Speaker 1when i talk to founders and operators about
Speaker 2ai the interesting question is no longer whether they're using it it's usually where ai should do the work and where a person needs to step in this moment episode is sponsored by asana who are thinking about the same human ai handoff in this episode daniel priestly nick hanua and i talk about the changing division of labor between people and ai what technology can take on and where people become even more valuable nick i want to start with your background and your context so i can understand your perspective and who you are you sold a company for almost seven billion dollars correct and what's so fascinating about you is you typically billionaires have a certain narrative and perspective on the world you seem to have a very different one i do who are you wherever you come from and what is your perspective on the world as it relates to the subjects that you know we're going to
Speaker 1discuss today i was raised in a civic family i should say what does that mean it means a family that takes uh civic responsibility seriously uh but we were middle class people and my father started to work for this tiny family business that his his father had started manufacturing bed pillows and down comforters which is how i got my start in business and to make an incredibly long story short i had a very early intuition uh about the internet uh and uh the role that it would play in commerce and as luck would have it i had a friend who agreed with that proposition and his name was jeff bezos and so he wanted to start an e-retailer he was working in new york uh for a hedge fund uh dating one of my closest friends and for a variety of reasons he ended up sending his stuff from new york to seattle to my house and we started amazon.com together done same
Speaker 3question for you yeah i grew up in australia and uh i grew up in as a teenager i discovered entrepreneurship i got an entrepreneurial mentor uh very early on and i did two years in a startup and it was really exciting and i loved it um and i felt like i discovered a cheat code in life which was entrepreneurship and starting businesses and small businesses and then at 21 i went off and started my own company which was my first agency and it grew really rapidly uh went from zero to a million in its first year and then 10 million in year three and it was like this exciting young company with all these cool young people working there and living there we actually kind of did that and i was like oh my god i'm gonna do this yeah yeah we actually were in a big house and we kind of spent a lot of time together yeah i just fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business and family business and all of those kind of things and i also 15 years ago started an entrepreneur accelerator where people who want to get together and talk about entrepreneurship and figure out how to run their businesses can get together and and figure out how to do that
Speaker 2i mean one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence and we you probably saw recently eric schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students and every time he's up the stage yeah every time he said the word ai um one of the things that anthropic or one of the leading ai companies said recently is that entry-level jobs are at risk and i've got this graph here showing the decline of entry-level job postings i believe it was on linkedin um pulled from somewhere and it shows that they're consistently dropping and dropping and dropping ai is i think about it so often i was up late last night trying to think through some of this stuff because anthropic released a report yesterday showing that the ai models will be able to improve themselves theoretically in the future and what this might mean how disruptive do you think ai is going to be as it relates to job losses
Speaker 1you know i don't think bernie sanders latest idea is terrible u.s will own 50 of all the air companies it is absolutely true that ai has monetizing for free humanity's intellectual property and a few people are going to directly benefit from that and i think that um in the same way that norway created a sovereign wealth fund with this enormous asset that they had uh creating a sovereign wealth fund with 50 of the value created by ai and recycling that into uh i think it's unclear exactly how those benefits should be should be recycled but trying to find a way to make some of that value a cushion for the disruption that it will inevitably cause i don't think that's a crazy idea it's a good idea for china in the u.s yes
Speaker 2yes but not for anywhere else necessarily it's not going to help senegal southampton much no in fact it'll
Speaker 3damage a lot of those places you know like the philippines has benefited enormously by being the outsourced back office uh for a lot of small businesses that ai can now do a lot of those those uh those jobs um one of the things that i always come back to is the idea that say the uk has 5.7 million businesses we have a million unemployed people we need one-fifth of the businesses to employ one person ai does actually make your business better like ai is really good at helping you with your marketing ai is great at helping you do legal contracts there are a hundred ways that ai could actually make 5.7 million businesses a little bit better to the point where they want to hire someone and if we can incentivize those things to happen businesses are trained on how to use ai to their advantage and tax breaks for small businesses that are hiring and we will you know there's actually 5.7 million businesses and a million unemployed people that's a good there's a good match
Speaker 2there you know um a lot of people have been talking about ai agents and uh what an ai agent can do for anyone that doesn't know is it can go on your computer and it can get any task you want done on the computer um whether that's you know editing tasks or whether it's you know manual data entry tasks or whatever it is it can click around on a computer and do things a lot of the entry level roles were often given are that kind of work i think my entry level entry level job after i dropped out of university was kind of doing that kind of thing there was also a little bit of a cold calls too and increasingly if we just play the rate of development forward we'll be able to do those things so if these businesses get more and more efficient um again it comes back to this entry level point is what role will entry level team members have in these kind of companies
Speaker 3so what's interesting for me i have a group of companies small businesses uh dynamic small businesses we've implemented ai in all of them and as a result we've hired people who have you hired so entry-level people we've hired some entry-level people who are augmented by ai so they become more valuable because of ai but like things like appointment setting we've ended up hiring more sales people because we get more appointments we we use it with our marketing and we end up hiring people who can actually have those final conversations with people at the very core of my organizations we have an ai layer and the ai layer has context and skills and models and security layer right all all in there and it spits out amazing information and data and reports and tells us who to talk to and why to talk to them and what to talk to them about all these things are happening because of ai but
Speaker 2it doesn't get around the point that like if you think about uber uh dara has been pretty clear that the nine million drivers they have i think it is are going to lose their jobs in the future if you think about the the other sort of white collar professions we've described they those roles won't won't exist in the future well i should say those roles will be will be changed
Speaker 1correct if i put on my more optimistic hat the thing is is that all businesses operate in a competitive environment and there are two ways to compete one is to be cheaper the other is to be better right and the thing about ai is that yeah there are tasks that you can automate away but one person with good ai tools may be able to do the job of five right and yeah you could eliminate that job or you could keep that person give them the right tools and out compete your competitors the right tools the right tools i think there's an assumption that will i mean this is of course what happened with computers right i mean i'm i am older than you guys so i remember i remember when calculators hit you had to be there to realize how freaked out people were about calculators right like people were talking about like what are the accountants going to do and and and will kids learn math anymore i mean it was it was like extremely controversial to bring a calculator to to school and then along came computers and the truth is that computers didn't reduce the amount of work that people did they increased the amount of work that people did and i do believe that there are ways in which ai is probably going to do that and so the job loss may not be as apocalyptic as it now feels like it may be because again at the end of the day you have two ways to choose to compete if you you know you can get rid of somebody and do x but you could keep that person and have them do 5x and out compete you know your competitors in another dimension i think that that will be something that people are likely to do doctors are just going to be better doctors i think i i
Speaker 2definitely agree that there's going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals i think maybe the difference between like calculators or computers versus this is ai is coming into a technological economy and it is coming in with instant scale in a way that when when anthropic shipped their new model last week it went to all of us at once yeah everywhere in the world we were all boom step changed with computers i remember the day that like my dad ordered the first computer for our house and we waited for weeks and weeks and weeks and then we got it was super expensive to get one we unboxed i remember us all stood around it looking at and it was like this windows 95 machine that had like no memory on it um so the distribution the sort of disruption was much slower the pit the pit The pace is much slower. Right. I understand that with our team, we have no intention at all to let anybody go because of AI. We're reskilling people, training people. However, would we end up hiring less people, especially in the near term, than we would have otherwise? I think that's maybe conceivable. Yeah. And a lot of companies, I think, are in that position. I actually was speaking to someone yesterday and they said, we're just letting the natural attrition in our call center take care of the shift. Which means they lose 25% of people from their call center naturally. They're just not hiring other people back in. And actually, Klarna's CEO said the same thing. He said, we're just letting the attrition take care of it.
Speaker 3I'll give you another example, though, just to counter that. I work with a husband and wife couple in the north of England who they had a little video production agency and one or two people who did a little bit of contracting with them. They used AI to create a piece of software. And that piece of software helps auditors. Automate script writing and a few of the things that they do. They launched a waiting list for this. They got five and a half thousand people to join the waiting list. They then signed up their first 1,500 clients to a piece of software that cost almost nothing for them to build in four months. And now they're hiring a team of 10 people. And this is a husband and wife who had a small, constrained business who are now building out a bigger business. And this is something that could never have happened. They haven't had to raise billions. Millions. Dollars. They haven't had to hire 30, 40 people. So this tiny little SaaS opportunity is suddenly possible because of AI. And take that AI away and that fast growth, dynamic little businesses.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think anecdotally I could come up with lots of examples as well where particular people are highly entrepreneurial. They come across an opportunity. But there's this broad, if you just zoom out on the way that people generate value in the economy at the moment, so much of that is going to change. And it's going to be quite quick, it feels like. Oh, totally. And I don't know what you do about that. What do you do about that?
Speaker 3Well, this happened in the Jevons Paradox. The person who had a tractor displaced 100 people who were in the field. And those 100 people went into the city looking for work all at once. And it was Charles Dickens wrote The Tale of Two Cities. He wrote Oliver Twist. Guess who else came out of the Jevons Paradox? Our good friend Karl Marx, who came up with the most toxic ideas ever created and written down. He came off the back of the Jevons Paradox.
Speaker 2So what do you do about it?
Speaker 1UBI? I'm not a big fan of UBI at the moment.
Speaker 2Isn't that kind of what this 50% Bernie Sanders thing would do?
Speaker 1Well, it's a sovereign wealth fund, basically. But you have to find a way to help manage through this transition. And you have to, I think, depend on the value. Look, the whole valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption. You can't get to those numbers unless you're displacing lots of jobs. Exactly. And if that's true, then we should. We should not grab some of that value that is created and recycle it into the economy to try to cushion the disruption that it creates. This is a bit of a socialist idea, right? I don't call that socialism. What do you call that?
Speaker 2I don't know. Just common sense? Wouldn't that broadly apply to all companies and rich people? If they are disrupting the economy and taking an unfair share of that disruption, should we not just grab and recycle back in?
Speaker 1But that is the basis upon which every high-functioning democracy in the world operates. I mean, every high-functioning democracy in the world has progressive taxation, labor standards, rule of law.
Speaker 3There's a difference between seizing private property, which would be a socialist way of doing things and a communist way of doing things, and owning strategic assets, which are private property. So, for example, the Dubai government owns the physical hotel buildings that run Dubai, and it leases those out to hotel owners. But it keeps money in its sovereign wealth fund because it says, basically, a big part of Dubai is that we own these kind of land assets. So, do you think we should go
Speaker 2and take a portion of these
Speaker 3companies? The difference was the Dubai
Speaker 2government actually developed those assets. Right, but we're already too far down the line within a capitalist society like the United States.
Speaker 3So, we might say that data is the new oil, and data is a common good, and it is a common asset that has been sequestered illegitimately by these companies. So, therefore… You're not seizing what they created. You're basically saying, I'm sorry, but you need to pay a license back to this sovereign wealth fund because you're using a common asset that you were able to essentially seize.
Speaker 2But you stole it from Africans and British people. You stole it from people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada.
Speaker 3The biggest issue that we're having is that we're actually – the nature of the entire economy is changing. So, this happened 250 years ago where the nature of the economy was land, and we had an economic system called feudalism and colonialism. And then the nature of the economy was industrialization, and we had an economic system called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally changing. So, in economics, there's four factors of production, land, labor, capital, enterprise. We're now swinging like a pendulum from land through capital, labor, and now we're actually in an enterprise economy. And we need some sort of economic system that reflects the reality of how money and wealth is made. And what is that?
Speaker 2Is that go to OpenAI, take 50% of their company? And then pay out the profits of that 50% to the people?
Speaker 3I'm always skeptical of any socialist ideas. If it comes from Bernie Sanders, I'm skeptical. Okay, but Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. He's a socialist.
Speaker 1He says he's a socialist. Well, take him at his word. No, socialism is, you know, the government owning all the means of production, right? Look, there are a million forms of capitalism, right? Every country operates slightly differently. And I don't think that Bernie Sanders is saying that we should abandon markets. What he is saying is we should manage markets for the public benefit, not exclusively for the benefit of the owners of capital. And I think that's really different.
Speaker 2You know, with like an Amazon, they're using the roads and the infrastructure. Correct. So, would you go take 50% of those companies as well for public benefit and then pay it out? No, but we effectively
Speaker 1do take part of them in the form of taxes, right? Now, the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue, and Dan may agree, are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give them. They don't return equal value. So, you're saying increase the taxes on companies like Amazon.
Speaker 2You both agree?
Speaker 3Well, Amazon is very successfully avoiding taxes. Yes. So, would you agree to increase the taxes? So, I think we need to close tax loopholes. We need to make sure that they're paying taxes like all other companies that operate within the economy. Like the guy at the pub that you're talking about pays. Yeah. Right? Yeah. He pays a lot of tax. And the retailers and all that sort of stuff who are in competition with Amazon. Right. Look, one of the biggest issues that we have is we have widespread incompetence in governments. And I'll give you a quick stat on this. In the U.K. government, you are 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance. Right. And the U.K. government is 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance. The U.K. government fires people at 1 600th the rate as normal businesses for incompetence. So, we have an accumulation of massive incompetence in government. So, the idea – you can come up – we can come up with all the best ideas under the sun at this table. We have a fundamentally incompetent set of people who have misaligned incentives. We have basically a revolving door between financial industrial complex, technology industrial complex. I'm so fine. Well, the Singaporean government, they basically said that we're going to have a very high degree of meritocracy in government that essentially we promote and fire based on outcomes and merit. Singapore is a miracle of governance.
Speaker 1Amazing governance. It's a miracle of governance, but it is a very small place. No, totally. And perhaps the only place in the history of planet Earth that has benefited from a well-meaning dictator. Yeah. Right? Yeah, Dubai. It's an astonishing story of capability, competence, foresight.
Speaker 2So, what is the solution with this AI revolution? I think we all agree that there's going to be job disruption. And there's going to be a new type of job. There's going to be probably a delta of people transitioning to those new types of jobs. I've said this before, but I even noticed that within our recruitment processes now, we are really looking for people that have a certain set of skills. We always ask. And it's harder and harder and harder to find those people.
Speaker 3Well, that's training. That's education and training. It is. And that takes time. The school system needs to produce people that you would want to hire.
Speaker 2Yeah. And that takes a lot of time.
Speaker 3In my hiring, I ask the question, how deep are you in the AI rabbit hole? And anyone who says, oh, a lot, I'm like, okay, join the team.
Speaker 2And also, if you think about humanoid robots, Elon Musk's pay packet mandates him to deliver millions of humanoid robots or else he doesn't get his big pay packet. If we think about robotics and humanoid robots coming through, we watched the other day, Figure AI released this video showing a humanoid robot. Robot sorting packages on a production line for eight days straight, beating a human sorting those packages on the production line. My car in Los Angeles now drives itself, as do the taxis. And there's a huge race to make autonomous vehicles. I'm sure there's new jobs created. And I understand in foresight, it's hard to understand what those will be. I assume there'll be more human jobs, more sales jobs.
Speaker 3My only thing that I can say is that the future is small businesses. It's small teams of 10 people making YouTube channels. small teams of 10 people making software. that when you have millions and millions of little small businesses, everyone's happier.
Speaker 2Whilst we debated a lot, we can agree on one thing. Knowing what to automate and what still needs a person really matters. With Asana, their AI teammate can keep routine work moving while decisions that need judgment stay with people. So AI handles more of the process and people can focus on the work that matters the most. You can try Asana at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A.com. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
PodcastTranscript AI