Unpacking the Impact of AI Job Cuts

0:00Catch the NBA playoffs on Sling TV, the most flexible live TV streaming service, putting consumers in control to watch games their way with flexible subscriptions. Want to catch one game or a full series on ESPN? Grab a one, three, or seven-day pass. If you want to catch as many games as possible, get a monthly subscription with our ABC, NBC, and ESPN combo package. Either way, Sling lets you watch the playoffs your way with no long-term contracts. Learn more at Sling.com. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too.

0:38With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at RSS.com. Every single day it feels like we have a new tech company that is announcing layoffs, And almost every single time they blame it on some version of saving more money to invest into AI initiatives, or they are just so much more effective with AI that they don't need the extra people.

1:16I don't think either of those is intrinsically correct or true in a lot of cases. And I've actually been saying that on my podcast for probably the last month as we've just seen all of these tech layoffs happening. We finally have data to back that up. A brand new report came out of the BLS. And in that, it shows basically that AI's job impact is relatively small in areas that should be very exposed to AI. So anyways, we'll break down the data. We'll break down that report. We'll also break down some of the things we learned from ClickUp's big. I just bring up ClickUp because this is the most recent one that they just did.

1:54I think 22 % of their workforce is getting laid off. So anyways, we're going to get into all of that and what this actually means for jobs, what you should be doing and where some of the opportunities are. Before we get into that, I wanted to tell you about our AI Hustle school community. So every single week, Jamie and I record a bonus episode that we post over on our school community. We have over 200 members in here. Everyone's sharing what they work on. We share all of the insights, the stuff we don't share publicly about what we're building, how much money we're making. This week we recorded a whole episode on if you are vibe coding a tool, how to actually get it to show up on Google, all the SEO things you need to do if you're using Lovable or Claude or OpenAI's Codex, how to get your tools to show up inside of Google.

2:39I show you my Google search console, two projects I started in the last 30 days, how many impressions they're getting on Google and how many clicks they're getting on Google using our SEO, some of our SEO strategies with all this. So anyways, that's what today's was on, but we have a different one every single day. We break down how much money you're making from different side hustles, all the stuff we can't share publicly. It's$19 a month to join the school community. Incredible insights, great community. It's the inside hack if you want to save yourself thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours and just get a cheat code to figure a lot of this stuff out faster.

3:12All right. And it's linked in the description, by the way. Okay. Jamie, tell us what's interesting to you about all of this jobs data, all of this layoff information and what's going on with ClickUp. and this new jobs report? Yeah. So basically ClickUp, they announced recently that they introduced roughly 3000 internal AI agents to handle a wide range of complex tasks on behalf of its employees. So, and I feel like the number is thrown around a lot. Like it's supposed to be really impressive when we have a big number of agents. I think what this means is that maybe every employee has some kind of agent that they're using, like whether it's, it's Claude or Claude coworker, something that's helping them accomplish their daily tasks.

3:54Either way, they, they, um, release these agents. And then now, instead of performing the work themselves, the employees, they're supposed to kind of oversee these agents, um, make sure it's up to quality standards, standards and things like that. So that's kind of what they're blaming on this, this layoff is that they don't, you know, they're trying to invest more in AI, save money, you know, increase profits, all that kind of stuff. But there is a study recently that came out. Gartner did this, said that 80, about 80 % of companies that are using AI tech have cut jobs, but that doesn't necessarily translate into meaningful financial returns.

4:39So that's a really interesting stat because that's what everyone's claiming they're doing is that they're increasing their productivity, their returns, you know, for the shareholders by implementing AI. Yet we're seeing not a huge meaningful increase in financial returns. I don't know if that's because overall, you know, companies are hurting right now, if there's a recession here already that we haven't really fully realized yet, or in, in, in that's their way of kind of saving their businesses by cutting the workforce, trying to get AI to replace things. You know, I'm thinking back to the whole tariff situation.

5:21You know, once these, the tariffs were announced, you know, a couple of years ago, everyone bumped their prices up, even though the tariffs hadn't even necessarily hit yet. it was just kind of an excuse. Jayden, what are your thoughts? Do you think, are these companies actually, you know, increasing their profit? What are they actually doing here? Are they trying to save themselves? Yeah, what are your thoughts? Yeah, a lot of the data I've seen basically shows that companies have overhired during the pandemic and they're just, they had too many people or they're facing some sort of financial difficulty.

5:56So they're laying people off and they're just kind of blaming it on AI as a big chunk. Now, what's interesting is we do hear a lot of companies with AI roles that are impacted by AI, but according to the data, this is a very small sliver of the overall jobs market, basically. And so one of the areas that is most heavily impacted is recent college grads. So basically, kind of like entry-level jobs are being impacted. And people talk about that a lot. They're like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? All the college grads coming out of college, they're not going to have jobs because AI is kind of doing the junior work that usually you'd get in and kind of learn.

6:34And more senior people are just using Claude to do what a junior used to do for them. Anyways, I mean, the solution is they need to not just expect their college degree is going to instantly land them a job that's going to train them. They have to be training and learning how to do the job in college. And this is actually advice that I've seen a lot of people give even before AI was a thing. If you want to be the most valuable while you're in college, don't just expect college to teach you everything. You need to be doing projects on your own that are moving you in the right direction. So if you're going to go into finance, go find some companies, do free internships or whatever, or I don't know, free internships are legal anymore.

7:16That's a trigger word for a lot of people, but do some sort of work that can teach you what's going on in that industry. So by the time you graduate, you have more than just entry level, you've actually been working in that space. That's the number one piece of advice I would give. And if you can't get an internship, or you can't work for a company, start your own, even if it's not like, you know, insane success, you now got the experience on how that works. So if that's in marketing, if that's an HR, if that's in any area, do your own projects, work inside of companies, do internships, do things that are going to give you experience.

7:45That's the first thing that I would say. And then the other thing that I thought was really interesting from all of the data that came out is only about 40 % of workers are using generative AI right now as a whole in the economy. So 60 % are not, but the adoption is really varied by sector. So in tech, it's going to be a massive percentage of the population. And in mechanics, it is going to be a tiny fraction of the population. So in so many different areas, it varies a lot. But that doesn't mean AI can't help in virtually every area. It's just the adoption hasn't really doesn't have a lot of penetration.

8:23And actually, Anthropic released a report on this that was very interesting a while back. And they showed every single sector, every single industry, and how much adoption was in every single industry. I think things like architecture, it's like AI should be pretty good at and has like almost no adoption. Anyways, there's a bunch of really interesting areas like that. So I bring all this up to say, everybody likes to blame layoffs on AI. In reality, it's usually a business problem. They're facing some sort of business issue where they're not being able to realize gains or grow their company. And so this is kind of the next strategy.

8:57They're going to try to save money. And I do think that it's kind of overreported and we kind of have more hype than what's actually going on in the economy because it's a very small percentage of the economy is actually exposed right now to AI automation, replacing large segments of the economy, but we still blame everything on the AI. Yeah. And I mean, I think, I think people's intuitions are correct. I do think long-term that jobs are going to be highly impacted by AI, but I think the transition is happening a lot slower than people think. And I do think there's lots of outside factors at play here.

9:36So I love what you said about, you know, strategies for making yourself more valuable. If you're listening to this podcast, I think you're in the right place. I think learning about AI and how you use it is number one priority for anybody, whether you're a new college grad or you have been in the workforce for a long time and see your job as as one of these jobs that could be replaced. So, yeah, I think just staying on top of education, I think practicing using some of these tools and getting used to them, I think is going to put you ahead of a lot of other people. But yeah, I think, I don't know, these tech companies, it's interesting because, you know, they have ClickUp.

10:23It's basically kind of a glorified CRM, yet it sounds like they have thousands of employees. I don't know. To me, yeah, to me, it does seem like they must have overhired at some point. I think maybe if they get a ton of VC funding, they're like, oh, what should we spend our money on? And then they hire a team and then it's like, oh, we don't actually need them. Yeah, yeah. I think then that's some version of that is the case for many, many of these software companies. And I'm sure lots of them would be upset by that framing. But I think that's actually pretty accurate. So it's interesting. One other thing that came out in the data from the report, it said that unemployment in AI exposed occupations is lower than jobs less exposed to the technology.

11:09So that's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the BLS. That's the data I've been talking about. So basically, unemployment in areas that have AI is impacting a lot is actually lower than a lot of other jobs. So we're just seeing unemployment is higher generally everywhere. Only some of those are because of AI. A small percentage of those are because of AI. But everything is getting blamed on AI, which is very interesting. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you learned anything new, we would really, really appreciate it if you could leave a rating review on the show.

11:44We just passed 100 reviews. We are so grateful, guys. We're trying to get to 150 right now. If you could leave a review, if you haven't already, that'd be amazing. on Spotify, you have to listen to at least three episodes. So if you've listened to three episodes on Spotify, you hit the about tab, you can leave a review and over on Apple, we read every single comment. If you haven't left a review yet, that would be phenomenal. Thanks so much, guys. We'll catch you all in the next episode. Catch the NBA playoffs on Sling TV, the most flexible live TV streaming service, putting consumers in control to watch games their way with flexible subscriptions.

12:16Want to catch one game or a full series on ESPN? Grab a one, three or seven day pass. If you want Want to catch as many games as possible? Get a monthly subscription with our ABC, NBC, and ESPN combo package. Either way, Sling lets you watch the playoffs your way with no long-term contracts. Learn more at Sling.com. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more.

12:53Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com.