Common Ground is Ground's newsletter highlighting the most important consumer news, tech trends, artificial intelligence, in-depth analysis, along with a few extra thoughts from our team. Subscribe today to get the latest issue delivered to your inbox.
At Y Combinator's Startup School in July, Jensen Huang the CEO of Nvidia said the AI job-loss narrative is "exactly backwards" - "AI automates tasks away, but it doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs. The job of a person has a purpose, and that purpose has many tasks." He backed it with radiology: Hinton predicted in 2016 radiologists would be obsolete in 5 years; the field grew ~12% from 2010–2022 and is projected to grow another 25–40%. He's also said "the more AI we use, somehow the more people we have to hire" and, at Stanford, "most people will lose their job to somebody who uses AI"
Most people are missing what Jensen means: AI is not about replacing humans. It's about making them superhuman.
While the tech world obsesses over AI that can do human jobs, the person with the most complete view of AI’s actual capability is making the opposite argument - and backing it with his own headcount.
“The more AI we use, somehow the more people we have to hire,” Huang has said, pointing to the fact that agentic systems are genuinely new skills requiring new roles. His framing: “This is a classic example of productivity increasing growth. Increasing growth drives more employment.”
This isn’t philosophical positioning. It’s a strategic read on where the leverage actually lives. The real AI revolution isn’t about fewer humans - it’s about more capable ones.
This mirrors exactly what the smartest DTC brands are discovering about AI implementation. The companies winning with AI aren't the ones laying off their teams. They're the ones making their existing teams dramatically more effective.
Your email marketing specialist doesn't need to be replaced by AI, they need AI that can analyze thousands of customer behavioral data points in real-time. Your customer service team doesn't need to be eliminated, they need AI that can instantly surface every previous interaction and predict customer intent. At Ground, we see this philosophy in action every day - we're not trying to replace your marketing team or growth operators, we're giving them capabilities that make every decision smarter and every campaign more targeted.
🔌 Ready to turn supercharge your revenue team? Speak to Ground AI's growth experts today.
The brands that understand augmentation over replacement are seeing immediate, measurable results. Teams that were already performing well suddenly deliver results that seem impossible. Not because they've eliminated human decision-making, but because they've amplified human intuition with AI precision.
When your lifecycle marketing manager has AI that can predict exactly when each customer is ready for their next purchase, they don't just send better emails - they become a revenue-generating machine. When your retention specialist has AI that identifies at-risk customers and automatically crafts personalized win-back campaigns, they don't just reduce churn - they become a profit center.
Nvidia is betting its hiring plan that augmented humans beat AI replacement. Smart DTC brands are making the same bet on a smaller scale - and seeing immediate returns.
While competitors debate whether AI will eliminate jobs, the winners are busy making their people unstoppable.
The question isn’t whether your team needs AI. It’s whether you’ll use AI to replace them - or to make them the coworker everyone else loses out to.
🔌 Brands using Ground’s AI revenue agents typically see 20 to 50% more revenue out of the same traffic they're already getting. A few August onboarding spots left - book a time with our team here.
Nothing we write about augmentation lands as hard as a customer saying it themselves.
One of our customers Dan Castle, former Managing Director at Martha Stewart and now founder of CastleFlexx, just shared publicly what Ground has meant for their growth - and we’re still a little floored by it.
Dan Castle runs CastleFlexx - the premium mobility and back-pain device - with a small team and a handful of AI agents. (Humbly: ours.) By his own words, he’s scaling the brand faster than Vuori and Under Armour did at the same stage, and he calls Ground the first growth lever in the business. See what Ground can do for your brand
The Ground community comes together sharing different stories, but common ground.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.