The Data Is In: AI Is Creating Jobs, Not Killing Them

0:00Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

0:25Eric Siu:Did you see here this chart over here? So this is from Financial Times. I'm sure you might have seen it already. Yeah, looks familiar. Okay, so I'm going to read it off right here. So companies that spend more on AI also increase worker numbers, right? So change in headcount by intensity of use. So this is all jobs on the left side over here. You can see that 10.2 % average increase for companies that have high AI adoption, right? And then low AI adoption, no change, basically. Now, if you go to the right side, if we're talking about entry level, 12 % average increase, high AI adoption companies.

0:53Eric Siu:And then you have low AI adoption, no changes. It kind of went down slightly. And then there's been months since AI adoption, about 20 months or so. Here's the caveat that I want to add. So a lot of people are saying like, oh, what's the ROI on this stuff, right? So I just want to keep in mind for everyone that this stuff didn't really start to take off until December 2025. The last week of December 2025 is when everything went parabolic, at least for me. And so it hasn't even been a year yet. I was just thinking about it this morning. I was like, dude, we're only like seven months in to the new step change.

1:24Eric Siu:And it just keeps getting crazier and crazier. So I don't know about you. I'll just speak to my experience first. I want to hear from yours. I am looking for more people, definitely. Especially on entry level, I'm looking for a little more because they don't come with a lot of bad behaviors, but you do need experienced people too, right? So for me, I do look at this as job increase for people that are AI native. Go ahead.

1:46Neil Patel:I was having a debate with this with a guy named Monik, who is a founder or co-founder of Search Atlas SEO tool. Oh, yeah. And he believes that AI is going to cause massive work reduction in white collar jobs.

2:02Eric Siu:You should define white collar.

2:04Neil Patel:So white collar is like corporate jobs, not someone flipping burgers. Yeah. I can see AI causing huge disruptions and blue collar jobs for things like flipping burgers, but not things like repairing your roof or your plumbing or things like that. Right. And I was telling him we're seeing the opposite in white collar jobs. I don't have good data on this. And I told him, I'm like, look, dude, I'm not into AI like you. And he's talking about his mentors, like at Anthropic and some of the leaders. I'm like, I don't have those people who are my mentors or anything like that. so I don't see what you see but I'm like we work with hundreds if not thousands of companies globally and we haven't seen really any reductions in headcount.

2:46Neil Patel:The reductions in headcount we see are from people who really quote-unquote just overhired and he's talking about efficiency gains and he used Google I believe is Google as example or we were talking about Google and what I was getting at is there's a few oddball companies like Google and Meta or maybe NVIDIA or maybe some of the memory companies where you can just keep making more margins and Google's the best example of this because they make so much money from ads. You don't really need a lot more people to keep making more money from your ad ecosystem.

3:20Eric Siu:Or you can be like Micron, you can just charge more because of supply and demand.

3:23Neil Patel:Correct, which is what Google's doing, right? is supplying demand. They're just charging more. You don't need more employees. I would actually look at those organizations. Even if you take out AI, would you agree they're bloated and they don't need anywhere near the headcount that they have in the first place? Eric's shaking his head yes. Nodding, nodding, nodding. Or nodding, yes. So in those type of companies, I don't think it's an AI thing. I just think those companies are really efficient or could be even more efficient and has nothing to do with AI. You just don't need as many people. I was telling him, I'm like, my viewpoint is very different because if you have efficiency gains and I can at least talk to marketing or I can actually speak to engineering, but he is an engineer.

4:03Neil Patel:I was like, cause he's saying, I don't need as many engineers. And I'm like, but we're seeing because of efficiencies companies spend more money hiring engineers than ever before. Yes. Some people are getting let go cause they can't use the tools, but they need to figure out how to learn these new tools and adapt to the new times. But we're seeing a lot of SMBs hire more engineers because you can now do things you couldn't have done unless you had a million,$2 million budget. And even though each engineer is more efficient, there's a higher need for engineers because of how much more you can do at a much cheaper cost.

4:35Neil Patel:So we're actually seeing more engineers being needed, even though things can be more efficient. And in marketing specifically, you know, because all of us are in marketing, I was like, if you can do more things efficiently, companies are expecting you to either do more or charge way less. We're not seeing it where companies like, oh, cool, you can do a lot less or you can do the same amount with a lot less employees so we can just go and fire a ton of people in our organization. We're not seeing that come to reality. We're seeing companies adapt and expect more in this timeframe. And we're not really seeing budget cuts.

5:16Neil Patel:We're seeing companies look for more strategy and things that require human, the human element more. And they expect the same amount of execution still because AI can help with a lot of the execution.

5:29Eric Siu:So I used to think that AI was going to take a lot of jobs, but my stance is AI is going to cause a lot of abundance. And sure, you might say, okay, do truck drivers actually want to drive trucks? No, I think they're going to be able to find better jobs, just like nobody wanted to do farming, you know, a long time ago, right? And that's changed. It used to be 98 % of people were farmers. And now it's like one or 2%, maybe. And it's decreasing over time because we've automated a lot. The way I look at it now is AI is going to create a lot of abundance. There's going to be more jobs than ever. More people are going to be happier doing what they're doing.

5:57Eric Siu:And to your point, we're hiring more engineers. I talked to my CEO. I'm like, we need more. We need more engineers. We need more engineers. And so the good guys, by the way, X is great for recruiting engineers. It's been good for us. So we're recruiting more engineers. And let's use some examples. This is why let's disprove the whole myth that AI is going to take jobs because that's BS. When you look at radiology, people are like, oh my God, radiology is that job's dead. Once AI figured out how to handle the image test, but there's more radiologists than ever. There's more job openings than ever.

6:23Eric Siu:Oh, the ATM came out. Oh, tellers are not going to have jobs. There's more tellers than ever because more banks ended up opening, right? The spreadsheet is going to kill jobs. That created more financial jobs than ever. And if you look at all the jobs today, 60 % plus of the jobs that we have today are net new since World War II. So humans always find a way to create new abundance, new jobs. You look at this, by the way, you look at the toilet that you use, the air conditioner you use, the phone that you use, the car, the self-driving car that's outside, all these things that you have, net new jobs.

6:58Eric Siu:Because here's the thing, if we go with the narrative that AI is going to take jobs away, then who's going to pay for all this stuff, right? Correct.

7:05Neil Patel:I totally agree with you. It's just like people saying, oh, AI is going to replace all these software companies. Well, these software companies are probably some of the largest users of these LLMs and all their tokens. So who's going to pay for it then? And I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying. And I think you phrase it really well in which AI will cause disruption to jobs, but new jobs will also be created. And you and I both feel people will eventually transition into new jobs like they have done historically over time yes there may be some disruption in the short term they'll learn new things but net net there'll be a bigger demand for these new jobs than the ones that were lost and you know what these new jobs will pay much better than a lot of the ones that were lost so people will have an opportunity to earn more assuming they're willing to learn and get the education and adapt and i think that's where the disruption comes because some people will some people won't but over time people will

8:01Eric Siu:have no choice and they'll have to do it yeah you know this is more philosophical thing and then i want to show you a chart but one do we agree human nature doesn't change yeah i agree okay well

8:13Neil Patel:i think human nature doesn't change when someone's really old when they're young it's much easier to

8:17Eric Siu:get the human nature to change so i'm i'm hoping with ai it's going to lift everyone else up to want to create things because i actually think at the pinnacle humans are creating stuff right like Like I'm very happy creating, like Noah creates as well. When you're creating, you're in a very happy place. I think most people just haven't found their thing to create. And I think this is going to enable it. And most people are going to be a lot happier. That's what I think the net gains are, right? But people are like, oh, you know, I'm showing this chart to Neil right now. This AI bubble, okay? So this is the generative AI economy revenue, okay?

8:47Eric Siu:So you look at the annualized run rate last month times 12, trolling 12-month actual revenue, right? And so this actually shows that the AI economy revenue is actually growing over time. And like I said, it's only been seven months since this stuff really started to take off for broader consumers. And I don't even think it's reached a broader consumer market yet.

9:06Neil Patel:What's the line underneath? So the top line, the purple one is$175 ,000. The one below is$110 billion. Yeah, so that's banked trailing 12-month revenue.

9:14Eric Siu:The above is annualized run rate. Got it. Yeah. And this is all AI revenue. Yeah. And this is a 1.6x gap. the spread reflects the growth rate. Got it. Yeah. So the growth rate is actually accelerating. That's what this thing is saying. And so like, I believe, I think it takes time for this to go throughout the organization because one company I talked to, 8 ,000 employees, and I asked him how many people are AI pilled. He's like, maybe 12. I'm like, really? 12? It's probably more than that. But when we asked one of our mutual friends, it has about 1 ,000 employees, 1 ,200 or so. He said maybe 40.

9:45Eric Siu:So this stuff takes time. And I think we're, the fact that we're talking about right now, like you're listening to this, you're probably in the top 1%. But this is going to disseminate the economy. So I think this whole AI is a bubble thing is a nothing burger.

10:01Neil Patel:Dude, months ago, we partnered with a company called High Level. And when we first started talking to them, I think they had around 2 ,000-ish employees. Now they're around 3 ,000 employees. It's somewhere around there. They're growing extremely fast. Where are they based again? They're global, but their headquarters are in Dallas. And one of the biggest things that's made them grow fast is, yes, they're great at marketing, but it's more so they've leveraged AI to build tech that helps SMBs do more and grow faster, like voice AI. So then that way, SMB, like a home service business doesn't have to follow up with every single lead and AI can just do it for them, right?

10:42Neil Patel:And I was using this example on the past podcast with Monik because when people talk about AI job displacement, if you're using AI correctly, you're offering a better product or service to your customers. And that's causing more demand. That causes more growth in your organization. As you have more growth in your organization to keep up with the demand, you end up having to hire more people even when you create efficiencies with AI. because you can do so many more things that you couldn't have done before. And I use that as an example because it's like, dude, you're talking in like maybe a six-month span or somewhere around there.

11:18Neil Patel:My numbers are a little bit off, but 2 ,000 to around 3 ,000 employees, right? It wasn't maybe as big of a jump, but it was close. Like massive growth just because adding in AI and creating technology that helps businesses do better. And I believe that's what most businesses are going to experience if they use the technology right. But I think the biggest problem that we're seeing when people talk about AI and integrating with their organization, they try to do basic stuff. And I look at that as like table stakes. They're not trying to really, forget creating efficiencies for their employees. They're not trying to figure out how to use the technology to make their product or service better.

12:01Neil Patel:I look at it as most people, especially in marketing, it's always about, oh how do we just get more done well it's not about how do you get more done with the same amount of time it's how do you do better new stuff that you weren't able to do before that helps you really get a leg up on the competition when it comes to your marketing yeah by the way

12:21Eric Siu:it just clicked to me you mentioned search atlas i this guy and i are trauma bonded because we had one person that stole from us uh this one person that left my company went to his remember uh stole clients, stole employees, went to his company, did the same thing. And he was actually the one that discovered it all. So he was the one that discovered that this person was doing the same to his company, Search Atlas.

12:42Neil Patel:Search Atlas was doing it to his company?

12:44Eric Siu:This person was doing it to Search Atlas.

12:46Neil Patel:So they were stealing their...

12:47Eric Siu:So they did it to me, then they went over there and then they did this, they tried to do the same thing, but then they caught them. And then he came back to me and then showed me all this stuff. And then he didn't want to get in trouble. So yeah. I'm confused on this. Let's back up here. So you had an employee lead? she was we put her on leave because uh her family member was sick and we said hey we'll put you on paid leave like go take care of your family we love you we got you right during that time she was actually taking our uh all of our leads she had a va in our channel taking all of our leads right uh and then she she picked off a couple of uh employees that and then dragged it over to that so her mom wasn't really sick her family wasn't family member was sick that was a real thing but wait she was starting another business oh i know you're talking about yeah she started she started working at that company while she was still with me took on a coo job right and then uh started doing the same thing that his company too the only thing is and then you can see in the channel that a couple of ex-employees were actually there and then on the same at the same time she was working at this new company search atlas she started to do the same thing for she started started something on the side and she was doing she was working at search atlas while she was on leave for you yeah

13:57Neil Patel:That's messed up. Yeah, yeah. So she was getting paid by you, saying she's leaving and she needs to take care of family, which was very nice and generous. And I think that's the right thing you did to pay her to go handle her family stuff. And instead of focusing on family, she took another job, double dipped, and then at the same time had a VA in your Slack channels and stuff trying to take your leads

14:18Eric Siu:and create her own company. She took leads, tried to steal a client, took a couple of employees as well, and then did the same thing too, Search Atlas. So then when I was doing to both.

14:28Neil Patel:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:29Eric Siu:So then when I hung out with I met I met Monarch, you said I met him at HubSpot Inbound a few years later. And then him and his wife were just like talking about how we're trauma bonded. So you just brought back all these memories. So small world. So the same girl was taking clients from both of you. That's so screwed up. And then taking paychecks from both of you and creating her own company with all the leads. And let me give a one lesson for everyone on this. So yes, that happened. But you might be thinking, okay, destroy this person. And that's well with that's a that's a human. I think reaction, but the right move is actually move on, move on, like, yes, you know, and just get on with your business, because running your business is already hard enough.

15:09Eric Siu:And so, you know, we just kind of get like a slap on the wrist, and we moved on. Because like, some of some of my friends were like, no, you have to must absolutely destroy her. I was like, no, but then that would like 50 % might attention going to that means 50 % less on my business.

15:23Neil Patel:I know one person who really likes destroying people when they screw him over. He invested in a company in China, blew up really well. Blew up well? Grew really fast. Oh, grew up, grew up.