Companies Using AI Well Are Hiring, Not Firing | Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

0:08Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Welcome everyone to this episode of the Talent Fix podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. So Dr. Gleb, you're very welcome to the program. Dr. Gleb is a behavioral scientist and a published author and contributor to publications like the New York Times. So really excited to dive into the topic of AI with you with a recruitment focus today, Dr. Gleb. But before we kick off, I mean, you've got a fascinating profile. If you could maybe give us a quick, quick-fire introduction to yourself and highlight your publications as well.

0:48The Talent Fix Hosts: Sure. Happy to bear it. And the reason we're talking about today is that I have a new book out called The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work, From Resistance to Results. It's out with Georgetown University Press. It's peer-reviewed extensive research on how recruiters and other folks can effectively adopt AI. And where the challenge with AI adoption is really not about the technology, it's about the psychology. Because the technology is actually surprisingly easy to use. It's very intuitive. So the crucial challenges are with the psychology, not technology. So that's what the book is about. Now, my background is that I've been doing work with companies, helping them adapt to the future of work for the last, oh gosh, 26 years now.

1:37The Talent Fix Hosts: So now 27 years, since 1999, I've been helping companies figure out how to adapt to the future of work. I have a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill in helping how people make decisions in the historical and contemporary context. I taught for seven years at Ohio State as a professor on this topic. And I've written numerous books, not numerous books, I have wrote eight books now with this new book. You might know me from Never Go With Your Gut, How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. That's my global bestseller. And like you said, I regularly feature in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, and so on.

2:14The Talent Fix Hosts: And all this time while I was teaching, of course, I was moonlighting and helping consult with companies on adapting to the future of work, including in the last several years, focusing on AI as a topic. And definitely recruiters have a lot of work to do in figuring out how to adapt to AI effectively, including both their internal workflows and how they work with candidates.

2:37Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Brilliant. Okay, so let's just dive into a recruitment perspective, Dr. Glav. If you can give us your sense of what type of jobs AI is going to eliminate, and is there going to be mass displacement of jobs, or is it going to be more kind of elimination of tasks as opposed to jobs?

2:57The Talent Fix Hosts: Another question is going to be mass displacement of jobs, and it's not only me saying this. So we already see displacement. Last, there was a research called Canaries in the Coal Mine from Stanford that looked at, in June 2025, looked at the most AI-exposed industries versus the least AI-exposed industries and found that the prospects for employment for young people, 22 to 25, were 15 % lower in the most AI-exposed industries. They updated that research very recently, so in July 2026, and they found that that gap has widened to 19%. So now there's 19 % lower prospects. And of course, that'll just keep going.

3:40The Talent Fix Hosts: that's just young people there was a recent letter signed by over 200 economists including 16 Nobel laureates that said that in the next several years there will be mass job displacement for everyone, not only young people so at all levels and there's no question that AI will cause mass job displacement and there's definitely something to worry about and for recruiters to plan for both in terms of who they're recruiting and in terms of themselves.

4:10Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: 100%. Okay, so I don't know if you saw McKinsey's recent survey, which talked about the number of companies that were expecting, the percentage of companies expecting to lay off workers, right? And I think it was something like 39%. But then when they went back and they looked at the number of companies that actually did lay off workers, it was 14%. And so there seems to be a difference between the expectation and the reality in that sense. Like, what are your thoughts on this?

4:42The Talent Fix Hosts: And so what happens, what's happening in the short term is that AI forward companies are seizing market share. So here, this is a recent research out from Stanford. It found that companies that are in the same industry, so comparing companies in the same industries, that are more effective at adopting AI compared to companies that are less effective at adopting AI. The companies that are more effective at adopting AI, they're growing their top-line revenue 9 % faster, but they're also growing their headcount 6 % faster. So they're actually hiring people, not firing people. But they are using less people to do the same work that they did before.

5:25The Talent Fix Hosts: Again, their top line driving 9%. Their headcount, 6%. So who is losing people? The companies that are not adopting AI effectively. So those are the companies that are losing people because they're losing market share. So in the short slash medium term, what we'll see is a shift of employment from AI backward companies to AI forward companies. But overall, there will be eventually less employment. So that's what we're seeing in the short and medium term. That's kind of like how you want to be thinking about things.

6:01Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Okay, very interesting. And then we're also seeing some kind of pretty stark data coming out of the US around startups and the numbers that they're taking on is way less. I think it's something like a factor of four in 2020 compared to 2022. So we're clearly seeing companies doing more with less people.

6:27Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Obviously, that is an impact of AI, of course. But one thing that concerns me is the entry-level employment. And I think, obviously, historically, people learned by doing low-level work. If AI takes a lot away of those tasks, we just mentioned, where do tomorrow's managers get their experience? Yes.

6:50The Talent Fix Hosts: So this is definitely a crucial question. And I already mentioned that employment for young people, 22 to 25, is down in AI-exposed industries. So what are we to do in this situation? What do we need to do? And the crucial thing that we need to do, so I talk about this in my book, The Psychology of AI Adoption to Work from Resistance to Results. The crucial thing to do is focusing on training people differently, not on training people on the lower level tasks, but on training people on the outcomes of those tasks so that people understand how to work with AI. It's kind of the same idea of transition when we acquired calculators.

7:29The Talent Fix Hosts: You don't train people on the lower level tasks. You train people on the concepts of the understanding that comes with doing higher level math. And like we don't like with Excel spreadsheets, right? Same idea. You would train people on how to do the complex tasks that are enabled by Excel spreadsheets. So right now that's not really happening in most companies. Their training programs are not really adapted to the future. The recruitment, their training is not well set up for where the future needs to go. What they need to do is focus on helping young professionals understand where and how to produce competent work and recognize competent work.

8:12The Talent Fix Hosts: Recognize what I call the concept of metacompetence.

8:16Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: I like that.

8:17The Talent Fix Hosts: Metacompetence.

8:17Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yeah.

8:18The Talent Fix Hosts: Yeah, the metacompetence means being able to recognize what is quality work in any area, not produce quality work. Of course, you need to understand the basis to produce initially quality work and so on but you don't need to do the drudgery of keep producing it and learning by doing. You need to learn what is the outcome to recognize the outcome with the AI being able to produce that outcome and you being able to recognize it if it's not good enough you need to be able to work with the AI to get it to be good enough. So people need to incorporate AI into their training and focus on training to work, to evaluating the quality of the outcome and editing it using AI tools to get to that outcome.

9:07The Talent Fix Hosts: And that applies to any field. So that is the crucial skill of the future that needs to be trained in meta-competence.

9:15Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Okay, okay, perfect. That's a really interesting idea. So, and that's, I mean, another skill that's going to be in demand in the age of AI is this idea of metacognition as well, right? Yes, exactly. The idea that we can think about our own thinking. But I think with the advent of calendars, it didn't, sorry, calculators, with the arrival of calculators, it didn't all mean that all of us weren't able to add or subtract. Sure. So I don't know. I mean, maybe this idea that we're not going to be able to think for ourselves is a little bit over-exaggerated, potentially. Sure.

9:55The Talent Fix Hosts: Well, what we can't do, I mean, I certainly learned how to do long division in school, but I certainly can't do it right now. I doubt that you can do long division right now, too, Barry. And so it's the same idea.

10:08Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: We'll test you now, Dr. Gleb. Get out the pen and paper. Exactly.

10:13The Talent Fix Hosts: So those are skills we can let go. And so those are the things. you need to understand the concepts behind the skills, but you don't need to have the skills of generating the first draft of any task. You can let the AI do it. The crucial thing is the concept behind it and then how to evaluate the quality of outcome and work with the AI tool to get up to the quality required for the job.

10:38Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Yeah, so evaluating the quality of the outcome, that's going to be the differentiator, right?

10:43The Talent Fix Hosts: It's going to be the differentiator, absolutely. And working with that, so that's one. and working with the AI tool to get to that quality outcome. So knowing how to use the AI tool effectively and recognizing the outcome. So those are the two things that need to really be future students.

11:01Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: So two people using the same AI tool could arrive at different quality results. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not necessarily going to be the same result. but just shifting gears a bit to the psychology of resistance Dr. Gleb because I know we're just conscious of time which you've written about which is a very interesting idea so you've identified different psychological types when it comes to AI adoption yes like what is actually driving the resistance and is it kind of fear of losing your job is it fear of becoming irrelevant potentially a lack of trust in the technology or is it something deeper?

11:42The Talent Fix Hosts: Yes, what I identify as three big blockers, and this comes from doing over 100 consulting projects, hundreds of focus group responses, many, many thousands of survey group surveys. What I identify is that there are three big blockers. One of these is fear and anxiety about losing jobs, as you rightly pointed out. So fear and anxiety about losing your job, including by recruiters, is a big, big driver of resistance to AI usage. People are afraid of trading their own replacements. I call that psychographic profile the AI alarmist. Definitely a large one. That's one. Second is identity threat. So people aren't worried about looking up information in a CRM versus looking it up in various sales, in various spreadsheets about, let's say, your clients.

12:32The Talent Fix Hosts: but they're worried about a tool that can identify a quality or candidate nearly as good as they can, or maybe even better, or write a job description, or write a sales letter, right? Doing all of these things that people feel proud of. They feel as part of who they are as a professional. It's key, central to their professional identity. And of course, so many of us get meaning from our work. So that's a threat to their identity, to who they are as a professional. And that's the second big issue. So that's a broader issue than irrelevance. It's a lack of meaning and threat to their identity. That's the second big issue.

13:12The Talent Fix Hosts: And I call these people, again, in chapter six of my book, the pragmatic resistors. They're less afraid for their job. They're worried about their identity. The third group, so there are three people, these are people who actually do adopt AI, but they feel ashamed of talking about it. So there is strong emotion here is shame. They're socially stigmatized for using AI to evaluate candidates and to say, yeah, it can do as good a job as I can in evaluating candidates just much faster. Writing job posts, doing all those email, creating images, all of this sort of stuff. There's social stigma around that.

13:52The Talent Fix Hosts: And so people don't want to talk about it. As a result, you're not seeing the results of higher productivity because people aren't talking about it. They're finishing their tasks faster, but they're spending their time listening to the Talent Fix podcast instead of being in the chat.

14:08Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: That's not a waste of time, Dr. Glenn.

14:10The Talent Fix Hosts: Sure.

14:12Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Very good. Okay. What about the group, the AI skeptics? because even in my own business, I encounter, I've definitely got, I think some AI skeptics on the team potentially think that, oh, this is all going to go away. It's all over-exaggerated. It's just a fad. Is that a group you encounter?

14:33The Talent Fix Hosts: So I think the AI skeptics come from the first two groups. They express skepticism, but that's not the underlying emotion because obviously AI by now is incredibly powerful. I mean, Anthropic is about to IPO at like$2 trillion, right? That's about half of Microsoft. So like, it's just... In what, four years or something crazy? Yeah, and NVIDIA is the largest company in the world. And, you know, the market is not wrong. So the data is very clear that AI is here. It's here to stay, no question. Huge job displacement. The reason people express publicly skepticism is that they don't want to say, well, I'm not using AI because I don't want to lose my job, or I'm not using AI because it's threatening who I am as a professional.

15:25The Talent Fix Hosts: Because those are things you don't talk about in a professional setting, right? It's like tricky things to talk about, your emotions and your fears and so on. So they instead express that through AI skepticism or AI work slow. So for example, if they're forced to use AI, they use it badly. They just press the AI button and they get some kind of outcome. They don't evaluate it and they just send it to colleagues. And then the colleagues are like, oh, this is bad work. And the supervisor says, this is bad work. And they say, well, you told me to use AI. Here, I used it and you don't like it. Fine, I won't use it again.

16:02The Talent Fix Hosts: So you see that sort of malicious compliance definitely going on.

16:06Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Okay. Okay. Very interesting. So look, we're coming to the end and thanks for your time today. But I do want to finish with a final question. In terms of, if you were sitting across the table from a CEO and you were advising him or her about kind of their recruitment strategy, what would you be saying to them about potentially how to scale their business, either strategies to attract talent or even what skills to look for, what would your advice be?

16:46The Talent Fix Hosts: So definitely looking for the skills of meta competence is really important. Be able to see, give your prospect several outputs of whatever output they need to see and have them compare those outputs and be able to tell which one is good, which one is not, and how they would be able, what kind of edits would they make using an AI tool or at least themselves to get from the not-so-good outcome to the good outcome. So that is the skill that I would encourage them to focus on, like really thinking about that. Then in the more medium term, thinking about is this person able to manage a set of agents?

17:30The Talent Fix Hosts: The future in the next couple of years as agents become better and are able to replace more and more workflows, the crucial thing for people will be able to multitask and manage 20 agents that are able to do a number of workflows in their activities. Do they have those abilities? Do they have those managerial abilities, multitasking abilities, organizational abilities to manage a group of agents? So that would be another set of skills that I would encourage the CHRO to look for.

18:03Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Brilliant. Listen, that's a great way to finish. Just tell us about the book one last time before we sign off and where can people get it?

18:12The Talent Fix Hosts: Sure. So they can get the psychology of air adoption work from resistance to results. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere fine books are sold. Now, if you want to get a free sample of the book, you can check out my website. disasteravoidanceexperience.com forward slash AI book. And you can get the free sample right there. Disasteravoidanceexperience.com forward slash AI book.

18:36Dr. Gleb Tsipursky: Brilliant. We'll put that in the notes as well. Thanks so much, Dr. Gleb. Thanks for listening to Talent Fix. Please like and subscribe where you get your podcasts.

18:54Thank you.