a staff of, what does a Chick-fil-A have, 130 people per restaurant? The big ones. You may go down to maybe 40 to 60 people per restaurant. And you know what, you're still going to appreciate the human out on the curb taking your order. But you might have machines in the kitchen prepping everything. You're never going to replace the human. You're only going to optimize the human.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think the winners won't necessarily be the best at AI or the best at human interactions. They're probably going to be the ones who blend AI and human interaction together in the best way.

RYAN: And I think if you take it a step further, you're starting to see this online now. I don't know what the percentages would be, but I think you're going to find more people that get into unique baking, artisan cookies, the arts. I've seen people get into stone sculpting. Fascinated by using the chisel and hammer and sculpting stone. Or painters creating art. I think you're seeing a lot more people starting to apply those skills that have been lost and creating whole new avenues of revenue streams by using those unique talents.

So again, I think what we're really seeing is compression on the technology side. And you'll see a large percentage of that elevate. And the other percentage is just going to go find other things. As we evolve as a society, we want to find more things to do. We want to eat more interesting foods, we want to travel to more interesting places. Then those places are going to create jobs. And those people that get squeezed in the tech sector are going to find their life passion in one of those other sectors.

Again, 170 million jobs created, 92 million disappear.

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[FIVE YEARS FROM NOW]

Production note: the following stretch names current heads of state and speculates about future elections. Several ages are guessed live and at least one name is misstated. Flagged for editorial review before publish.

DANIEL: All right. So five years from now, we're going to look back and realize this was either the moment we got it right, or we completely screwed the transition and we lost it. Where do you think this is going to land?

RYAN: I'm going to take a little bit of a morbid approach. The predominant people of power globally right now are the much older generations. And I think as you start seeing the older generations die off at the political level, and you start getting younger and younger blood into the economic powers of the world, I think you're going to start seeing shifts.

They've been saying for a decade, when the baby boomers transition out, it's going to be one of the largest transitions of wealth in history. I think that goes into geopolitical power transition. And so I think in five years, we are either just before or right at that transition. And I think when that domino falls, it is going to be a wave.

ls, when you get into the mid: 2030

DANIEL: I think I'm with you. I think the current power structures are primarily with boomers. I think over the next five to maybe 10 years, that starts to falter. I think the next generation, whether that's Gen X or millennials, probably a hybrid combination of both, their worldview is so radically different in terms of geographic agnosticism, in terms of ethnic and racial acceptance. I think it's a radical shift that is held back by an incumbent generation that's refusing to let go.

RYAN: I was just going to add this one last bullet to it. It's interesting, because we see the dynamics of the European countries and the dynamics of the United States, China, and Russia.

[The hosts then run through the current ages of several world leaders, including the leaders of Russia, the United States, China, the UK, France, and Germany, noting that some countries have already moved to younger leadership while others have not.]

RYAN: A lot of the world has already started bringing in younger, new blood, versus the major powers of the world, or at least from our standpoint, the United States, China, and Russia. They're all legacy.

ing to look like? My bet's on: 2032

DANIEL: What happens in: 2032

RYAN: It's two presidential elections for the US. Statistically, it should be a much younger individual. They may be in their 60s then, but they're closer to their 50s right now. Late 40s and 50s is who that individual is now.

---

[THE LAST WORD]

DANIEL: I think the most important thing to understand about where we are today and where we're going to be in the future is that humans are not competing against AI. I think it's about finding those places where human judgment and AI capabilities merge together to create more value.

And so if I was looking at my capabilities and the skills that I possessed in the workforce, I think we need to admit that all of our skills have an expiration date. Whatever you're good at today, there is likely a day not too far in the future where AI can do that for you. And so you need to begin preparing for that day.

And just like the software developer we talked about earlier in this episode, where 40% of the software developer's job is developing software but 60% of their job is other things, that's where the human has the opportunity to add significantly more value than AI. Our ability to deal with ambiguity, to come up with a plan in the face of competing, conflicting, and uncertain priorities. That's something that AI, as of now, is not able to do.

So understanding that those kinds of intangible skills, leadership skills, influence skills, even things like location and demographics, are going to matter more than your individual capabilities, your ability to write good copy, write good code, or whatever it is that is the primary thing you're paid to do.

And I think the biggest opportunities going forward are going to be in the places that we don't typically think to look. I think it's going to be more service. Anything that you can't digitize, that you can't write an algorithm for, I think those are the opportunities for humans to continue to add a lot of value. And that's where I think the jobs are going to be. I think human touch is going to be a luxury good in the future. And it's going to pay a premium if you can create the market for it.

And so if I was advising people on how to build your career over the next 20 to 30 years, I would say figure out how to partner with AI and how to create experiences that can't be replicated with digital substitutes. What would you say?

RYAN: Everybody needs a skill portfolio and not just a skill set. The day of the skill set is dying. You need a portfolio of skills that includes AI.

ies that are going to survive: 2030

And I think flexibility might matter more than technical capability.

DANIEL: I think what that means is your ability to work cross-culturally.

RYAN: Yeah. Let me put some context behind it. As the world evolves, we are more globally connected. You're starting to see Eastern European countries fighting for lower hanging fruit jobs. You're starting to see a lot of South America come online and compete with jobs that are currently in India and the Philippines.

As we are more globally connected, that flexibility is going to matter more than the technical capabilities. It's not about the software. It's not about the technology. It's about where we can find humans throughout the globe.

DANIEL: Yeah. I'm working with a company in suburban, but almost rural, right on the edge of suburban and rural Georgia. It's going to be very hard for me to get a high quality digital marketing person to come out there. But why do I need somebody to come out there? Could I hire somebody in Colombia or Eastern Europe to run digital marketing for me for a company that's based in rural Georgia? Yeah, I can. The answer is yes.

So geographic proximity becomes less and less important. Certainly a perk. I'd pay a little extra for somebody who was local. But I'm not going to not hire this person, or hire somebody who's not qualified, just because they're local. I would go hire somebody on the other side of the planet if they can get the job done.

RYAN: So to that point, we talked earlier, 78 million net new jobs, but they're not going to be evenly distributed. It's a massive wealth transfer from people who adopt to those who can't.

DANIEL: The question isn't whether there will be jobs. It's whether you will be qualified for them. And remember what started this whole thing. He's not competing against AI. He's competing against other designers who use AI.

RYAN: Yeah. AI is just the hammer. It's the humans that know how to wield the hammer that will have the jobs of the future.

DANIEL: And our closing question: if 39% of your skills will be obsolete in five years, what are you going to do about it starting now?

RYAN: Love it.

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[OUTRO]

Make Work Not Suck is the podcast that talks about exactly that. Through our process of vision, journey, culture and results, we present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co-host Daniel Steer. Join us each episode and make work not suck.