📈 AI eats middle management before the entry level

“I think what companies are internalizing slowly, that the first place that AI disintermediates is actually middle management. You thought that it was the customer support person, maybe you thought it was the engineer, maybe you thought it was the designer, maybe you thought it was the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it's the middle manager, it's the functionary that basically is acting as essentially cartilage inside of this organization, has less and less to do in a place where AI-enabled systems are making a lot of decisions on behalf of businesses.”

“I just had Arush Selvin, who is the PM at Google doing deep research on This Week in Startups yesterday. And this product is nuts. And they designed it to basically be one of these like million dollar or five million dollar reports you pay for from these consulting firms. That MBA is right. And it does a better job. It's more accurate. It's done in five to ten minutes.”

“the class I taught on Monday at Stanford, they said, everyone wants a job at Meta or Google, and that's the get rich quick place. And it's, I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore. And they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management. So those jobs have dried up.”

“You're making a huge assumption that's buying into the doomerism that AI is going to wipe out millions of jobs. That is not, those are facts not in evidence. And furthermore, have any jobs been lost by AI? Let's be real. We've had AI for two and a half years and I think it's great, but so far it's a better search engine and it helps high school kids cheat on their essays. I mean, come on.”

“AI is a productivity tool. It increases the productivity of a worker. It allows them to do more creative work and less repetitive work. As such, it makes them more valuable. Yes, there is some retraining involved, but not a lot. ... But I think David is absolutely right. I think we will see job creation by AI that will be as fast or faster than job destruction.”

“So if there's a deflationary effect in terms of job need in other industries, I think that the loss will happen slower than the rush to take advantage of creating new things will happen on the other side. So my bet is probably on the order of I think new things will be created faster than old things will be lost.”

“And if you view it through that lens, you're right, Sacks. We have not accomplished anything yet that proves that this is going to be cataclysmically bad. And if anything right now, history would tell you it's probably going to be like the past, which is generally productive and a creative society.”

“He gave us two anecdotes of how he personally has used some of these tools to make management decisions, and his observation was managers are the first to go.”

“if you were to buy a bunch of accounting firms or law firms or IT services firms, and you do an incredible job, who wants to buy that in seven years? ... You could take that generalization and apply it to all of IT services. Why does any of that exist? Why isn't it all one click? Eventually, if these agents become smart enough, the fear that I have is that there is no terminal buyer for many of these companies.”