Future of Work 2026: The Only Jobs That Will Survive the AI Era

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0:57Ryan Roslansky:Just this year, more than 100 ,000 tech workers worldwide have been laid off. Of course, companies like Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and Salesforce. Amazon alone cut 14 ,000 corporate roles. Klarner reduced its staff by nearly 40 % as it leaned into, guess what, AI. Duolingo is phasing out human contractors in favor of automation. And this isn't limited to tech. In the UK, 1 in 6 employers now expect AI to reduce their workforce in the next year, with junior roles hit first. AI, political turbulence, economic pressure, together they've created what some people are already calling jupocalypse.

1:41Ryan Roslansky:Here's the paradox. Companies publicly say, if we don't adopt AI, we won't exist in 15 years. And at the same time, they're hiring fewer juniors than ever. It really feels to me like this first step of the career your ladder is cracking. And if that first step is gone, what does that mean for the future work and for the careers of recent graduates? On my podcast, Silicon Valley Girl, I talk to CEOs, investors, and founders who are actually hiring people and who are building the AI tools everyone is so anxious about. And you know, I'm a mom. I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. I used to worry about my career.

2:18Ryan Roslansky:Now I'm worried about my daughter's future because it's so unpredictable. And that's one of the reasons why I do the podcast, because I want to hear from those people. I want to ask my questions as a mom and as an immigrant. And in this video, I want to bring their insights together and show you which jobs are actually at risk, which careers will grow because of AI, and what you can do right now to make your career as AI-proof as possible. Let's start with what's really happening to jobs today. When I talk to founders and CEOs, they all say the same thing. In five years, we will most likely have AGI and there will be massive unemployment.

2:59Ryan Roslansky:For decades, the life formula was simple. Go to school, get a degree, get a job. Now the formula is breaking. Education prices keep going up, but graduate job openings in some countries are down by 40%. So if the job market feels like a closed door, it's not because you're doing something wrong. the system is preparing people for a world that does not exist anymore. Here's how Daniel Priestley, a British entrepreneur and founder, describes this gap.

3:29Marina Mogil:It's both. It's the easiest and the worst time. So there's more money than ever before. There's more opportunities than ever before. You can reach global markets faster than ever before. So in theory, it should be the easiest time. The reason it's not the easiest time is because our schooling system is rooted in the industrial age and it's built around getting people ready for factories and offices that no longer exist really. So the reason that so many people are struggling is because they went through this arduous training day after day after day for 12, 15 years, preparing them for an industrialized economy.

4:05Marina Mogil:And when they get out there, all of these skills make them very functional. but now we have automation and outsourcing. Which is like AI, right? Yeah. And it's like, great, we trained you as a large language model that's not as good as the current version.

4:18Ryan Roslansky:Yeah.

4:19Marina Mogil:Teaching people to do functional work that can be automated or outsourced way faster, way cheaper, way easier. Especially in the West, you are not only in competition with the technology, you're also in competition with someone who's armed with the same technology in a country where you can live pretty large on half the price.

4:37Ryan Roslansky:Yeah. So the question isn't, do I have a degree anymore? The real questions are, can I solve ambitious problems end to end employing those AI tools? Can AI actually 10x my output? Can I do something beyond what a model and a cheaper freelancer could do together? And that leads us to the next part, which jobs are actually in danger and why. When people ask which jobs will AI replace, they expect to hear coders, designers, maybe copywriters but the reality is more nuanced and in some ways more scary so i asked perplexity to analyze my portfolio okay and i asked whether i should find my financial advisor and it was like yes you should do this immediately like that that's the first time i saw something that definitive from ai like what's going to happen to these professions financial advisors real estate brokers because perplexity does it now and it created the whole strategy for me to rebalance and everything

5:30Marina Mogil:Getting the listings on like Redfin or Zillow with like a comment like browser, let's say you just have a recurring task that's running. It doesn't work yet, but it's going to work pretty soon, which is you could just have a task that says, you know, every day morning, just look at all the new listings on Redfin. Have something like every time there's a house below a certain budget, and that's within this neighborhood, make sure to like send me a push notification and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting for a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything. You can, you can.

6:03Marina Mogil:So if your agent only shows you listings on Redfin and Zillow, I think they're useful. But if your agent is doing off-market deals for you, they're still pretty useful because those things do not exist on the web. Okay. I feel like having the power of like intelligence and computer at your hands, it always comes back to that, means you can push the existing industry to like work harder for you. same thing with private wealth management or financial advisors like what are the job of the financial advisor to tell you like what stocks to buy then i don't think they're not going to be smarter than perplexity which you can go and summon and ask it to go read all the analyst reports in every stock and like all the morning day news and they come back to you and tell you like the impact of your portfolio uh what would warren buffett do if he had exactly exactly your portfolio, like it can answer questions like that that no financial advisor can.

6:58Marina Mogil:But if your financial advisor does more stuff for you, like getting you some access to certain funds like private equity or hedge funds or access to like funds of Citadel or like some startups, venture capital, which you cannot get through just the public markets, then maybe they're useful, right?

7:17Ryan Roslansky:Clear pattern shows up. AI is not killing entire professions. It's killing the shallow version of those professions. A lawyer who just rewrites templates? That's easy to automate. A financial advisor who just picks a few mutual funds from a list? Also easy to replace. You can already do that with perplexity. A real estate agent who only sends you Zillow links? You don't need a human for that. But a lawyer who negotiates, strategizes, and builds deep trust with clients? Very valuable. An advisor who gets you into deals you can't Google? Oh my god, yes, please. An agent who finds off-market properties and navigates messy human situations?

7:57Ryan Roslansky:Oh my god. Yes, I've been through that. I relied on my person. If you enjoyed this episode on the future work, you're going to love my recent conversation with the CEO of LinkedIn. We went deep on the exact same topic. Link is right below. Check it out and I'll see you in the next one. So let's look at the job loss problem at a different angle. Let's say you already have a pretty good job and you like it and it's interesting. You're inside the company. You see all these changes and you're thinking, okay, how do I not get replaced by the next wave of tools? I asked my guests what they're doing with their own teams right now.

8:38Marina Mogil:There's still higher value work to do.

8:40Ryan Roslansky:So they're still in the company.

8:42Marina Mogil:They're still in the company and there's still work to be done. Like everything's elevating. But what we discovered is that there's this ability to pull the scalable element out and address a market that was never even being addressed.

8:54Ryan Roslansky:So it's not like you're replacing people. It's more of you're elevating them.

8:58Marina Mogil:There's definitely an element of replacing people. And that is because there are always these jobs that are repetitive, functional, annoying, frustrating jobs that we can actually replace. There are some people who say, I don't want to elevate up. And unfortunately, there's not much I can do if you don't want to elevate. If you don't want to play at the higher game, I'm moving fast. So you've got to either elevate towards that or find something else.

9:25Ryan Roslansky:This is basically the new contract at work. AI takes the boring, repeatable tasks. Humans move up to higher value problems. If you refuse to move up, you eventually move out. And big tech CEOs are thinking the exact same way. We see big companies put a stop on hiring and they say like, hey to their employees, you need to figure out how to do this with AI first before we hire someone. What do you think about that?

9:48Marina Mogil:I think it's a reflection of a fast-changing market and a lot of uncertainty, both in the political environment and in the tech environment of where things are going. And the natural tendency to do is to go slower a little bit. And you might decide some people are no longer the right folks in my company for that kind of environment where things are moving incredibly fast, where you're almost forced to use AI to keep up with the competition. The realization I think that many companies had in the last few months is that if we have employees that say we don't want to use AI, that ultimately means we as a company are no longer set up for success because our competitors are all using AI or they're mandating AI.

10:30Marina Mogil:And I think this is the transition phase we're going through. Things like Mark Zuckerberg getting the scale AI team into the company. I think that shows where Mark's head is and where he believes the future is going to be. He's willing to invest into it.

10:46Ryan Roslansky:Yeah, yeah. So if you already have a job, your number one goal is very simple. Become the person who knows how to do your job with AI, not in spite of it. And if you're a manager and you're watching this, another meaningful thing I took away from a conversation with this lady who runs this nonprofit helping students apply to colleges. And when she was introducing this AI tool, when she was talking to her team, she told them to focus on the problem that they're solving with this tool. Because that tool allowed her team to spend their limited amount of time on actually encouraging students to apply and motivating them versus answering generic questions.

11:22Ryan Roslansky:So in order to become a person who knows how to do their job with AI, you can start with really easy practical exercise. Ask yourself, what are the three most repetitive things I do every week. Is it writing emails, making reports, doing research, cleaning data, then build a tiny AI system around each one. This can be prompts, small automations, agents, very basic, anything that saves time. I really like spaces in perplexity like I have a space for my high cholesterol, I have a space for guests that I'm researching. And then you just notice how you save 30 to 50 percent of your time on that repetitive stuff.

12:00Ryan Roslansky:I don't type my emails anymore. I just talk to chat GPT and it writes my emails. So keep asking myself what higher level work can I move to? Where is this highest ROI? Where should I invest more time in and where should I delegate to AI? That's how you move from replaceable task doer to irreplaceable operator. That brings us to one of my favorite questions. My daughters are four and six, and I always ask entrepreneurs, what skills should our kids learn for this new world? And honestly, the answer is very similar for them and for us.

12:35Marina Mogil:Generally speaking, AI, I don't suggest waiting, because part of what you want to be doing, you know, just like any new technological revolution, whether when YouTube was happening, when the Internet's happening, The folks who go and adopt and play with it early then have a differential edge in the change that it means in the industry, in their society. And so even though three years from now the coding tools and agents will be much better than they are now, the people who started playing with them now will probably be the people who know how to use them and deploy them much more comfortably early.

13:09Ryan Roslansky:So what do you think parents should be teaching their kids now?

13:13Marina Mogil:I think it's still important to be good at like learning knowledge from first principles yourself, and not depending on the sort of AI tutor leading you through. Like, I think one of the most important things is from school is the discipline of being able to teach yourself. That's a meta skill. And that, you know, that comes with friction. So I think as a parent, you still have to introduce, like discipline and friction into the process, because if it comes all too slow, and it's always on tap, you know, then there's a risk that the child could just get used to having everything instantly available and doesn't learn from the hard work, you know, the benefits of hard work, which I think are important.

13:56Marina Mogil:So that's like something to think through now that everything is going to be so seamless.

13:59Ryan Roslansky:Then I asked the founder of Replit, Amjad, what he's teaching his own kids, because he's an immigrant and his kids are the same age as mine.

14:06Marina Mogil:When I'm thinking about my kids and what we're going to do in the future, I think about this idea of being more of a polymath, right? Like if you think about, you know, even before the Industrial Revolution, the people that are most memorable, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example, did a lot of things. It was an engineer, was an artist, was all sorts of things, right? And the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things, about spending a lot of time learning about everything. And I think this is where the education needs to be headed. where the Industrial Revolution created a world where humans are treated like machines.

14:46Marina Mogil:If you think about corporations or factories, factories are one big machine, and every individual person kind of doing the assembly of one thing is a part. And I think it was very dehumanizing. And I think we're going to go back to a moment of time where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship. leadership, even when you join a company, you're going to be judged by how much of a real business impact you're going to have as opposed to how task oriented you are.

15:19Ryan Roslansky:The new AI age wants you to be what researchers call a human epoch, someone who brings the five abilities AI still can't replicate. Empathy, presence, opinion or ethics, creativity, and hope slash leadership. And these aren't soft skills anymore. Let me give you a simple example. Two people can both use ChatGPT to write a report, but only one of them can walk into a meeting and read the room, understand why a client is nervous, understand what could be a hesitation, reframe the problem when the model's answer isn't enough, make a judgment call when the data conflicts, inspire the team to move forward.

16:00Ryan Roslansky:That combination, human psychology plus AI fluency, is what companies are paying a premium for. And then there is something most people still underestimate, personal brand.

16:13Marina Mogil:Personal brand is going to matter even more, a lot more, because personal brands get 20 times the cut through as business brands when you're trying to get attention. But it's going to be nearly impossible to build a personal brand. Imagine the scenario where there's an airport and there are planes that are on the ground and there are planes that are already up in the air and the fog comes rolling in. And the air traffic control says, if you're already on the ground, it's too foggy, you can't take off. But if you're up in the air, you can keep flying. That's what's going to happen to personal brands.

16:44Marina Mogil:So new personal brands are going to be harder and harder to get through the fog. Existing personal brands will be already up in the air. I think there's probably two to three years where you've still got time to build a personal brand. I think one of the greatest assets anyone can build right now is a dedicated following of two to 20 ,000 people who know who you are. They get you. It doesn't have to be millions, but if there's two to 20 ,000 people out there on your LinkedIn, on your Instagram, on your YouTube channel, whatever it is, they feel like they've met you or know you. They've got a parasocial relationship to you, if you've got two to 20 ,000 people out there who have that parasocial relationship with you, that is going to be one heck of an asset to have.

17:27Ryan Roslansky:In a world where AI can generate infinite content, people follow people. Your edge is a mix of AI fluency. You know how to use tools better than 90 % of your peers. Polymath skills. You can connect dots across fields and ship real things? Personal brand. None of that requires permission from a recruiter, but it does require something old-fashioned. Learning. And no, we're not all about retiring at 30, but how we work is changing fast. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger described it perfectly when he talked about Claude and AI agents. What do you think is going to happen in two or three years? How are we going to progress in advance?

18:07Marina Mogil:I think part of it, and I was having this conversation this morning, even with some of our researchers, the progression or the dynamic that I see is if last year, maybe the beginning of this year, these models, and I'll use Claude as the example, were really kind of assistants that were helping you with maybe a question at a time or maybe a task, right? This year, they're moving more into collaborators where, especially if you watch somebody use Claude Code, for example, they're actually delegating what would have taken them maybe 20, 30 minutes and Claude's going off and doing it. And then you're checking in and you're more on the sort of validating or verifying work, right?