#14 What You Can Do To Survive The AI Job Apocalypse

Willkommen to the AI Cookbook, I am Malcolm.

Hey bro, what if tomorrow you wake up and half of the jobs in your office are gone? Like boom, like this. And what would it be replaced by? Well, something that's like a silicon brain, super smart, does not need holiday, does not take coffee breaks, does not fall sick. And if you ask me, is it really the end or would it be the start of something much more interesting and much more cooler to go in an office where half of the people that you're working with, that you don't get along with anyway, that are lazy, that are not very smart, are gone for once.

This is the AI Cookbook, where we try to cut a bit through the BS and try to tell what is real about AI and what is not. And in this edition, we're going to dive into something which, if you ask me, is not so apocalyptic. It's a bit about what the AI or what the job market will look like end of 2025, beginning of 2026, et cetera.

If you ask me, there's a very, very, very high chance of a bit, a huge train rolling through the entire world, a train of layoffs and not blue collar workers, because blue collar workers are super important. You will still need somebody to come to your house and install a light. You will still need somebody to build the engine of your BMW car, but white collar workers.

And white collar workers were what? Who are often middle, middle to top management. Why? Because middle to top management is there because they got their years of experience. I'm already 20 years in the company, yet you have some AI kids that are upcoming and that are very fast working with large language models, not with one, but like four, five, six large language models doing the work of two or three or four white collar workers.

And when all of these white collar workers get thrown out and decimated, is this something bad for your company? Like when you talk to CEOs and you tell them about this, what do you think they say? You think they say, oh, this is so bad. Frank, such a good guy. He was with us for 25 years.

Or when you say, no, do you understand that three AI automations, which costs you 10 euro a month can take over the job of Frank. You think they're unhappy or unhappy? Well, if you ask me, because I talk to these guys on a daily basis, guys, they're super happy looking forward to this future, super duper, duper happy. But now I'm a bit like you.

I'm like, wait, wait, but I have kids. My kids are seven. They're nine. I have like a young baby, which now is growing. So what's going to happen to all of these people? And it's not, not so far away.

Microsoft has just thrown out, I don't know exactly the number, but I think last week it was 9,000. This week it's already 15,000. They're throwing out 15,000 employees now. And you know what they're saying to the rest of them? They're saying, hey, if you are staying in Microsoft, the best thing that you can do is brush up on your AI skills.

And Satya Nadella is saying, you know, GitHub Copilot is churning out 20, 30% of the internal code. Guys, I don't believe it, but even if it's not true, it's the perception. But I do believe because I'm working with wonderful companies and wonderful startups where not 20, 30% of the internal code is written by AI. No, more like 60, 70% of their code is written by AI. So this is the reality already today. Today.

So if you're a CEO who's listening and you still have not thrown out anybody because of an AI automation, chief, you're probably doing something wrong.

And it's not, okay, it's tech, it's Microsoft. No, no, no, stop, stop, stop. Ford, Ford, they built physical goods. And Ford thinks that the CEO of Ford, his name is Jim Farley. He thinks that not 10 or 20% of these white collar workers are going to be gone. He thinks that half of all white collar workers are going to be gone in the US. Half. Think about it.

Why? Why white collar workers? Well, these are people wearing a suit. These are people often crunching numbers. Sorry, Grok just came out a few days and Grok is better at crunching numbers than most PhD in the world. Then they look at the numbers, then they write reports. Sorry, any AI frontier model is better at writing a report than you. And it continues and it continues and it continues.

And now let me continue extrapolating to really scare the shit out of everybody. It's like, you know, now you're like, okay, but that's the future. These are big companies.

Wait, do you know that the big four, you know, like the Deloitte's and them, they have reduced the intake of college graduates. Why? Because AI, normally college graduates, what do they do? They come in and they work as analysts. What's an analyst? An analyst is somebody who crunches numbers on Excel and does slides. That's the only thing an analyst does. Now, wait, AI is better doing that.

And how do we see this? The unemployment rate of 22 year old to 27 year olds is now at close to 6%. It's the highest unemployment rate since 2021. So basically, AIs are eating up entry level spots in finance, in the big four, in tech, et cetera. And my seven and nine year old, well, in which job are they going to go into? This is a bit what I ask myself, you know, and it's not only CEOs who speak like this.

You know, Dario Amodei, Dario Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic. Anthropic is Claude, one of these great AI models. He also thinks that 50% of entry level white collar jobs will be gone in one to five years. And we won't have an unemployment rate of 8% or 6%. No, he thinks it's going to be 10 to 20%.

And Sam Altman, the CEO from OpenAI, he thinks the same. He says the sentence, yeah, millions are at risk, not will be at risk in five to 10 years. Are at risk. And similar to Satya Nadella from Microsoft, he says, guys, it's adapt or die. Like, like use AI pretty much everywhere. Learn how to use AI or you're gone. Nobody needs you.

And now we continue. Now we continue. Okay. So now this was the US heavy based US CEOs. Now I live in Bregenz. Bregenz is not far away from Davos, where you have the world economic forum.

And then you take the world economic forum future of jobs report. Basically AI, when you were reading the reports of the world economic forum, even two or three years ago was not super omnipresent. But now it's the single highest risk of displacement of jobs, which means 92 million jobs might be displaced by 2030. Yet 170 million new jobs will be created.

Now, man, wait, I don't understand this. I don't understand this. Basically the whole time you're just telling us that people are going to lose their jobs. There are no new entry-level jobs. But now you're telling us that the world economic forum says that in the next five years, there will be a net gain of 80 million jobs globally. Wait, how is that possible?

Well, if you ask me, it's possible because of many things. It's possible because a person like Malcolm, who does not know much about more than a bit of oil and gas and a bit of pharma, can use AI to boost himself and his team to go and basically teach banks how to use AI, teach manufacturing companies how to use AI, and be invited once a month at Microsoft to teach them about prompting. And it's not me. It's all the people who work with me who have gone through such a transformation. We have basically created not one, one or two or three new jobs for ourselves, which didn't exist before.

So yes, in the short term, people who don't master AI will have a very huge problem. But in the long term, I believe strongly what the World Economic Forum is believing, that there will be a net gain of jobs globally.

Yet, we need to watch out a bit. We need to watch out because there are two, three things that are worrying me a lot. As I said, the first one is entry-level jobs. The second one is people who don't use AI. And the third one is women.

And we can do an entire section because we do courses about how, in general, women are more exposed to AI taking over jobs than men. There are many, many, many, many reasons. I mean, the first one is, in general, women do more white-collar jobs than men. Women do more office jobs than men. So if 30, 40, 50 percent of all the office jobs will be gone, men are going to be stuck and they're going to go back and work back on the construction site. Or they will do blue-collar jobs because there are, in general, more blue-collar jobs for men to go to than women.

And in general, women need to watch out much, much, much more because also the statistic shows it that women underutilize AI compared to men. When you look at the usage of AI, it's not 50-50. Not 50 percent of all men and 50 percent of all women use AI. Many more men use AI than women do. So men are using AI. They're boosting themselves. They're getting more promotions. They're going up the corporate ladder. And the people who don't or perceived as not using it, they will be on that list of Satya Nadella of the 15,000 people that he has thrown out.

So it's very, very, very complex. Now, what can you do?

A. Don't panic. Just understand it. Understand this is the situation in which we are.

B. Please upskill yourself. Go and talk to an AI, not one time, but 10 times a day. This is my job. That's the task I'm doing. How would you do it? Teach me how I can improve myself. Teach me how I can do this task with an AI.

So write to me on LinkedIn. Share your fears on LinkedIn. Tag me. I would love to hear your feedback about this. And reach out to me if you need any help and support rolling out AI in your company.

This is the AI Cookbook. Thanks a lot for having read my ramble, even if I highlighted the elements of fear without wanting to instill fear in you. Because if you ask me, AI is still a blessing. It's a wonderful technology.

So wonderful greetings from close to Vienna, where my parents live. Take care. All the best.