The Skills That Matter Most in the Age of AI – with Aneesh Raman

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1:54Welcome to the second and final installment of PropG on the future of work and AI, a special two-part series on who wins, who loses, and how AI will reshape the labor market. We're joined by Anish Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Together, Anish and I are going to be answering your questions on what AI means for workers, which jobs are most at risk, and where the biggest opportunities lie. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Anish, good to have you again. Good to see you again. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Our first question comes from Christian Robin on LinkedIn. He says, which professions do you think are most overestimating the resilience to AI right now?

2:30And which ones are being underestimated? That's a good question. Anish, any thoughts? Yeah, well, I got a little recent bias because of the headlines. I think underestimating resilience, I'd put software engineering in there. There was a great deal of hype early on that software engineers were done as the tools got better and better at coding. And then we started to realize, wait, these jobs are about more than coding and not all software engineers do the exact same job. Everyone's bringing different capabilities to it. Some of these jobs are more about working with customers. Some are now thinking about ethical implications of what they're building.

3:04And you're seeing actually an increase in software engineer jobs. Look, we don't know where all this stuff is going to go and how it's going to play out. In our book, we talk about ATMs and bank tellers as an instructive example. when the ATM came out in like the mid or late 70s, we have this New York Times article where they basically say bank tellers are done. There's now an automated way for you to get cash. And bank teller jobs actually doubled between that moment and like the mid 20s, 2010 ish, because banks were opening up more offices in more places because now they could distribute cash at all hours.

3:37So that meant you needed bank tellers. And then bank tellers just started shifting their job away from the basic task of giving out money to more of the relationship banking that has become core to what it is to go into a bank. Now, bank teller jobs are now dropping because of phones, smartphones, because of how much banking we're doing on our phone. But you couldn't have seen that coming in the 70s. So I think right now, software engineers are a great job for us to look at because they're actually going up, not down, even though the hype was that they were done. And the instructive lesson there is that they're about more than one task.

4:10Those jobs are not just about coding. And where they go next and what they're called in the future depends on how work adjusts around the tasks that human software engineers are going to bring to work as these tools are able to do more of the coding and maybe other basic stuff. I would say on overestimating resilience, I mean, it's kind of like anyone that feels safe right now shouldn't. And the way I think about it, Brookings has a great study they did recently, which is we shouldn't be looking at job vulnerability alone because we're miscalculating stuff and what is disruption here and not all jobs are the same.

4:44We should also be looking at ability to adapt. Like how ready are people to adapt to work as it's changing? Part of that is inside of you. Like, have you handled hard well before? Have you had to fail and get back up before? Have you had to reinvent yourself before? Those are all things we're all gonna have to do. So if you've been able to do that before, you have a leg up. If you haven't, that's going to be sort of new growth for you. But also, are you in a community? Are you in a structure that supports you? A lot of that is financial security. I mean, to what degree do you have financial security to sort of like test and try things?

5:17And if you don't, you're a lot more stressed about, well, I got to land that job and keep that job. Are you in a place that's allowing you to change that job so you can stay in it as it changes? And in Brookings, they call out certain geographies of the U.S. and certain job centers where there isn't enough that policymakers are doing or that companies are doing together to support people who are going to need to adapt, who aren't set up to adapt right now. So I think anyone that's feeling safe, you shouldn't. It just means you have more time to get ready for the change before it hits you. But the way to think about that would just be, do you have the fundamentals down on adapting either those habits or the structures?

5:53And a lot more right now rides on where you work than what you do. Like, are you in an organization that feels like it gets that this is coming and that's starting to figure out how to change it and that's empowering workers to start to be part of that or not. And the more you're in the right environment, the easier it's gonna be to adapt. And so that's what I'd say for that one. So underestimating, I think that,

6:19underestimating the resilience, recent college grads. I think that the supposedly job apocalypse is coming among recent college grads is not going to be nearly as bad as people think. Again, I think a lot of people are spoiled. We've had an unprecedented 18-year bull run with, at one point at Stern where I teach, the graduate business school at NYU, they had the career services department had to tell kids to stop interviewing when they got more than five offers. When I graduated in 1992, 40%, only 40 % of us had jobs. So the majority of grads from the Haas School of Business, top 10 business school, did not have jobs on graduation day.

7:00So I think we've gotten spoiled. And youth unemployment's about 10.5%. And the reality is two things. Recent college grads typically understand these technologies better than their older peers. And two, you're fairly cheap. You know, the people who are typically most vulnerable in my companies is the dude that's making$400 ,000 a year because he's a dude and he's 40. And for some reason, we decided that this person, based on their track record, should warrant this kind of salary. And then we figure out the recent grad making 100 grand is 80 % as good. So I still, I think we underestimate the immunity of new college grads.

7:42They're smart. They come skilled. They come with an understanding of technology. And again, see above, they're cheap. Overestimating the immunity, I just think truck drivers are going away. I think taxi drivers are going away. But I think you're sooner rather than later going to just see so much data saying we can take 40 ,000 preventable deaths from automobile accidents, we could take it down to 4 ,000 in a decade with autonomous. And we could essentially eliminate maybe pilots at Elastigo because it's still an incredibly safe means of transportation. But I think anything that involves movement of people, you know, there'll be surgeons, but there'll be younger surgeons who know how to manage a joystick and equipment.

8:33So I think we're underestimating the resilience of recent college grads and overestimating any job that involves the physical safety of people that requires quick decision-making, whether it's anyone operating a vehicle, quite frankly. I think those, and by the way, that's a big deal. The number one, the biggest employer of young men or the number one job in terms of gross employment of non-high school graduate men in America is truck driver. So this shows real serious implications. But when I think about AI and autonomous, I immediately go to why on earth is there ever an individual behind the wheel of a semi-tractor trailer at two in the morning on a big open highway?

9:21That seems to me that it would be ground zero for autonomous. But anyways, it's gonna reshape it. But at the same time, we're gonna need people to maintain this equipment. We're going to need people to upgrade it, design the software for it, train people on how to use it. So it'll create jobs. It'll just create a different complexion of jobs. Thanks for the question. All right, let's go to number two. Question number two comes from Hacksin34 on Reddit. They say, hello, PropG team. How can I introduce AI tools and workflow automations at my current company while also ensuring my colleagues feel supported and not threatened by changes to their roles?

10:01This is a common one, Anish. How do you tell people to sharpen the sword that might cut their heads off? How do you give them some sense of security? Yeah, we're in a battle of belief right now, I think. And in most places, workers aren't getting a signal that they can believe that whatever they're being asked to do with these tools is going to lead to new types of work and not just a reduction of the work that they're training these tools on that they might be doing in their day to day. The biggest thing that leaders can do right now is intent. It's the story. The intent matters most. You've got to be pro-human right now.

10:35You've got to be a believer that these tools are not going to end work for humans. They're going to open up all sorts of cool new things that the people that work at your organization are going to be able to do. That's got to be what you're telling your brain, because then your brain as a leader is going to look for confirmation bias one way or the other. It's going to connect dots one way or the other. it's gonna reinforce what your intent is. And so you gotta start from a place where you're pro-human here. The second thing I would tell leaders to remember is they have agency. You know, I'll be in meetings with some folks and they'll say, well, we might end up with a team over here that's got one person, or I think all businesses are gonna be, you know, due to the AI tools and agents.

11:14Well, a bunch of decisions will happen between now and then that you will make as a leader, that we will make as individuals and as people. We have agency. We have a lot more control than we think about where this goes next. That's exceptionally true for leaders of organizations. And so if you've got that pro-human intent and you recognize you have agency, you're going to then really push yourself to not just say, hey, AI's here, let's use it. But what does this mean? What's the business transformation that you're going through or the team transformation you're going through? What are the ways that you want folks to use these tools, but allow it to open up space for them to experiment, for them to try new things, to fail in a way that you might not have supported before, to come up and push back on ideas in a way that you might not have supported before.

11:58We're ending the sort of way of work of the industrial age, which is we're all in an org chart. We have our silo. We have our slot. Everything is about predictability, about order, about stability. The org chart started as a tree with information going up, became a pyramid with decision making coming down. That will completely suffocate innovation. That will not lead to the business transformation or team transformation you need. You're going to have to build what we call a work chart. You've got to just build around the projects and who are the people that have the skills you need and how do you deploy them in different ways?

12:28But how do you bring them in to where work is going at your organization? So I think it's really just having an open, honest conversation with your team, with your workforce, making sure they know your intent, that you are pro-human, that you do see possibilities for folks. And then in a way that hasn't been true before in these big disruptions from technology, kind of letting it be worker-led. You're not gonna decide this is the right way and have it then just get handed down. You're gonna need pockets of innovation. You gotta operate more like a massive startup. And that means you gotta give more autonomy and more agency to your workers to figure out what is the best way for these tools to help them do something new and different.

13:05So make sure you're bringing the room with you. Reading the room and bringing them with you is probably my most important piece of advice for leaders. Yeah, I find compensation drives behavior and there's just no getting around it. there needs to be both a carrot and a stick. To a certain extent, so I'm an investor in a company called Section that is part of the adoption layer and helps corporations upskill their employees or upskill the enterprise for AI. And some of it is you just have to mandate it. You have to say, look, everyone's getting an agent and has to have a certain level of AI proficiency by this date.

13:42Because what they're finding in a lot of these surveys is that the people at work who are using AI are using it for therapy and not using it, not in a hurry to figure out how to use it to improve their job. And those that are using it tend to be young work from home and they're capturing those gains by giving themselves another half day in the dog park. And if that sounds cynical, trust your judgment. So I think it's one mandate. Some mandates, you know, sucks to be a grownup when you're in a corporation. Headquarters gets to mandate a lot. And two, visibly reward people. When people adopt AI and make their group more productive, visibly promote them, compensate them, and give people incentives to say the people here who learn how to use AI and apply it, they're going to be rewarded.

14:31but I always find when you have behavior that is not, that is not footing to your objectives, it has something to do with compensation. And so I think some of it is, you know, we all like to think the workplace is aspirational and it's about culture and vision and giving them security. Yeah, it's also telling them you need to learn this and you need to know this by X date. And we're, you know, maybe we're even going to test you on it. And two, when people adopt, when people adopt it and do a good job with it and figure out ways to be more productive or cut costs, you reward them. So, I mean, at a very basic level, you want to say, all right, there's incentives to do this.

15:13We're going to reward. We want to grow the business. But also, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, look, the world is changing, and do you want to be predator or prey here? Okay, we'll be right back after a quick break.

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18:59Welcome back. Question number three comes from Dennis on LinkedIn. There's a growing debate about whether taste and judgment will become the most valuable skills. This applies to the most creative professions, but taste is built through doing. As a seasoned designer, I worry that the next generation never develops craft because AI lets them skip the hard part entirely. What exactly will their judgment be based on? It's an interesting question, Anish. Well, I love that focus on taste. I think it was Steven Spielberg was talking about that at South By as a differentiator. Look, when we did this book, one of the things we had to do was define human capability.

19:36Like what makes us us? What is cool and unique about humans and only us? And it was hard to do in part because we've never really tried to do that as humans. We've been living under the guise of IQ matters most and technical and analytical skills matter most. And so we're going to teach and train and assess and credential around IQ-based parts of who we are. And so we took a stab talking to neuroscientists, talking to organizational psychologists, behavioral economists at defining these five C's that we sort of say are at the center of our consciousness and conscience, our EQ and our IQ, and their curiosity, compassion, creativity, courage, and communication.

20:14We could debate whether they're one too few, one too many, but it's meant to start a conversation. And then we sort of, in the book, talk about how around that you have these habits of adaptability, resilience, that all are leading to kind of this idea that we've all got to be entrepreneurial. We've got to have that entrepreneurial mindset. it. The wrong way to define entrepreneurialism is go launch a business, which is what I think a lot of us think that word means. And either we don't have the rich kid set up to do that, or we don't even know how we would survive the ups and downs of it. We've got someone in the book from MIT who I think really helpfully defines entrepreneurship as just doing more than is reasonable with the resources you have.

20:52That's any of us, any day, in any task we're doing. What's more than is reasonable with the resources we have and with the tools we have? So when it comes to creativity, look, I'm a writer. I got paid to write in certain jobs. First of all, I total imposter syndrome person across my careers, outsourced sense of self. I wanted to do things that sounded cool so other people would think I was cool. And so I was constantly having to sort of adjust around what I thought was the it thing I needed to do. And so when I went from reporting to speech writing, it's like one of the hardest things I've done because writing is really difficult.

21:26It can get claustrophobic, crippling, staring at that blank screen. And I think about this a lot in the context of writing, where now you could just ask a tool to write something and you didn't struggle through that cold start. But now I get a warm start with these tools. I overthink. So I have like 12 ideas. And the hardest bit for me about the cold start is like the literal first words of the first sentence. Well, now I can throw a bunch of ideas at these tools. I can ask it to give me 12 different options, pick which one is closest to where I want to go. It's never as good as I would do it.

21:56And then I build from there. So the cold start became the warm start. That just changed the heart of something creative. It didn't negate the heart. And I think that's gonna be true in all creative professions. The heart is gonna change, but if it gets too easy, that's when you're vulnerable to ceasing your growth at your creativity and the craft. Because the craft's about to matter more than ever before. I do think human taste, the things that we are gonna be biased towards being done by other humans, like humans are completely illogical. We are unpredictable. We're so messy. We're emotional in ways we don't even account for or understand.

22:30So the idea that AI is just going to create stuff that we're all going to love totally misses the mark, I think, on what makes us us. And so I think if you're creative by definition, first of all, you have a leg up because we're all going to have to get more creative. That's what being entrepreneurial is. And a lot of people think it's a talent, not a skill that you can hone. But if you're already comfortable with that skill, you're already well on your way to sort of where this world of work is going. And don't look at the tools as a replacement, but as a way to sort of up-level the impact of what you do.

23:01You can misuse AI. You can overuse AI. You've got to use it and find that calibration that's helping push your creativity to that next place.