This is not a conversation that can we agree 100% and I also feel like being like you be IO Kaie as our AI policy is not exactly helping. Can that get on the books? Welcome to your work friends. I'm Francesca Rineri and I'm L-plot and we're breaking down and now and next of work we're back with new week new headlines Mel what are you talking about today? Heck yeah we are this week Harvard a business review they just dropped it a new article this morning it is talking about how companies are not failing at AI because the technology is necessarily bad it's because nobody wants to redesign the organization around it which you and I talk about every freaking day. Yes. How about yourself? If AI takes over our jobs how do you buy cheese? How do you actually make a living? The key question that keeps coming up with a lot of the headlines this week is if this economy keeps growing which it is but our jobs don't keep up what happens to income and I want to talk about some of the options that are being put on the table. Let's do it. Let's Right we talked to future assault this time and there's always these themes that come up around oh it's going to be great because you'll do this higher level thinking and it's this new age of enlightenment and we're all going to be farmers with cupcake shops which sounds all super delightful until you start getting down in the details of wait how do I actually buy stuff get stuff do I actually own stuff and no one can really answer that no it really came to light especially as we're looking at the latest job numbers and after I went down a massive rabbit hole about Kim Kardashian's bunker around what happens when jobs don't keep up this is the thing we've traditionally gotten income from a job it jobs go away especially in a mass scale how do people get money I don't know I just want to get paid in seashells most poor claims too much I dream of being a little mermaid no sorry look at this cloth yeah it's yeah it's I'll take a sport yeah sport yeah yeah this came the light with this week given four key trends in the news we have headline one which is like our long-term unemployment is starting to rise even though our overall unemployment is around 4.4% and obviously they reconcile the job numbers the actual unemployment rate continues to go up but by most signals it's still relatively okay however talk to most people who are looking for a job what do they say can't find one do you find one yeah can't find one and on top of that we are seeing continued layoff announcements block last week just laid off 4,000 of their 7,000 people do completely to AI we're seeing and have been seeing over the last few years companies quietly reducing their work for us by about this 2 to 3% per year and that's two things like hiring freezes yes AI and automation and also they're just not backfilling any kind of roles that they had in layoffs and this is permission slice of their workforce that they're doing 2 to 3% at a time the other thing that's happening is we are starting to see some productivity increases and AI is allowing companies to produce more with fewer workers at least that's the going narrative we have shaved our workforce were more productive than ever were more profitable than ever with that's a very common headline right now what they're not that's actually AI or just squeezing blood from a rock of the humans that are still there is yet to be debated but we are showing increased productivity increased profitability with fewer humans and the last thing that has started coming to had at least in the last few weeks is this conversation about universal basic income yeah now some of you might be wondering what the hell is that I'm going to go through it but it's this idea of giving people money or basic income when jobs don't exist and a few years ago this was something that was really relegated to academics that were studying economic policy now last week for example you saw Andrew Yang on moonshot talking about it you're seeing Joe Rogan talk about it Elon Musk talk about it it's coming into the ether as part of the narrative and one of the main reasons why I want to talk about it because this link between work and income is starting to loosen it is I always pause when I hear Joe Rogan there you can't fuck me up like what are the benefits for them but super fair why I think it's very interesting to watch what they're saying is because that means it's mainstream yeah 100 percent right which also means to me that they believe this is coming I think it's coming to I think it's absolutely coming I know it's absolutely I agree yeah we've had the narratives for a long time around AI is going to create more jobs than it will displace right right now we're not really seeing a lot evidence of that and my biggest concern is that a lot of people point to circle scenarios the internet the industrial age all these ages that we've gone through the difference here is that those were not technologies that completely reproduce human cognitive ability yeah this is extremely different and even a year ago you and I'd like to think we are optimistic realists over here but even we thought okay your role might get augmented augmented or your role might get redesigned potentially but it wasn't going to be this level of layoffs not at this speed yeah anyway so this is different yeah the two forcing factors for me that make me very nervous one to your very good point the speed this is not something that's going to happen over the next 10 years or the next 20 years this is something that's probably going to happen within the next two to three LLMs largely didn't come on the docket 2022 dropped we started you and I were texting look at this but what's cool this is cool let's try it out let's test and learn and then really picking up the speed very much eventually the last year and you probably seen some of this inside your organizations right if you're managing teams and organization you might be feeling like the shape of the work or the number of the people needed to do it is changing your organization might be asking you to keep the amount of high count that you have and figure out how to use AI to replace any of the labor that has gone away or that you need yeah that's a very commenting we're hearing right now and there's three forces that are really driving this pattern one is obviously the technology AI can automate so many tasks within knowledge work right and there's a thought to that if AI can automate or AI can do the cognitive labor or even the labor that a human can do the value of that labor goes down to whatever the cost of the machine is which will always be cheaper than a human right there's that the second is companies are incentive to operate with more productivity and they're incentive to honestly keep on shaving that two to three percent head count each year because it makes them more profitable they're incentive in the stock market they're incentive by their board payroll we know is one of the most expensive costs of an organization so if you're a big organization that can meet a hundred million dollars a year yeah not chump change it isn't that's a lot the third is what we just talked about is this economic structure historically productivity gains have created new jobs but again that transition took decades a lot of times if we're being honest this is not right and it creates what economists call job like growth where productivity rises profits rise but employment stall does that sound familiar it does yes and like we talked about before we're moving from this phase of adoption we're throwing clawed we're throwing co-pilot at our employees and figuring out if they figure out a cool way to use it to really acceleration like we're putting it from test and learn to put it through workflows your agent can do something that an actual head FTE head count could potentially when you're moving from that phase one early adoption to that phase two acceleration this is the moment where labor disruption historically has happened this is where we start seeing oh the jobs that we used to have don't need to be there anymore we're moving on to historically now the new jobs the problem is who's doing those new jobs AI is going to do those new jobs right we're seeing in a 4.4% unemployment number was doing some scenario modeling even if we conservatively shaved 2 to 3% of our employee base every single year which by the way is very conservative that's a very modest cut I know it impacts a lot of people but it's a modest cut if organizations continue down this trajectory we're most likely going to be at a 78% unemployment rate within the next 12 to 18 months when you get to that level that's the signal where most of the people that you know are either looking for a job or waiting to get laid off that's where people start defaulting on credit card loans
that's when they start taking down all of their savings. We're already starting to see a lot of those signals. You and I talked about that. - Yeah. - People were bringing you 401ks, right? - Yeah, this weekend I was in my little doom scroll on the correct hints. I learned about how sharks are older than trees. And then I saw seven plus different threads of people who cashed in their 401ks because they were looking for work for the last year and half and haven't been able to find it. Or just, you know what, Yolo? - What's happening? - You can't blame people. You gotta do what you gotta do. You gotta do what's right for you. - Yeah, even if you're doing it for Yolo purposes, God bless, do what you need to do. - We're a life fan. - I know shit, honestly. It makes sense to me. - Makes sense. - Yeah. - That 70% is where like societally, it is not a good feel at all. And that's where the political pressure about how do we support economically or people because they are not making the money they need in order to buy goods, buy houses, buy cars, sustain. We talk about this all the time at the organization level. If you have a business problem, you have the people problem at the root of it. On a mass scale, what that looks like is, if your communities are destitute and in this position, guess what, your industries aren't gonna survive around it. So this is bad for everybody. - It really is. The reality situation is people need income. Right? - They need money to not only have necessities, but if you think about it as being livable wage, livable income, let alone high income, but livable, which means that they're not in chronic stress because they're wondering where their next dollar is going to come from. That's livable. We need to rethink how people get income if their income is not coming from a job. - Yeah. - And there are many ideas out there. Again, this has primarily been an academia and in some pub policy circles, but you're starting to hear more conversations. We talked about in more mainstream media, like Joe Rogan fucking talking about universally income. That is a mainstream topic now. So let's go through a few of them that are on the DACA because you're gonna hear about these more. You're gonna start to see more signals around these most likely in the next year. Number one, universal basic income, sometimes called UBI. This is the idea that every adult receives a guaranteed income. Key words, they're every in adults, meaning like per adult, not per family, not per household, and adult, not child. So if you're a family of four or two adults, two kids, whatever, there you go, not the kids, you. Most commonly discussed version of this has been like a thousand dollars a month. Andrew Yang was just on moon shot with Peter Diamata. Basically saying he thinks it should be $25,000 a year. That might be necessary for the future. So $25,000 per year per adult, that's like the highest I've heard about universal basic income. What do you think about that number? You wanna survive in $25,000 a year, Mel? No, you can't survive on $25,000 a year. That is below the poverty line. Yes. But it is an idea that is being touted out there. Universal basic income. You'll hear a lot of people talk about this. I would say this is probably the most common that you'll hear. UBI, UBI, you'll hear that, right? But the highest rate I've seen is $25,000 where people have modeled it out. Listen, it's not chump change. I love to get $25,000 a year. I love seeing the difficulties. But great. To live on negative income tax. Number two, so instead of a flat payment everyone the government guarantees a minimum income through the tax system. So if you earn below a certain level, the government will like top you up to come up to a livable wage. Who's determining what that is? This is the point, right? Okay, great. Our country could be doing that right now. Some aspects we do, but yeah, it's not there yet. The other one, and these are the ones that I'm more drawn to, which is the AI or sovereign dividends. In this model, the economic gains from automation are taxed or captured. And distributed dissidents as dividends, similar to how Alaska pays residents and oil dividend each year. So the oil companies are paying a last-gen residents a dividend. They are getting a cut of the profit of that company. They go to Mucho. Yeah, exactly. To your very good question, who determines the cut? Who determines the raises? Does everybody get the same cut? begs the question about capitalism? Because you're assuming that these companies are gonna be on board. Here's what blows my mind about this whole discussion. We are gonna have to completely take down our old system of how we think about how re-operies operate. 100%. It's a giant game of Jenga, and it just pulled out the middle piece. Probably Chris, it's a little over. We're leaving back and forth right now. Someone on it the right way. That is what it feels like. We're about to have a big crumbling of a Jenga game. We could have. It also makes this conversation really important because what can sustain that is people, even if this source of income changes, they're still whole. You have UBI, you have this negative income tax, the AI or sovereign dividends, there's a fourth major model that's been touted to, which is universal basic asset. So instead of cash payments, citizens receive ownership and national investment fund. So essentially building wealth collectively, so people earn returns from the capital. Similar to the dividends, just more of an ownership aspect of it. Again, begs the same questions. Find it fascinating in this, though, that you have as little as $1,000 per month per person touted, which by the way, didn't go to math school $12,000 a year. Said, I don't even know if I can have a problem. I'll problem during that time. That was a percent. So as little as $12,000, yeah, all the way up to, I mean, not that Joe Rogan's the arbiter of this, but he's talking about, man, wouldn't it be great if everybody received the equivalent to $200,000 per year per person? I do agree with that. They are wildly different futures, wildly different. But also, what is it going to get you at this point? Because who is paying taxes on those things? What happened to federal income tax when a big majority of your population can't work and contribute to those things? There's just a lot that needs to be discussed. And that doesn't even get into some of the bullshit if you've ever had to rely on government assistance for anything in your life. Does it create the in crowd and the out crowd of certain benefits? Does there become tears of this shit? And then does that also create policing on how you use your universal basic income, which happens today, by the way, for anyone who uses snap benefits and they've got like people judging what's in their shopping cart. Yeah. So I'm so curious. Like we haven't even tackled that for the programs we have today. Imagine this. Who gets 25K? Yeah. And then what do they do for work? Is it now feudalism? Where we're assigned jobs and meaningful work goes away because you no longer have the skills to do the jobs that exist. So you get assigned to something in order to receive this basic income. Like what does that look like? So now you potentially don't have a choice as a person. And I know I'm getting my big tinfoil hat on here, but that's where my mind goes in these directions thinking about it. I think those are really important questions. I'm secretly hoping it's like the Jimmy Buffett Margarita
ville and we all just got you to be like, we're tired. Me too. I'm like, I'm just, I'm just going to do the water. I do the water. Some watercolors. And you'll see me driving around. I'm going to do it. I'll do it. This is the thing that blows my mind. Right. There's so many questions. Oh, yeah. Well, much of this hinders on really robust, thoughtful, intentional policy. The people having these discussions are not federal policy makers. They're business people and AI futurists and academics. And to be fair, I just want to point something out. Sure. You know that meme where everyone's pointing the finger at somebody else? Like a degree? We feel like-- We feel like-- Always companies are like, it's the government's problem. And the government's, it's the company's problem. It's both your problem. And you got to get on the same team. To be able to agree. I agree. I am seeing more people that are typically in the private sector having these conversations. But it takes everybody. And this is not a conversation I can wait. Agreed. 100%. And I also feel like being like, you be IO, Kaie, as our AI policy is not exactly helping. I can't get on the books. Like you're-- Yeah, it's a thing. We're seeing this coming down the pike. It is not to scare anyone. This could end up being a really beautiful thing. We could all be the Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville. It could be completely dystopian. Or it could be what probably is going to happen, which is some shit show kind of stuff that we got during COVID, right? Like it's going to be walkie. And it's not going to be perfect. And it's going to be a lot of work.
And being able to be prepared for what might happen is the key, right? So some signals to look out for. And one, if you run a business, I think the misread here is that this is just a hiring slowdown. It's not, it's not. There's hell here is if your organization's productivity continues to rise, but your head count is less or flat. That should probably tell you that your business is obviously operating in the less, if you will. And then I think the thing that I would ask yourself is what your workforce looks like if productivity increases 20%. If you lead a team, the misread here is that your job is about protecting head count because most likely your organization's gonna force you to use the cheapest labor possible, which will increasingly become more and more AI. If you or AI tools are changing more clothes, I'm not talking about spot tasks, I'm talking about their doing whole workflows, they're doing whole aspects of a project. That should let you know that AI is taking over more of the human labor. And the move here, if you wanna keep your head count, how do you make sure that your people are doing higher level work? You gotta say one step ahead of the AI. All you need to do is not be the last person between the bear or whatever the fuck that thing is. You know what I'm talking about? - Yeah, I'm here. - Yeah, you have to, you can't just set it in, forget it. So for, I think it's gonna honestly show some asses for leaders who aren't being attention to that. Stuff with their team because if you're not checking with your team regularly or making them part of the conversation, we talked about this in our 2030 predictions, frontline workers know what's up and what's happening. If you're a leader and you have a leadership team underneath you who then is also interacting with people, you need to be having at least a quarterly touch point to talk through like what's shifting and what does that mean for us? What's next then? And if you're a good point, how are we elevating our work? What else could we be doing now that this frees up space for it? If you don't have a clear answer for that, how can you go to bat for your team? - That was in percent. - And listen, if you're an employee, the misery do not believe that stability comes from a single job. - Yeah, it does not, it does not. You will know that this is getting worse when more and more people in your circle are looking for a job, when more and more of them have been unemployed for six months or more. And then move right now that we've been talking about a lot is building multiple income streams and skill pathways, what else, Mel? - Making sure your brand is not related to your job, or your job title. Listen, in the US, and you and I talk about this all the time, we started a research project on it a few years ago, actually. Talking about self-worth, and your self-worth tied to our jobs and in our US culture, it's the first thing everyone asks you, what do you do instead of who you are, which is really sad, by the way, I try to change that. People are gonna have to start breaking up with their relationship and their identity and how it's tied to their work. - Yeah. - Because that's not your only value on this earth, but that's gonna be a big mental shift for a lot of people. Big shift. Listen, bottom line, the relationship between work and income is starting to change literally, mentally, emotionally. The opportunity here, it's massive prosperity through technology. It's the Jimmy Buffett retirement. That's the opportunity. The risk here is that prosperity doesn't reach enough people. What can you do now? Pay attention to the signals because this might not be about new jobs, it might just be about new ways of earning income. Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. We'll see what happens. (upbeat music) This is Fresh Off the Press, dropped this morning. It's called the last mile problems, Slewing AI transformation came out of HBR today from Connie, the professor at Harvard Business School, the chair of the D3 Institute at Harvard and on the board of CloudFlayer. So he knows a little bit about a little bit of something, a little bit in this space, it's a smidge. So here are the three headlines that came out of this article, you should pay attention to. Headline one, most large scale companies have hundreds of AI pilots running, and almost none of it is showing up on the balance sheet. It's great, interesting. But it blew up 4,000 more people, keep going. And say it's because of AI. Headline two, over 99% of employees at one global payment network are actively using AI tools, yet their finance team couldn't find the return. That was just an example coming out of the article. Headline three, the consequences of this, productivity gains are real at the individual level, but they just disappear back into meetings and email because nobody redesigned the role around them. And just guy read this and I was like, yes, we talk about this every day. That's the work we do. Yeah, yes, I think this is the thing that, it's a little age old, but especially right now with AI because AI is really clumping into cognitive labor. If you don't redesign, that people keep it up, is like how do they do what you need them to do? And if you don't redesign the structures that enable them to do that really well, and then if you don't incent them to do those behaviors, they're not gonna do it. They're not gonna do it because people, they'll be peopleing. They'll be peopleing. People being peopleing. Oh, that's a good hat. That's neat. That's what it is. All right, so let's take it all together. It points to one signal. AI transformation is installing because of the technology. It's installing because organizations aren't willing to redesign themselves around it. And you and I see it all the time. Yep, we see it all of the time. If you're a CEO, this means your board is gonna keep asking for ROI on tools you've already bought and you're not gonna have a clean answer until you make a structural decision, what we just talked about. If you're leading a team, this means your head count and role design decisions are already behind. Also, what we just talked about. And if you're an employee, this means, sure you save some time, you're getting back from AI is probably going straight into low value work unless someone above you explicitly says otherwise that it has real value. And we're seeing headlines about the big KPI of AI success is adoptability, but that isn't the case. It's what return is it actually bringing to an organization. So that's a red flag, right? If finance teams are really struggling to see that. So the pattern, what's driving this pattern is the way that organizations have positioned AI from the very start. When you're leading with cost reduction, you get cost reduction. You also get middle managers on the defense and a C suite that's narrowed its own ambitions before the work even starts. The authors of this called it the efficiency trap. They warn that a relentless focus on efficiency risk hollowing out the human capabilities, judgment and storytelling, that's the differentiating high value work. That's not what AI has. What leaders are getting wrong here is that they're celebrating those adoption numbers, like I just talked about, as that proxy for transformation. One organization in this article cited over 99% copilot usage as success and the CFO still couldn't find that return. Adoption isn't the transformation. What employees are misreading here is that they think job security is the biggest threat AI in itself. The biggest right here is working for an organization that's refusing to address this redesign issue. What's your read on this? - I'm not surprised. - Every time we have a new technology, it's this shiny ball and it's gonna solve all your problems. And it never does because if organizations haven't done the work to get incredibly clear, this is who we are, what we do and how we do it. And these are the ways in which we do that, via human or AI or I don't care a chainsaw, whatever it is. - Yeah. - You're gonna just have a lot of slop basically. I think adoptions an interesting number. I appreciate the fact that people wanna take things down to funnel. We look at adoption and we look at productivity, but ultimately if that's not going towards a gain around new product offerings, new service, customer retention, whatever they have to go down the funnel. And in order to get down that funnel, you need to be really clear around what great looks like and enable your people to do that. The other reasons why people don't do this is because it's hard. It's a lot easier to say, oh, let's get an AI training in here for two days. And let's leave it up to teams to figure out what to do. And then Hail Mary, hopefully something's gonna happen where we start to see something out of it as opposed to being in the driver's seat of your own strategy and your own work. - You and I know this, we have from our learning backgrounds and you have to get people in there actually using it and like calling out the efficiencies versus, that's a great starting point, but how is the work getting redesigned? 'Cause it starts to fall apart on the people, again, people, we people, it starts to fall apart at the people level. There are motions around change that aren't being addressed. There are real barriers. Do you think this is good, bad, or was always inevitable from your perspective? It's inevitable in a sense that there's some great examples of organizations that are incredibly savvy in the way they design work before AI even came on. And there's a lot of organizations that weren't, then you pull AI into it. And,
it just multiplies the problem. So inevitable that way. Bad in the sense that it multiplies the problem. And on top of that, all of your employees are sitting in an environment where the job market is caca. Yeah, even if you haven't talked about layoffs, even if you haven't laid off a single person, they're living in the world and wondering, am I next? Yeah, their friends have been laid off, their family members, their spouses potentially. You can't ignore that factor either. The, in my mind is that it's a massive opportunity. It is. Yeah, it is a huge opportunity for people to really get it right. And the org design problem was always going to be one. Mainly because the tech is moving faster than people are. Manage, in particular, like how they're gonna do this, how are they gonna shift and restructure and do things. They give a really great example around this team that was able to pull together proposals that needed to go through general council review. And so they created efficiencies on their team. The problem is the whole workflow hasn't. So there's all these little bottlenecks happening within organizations because then it sat for two weeks with their general council office to waiting for a review. Yeah. So it doesn't matter that this efficiency happened over here because it's not happening over here. There's a huge opportunity. What are we overreacting to? You and I are cursed with a few things, but one of them's getting sh-- but one of them is that we see patterns, which is great. It's great when you're talking about the future work. It's great when you're trying to do strategy. It's not great when you were sitting in corporate, trying to move an organizational along because you see problems that need to be fixed what you believe today. Yeah, but those leaders don't see it yet necessarily and/or don't believe it's the problem that really needs to be solved because they're dealing with frontline customer shit. They're dealing with it today. Then now I have to make numbers. The only thing I think about with overreacting is, I think some business leaders would think, I'm not reacting to this. I'm being diligent about seeing where this goes and then I'll make a move because I need to worry about customer theft. Yeah. I don't think we are, but I can see where it's my organization is my think we are. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I agree. I can know that too. What do you think we are underreacting to? I'm gonna go back to the self-worth thing that I commented on in your story because that identity to your job, and if you lead teams, you've seen this. You've seen this before. Yeah. When something comes off of someone's plate and their identity is tied to that project, tied to that work, tied to their innate value because it's what got them accolades. Yeah. Sounds pretty. It is not a good experience for them. For you, it's really hard. That's a difficult transition. And we're dealing with people and human emotions. So the people who holds that tacit organization knowledge, and they have built maybe their whole status around being the person who knows something. This transformation is asking them to give all of that up. And if that's not being addressed, you're not gonna get the knowledge from those folks and you're not gonna get the transformations that's needed because they're not feeling like they're part of that transformation. It's happening to them. I think that's the biggest thing. In addition to all the structural stuff, the people piece and life. You and I talked about this a couple weeks back. How people are not okay, just given all the life stuff. So probably most simple things people can do, but we'll go a long way to alleviate some of that is for leadership to spend a few days, if not more, really thinking about what is their AI philosophy? What is their ethos towards it? I don't need you to have all the details. I need you to tell me what your intentions are with AI. I need you to give me a roadmap of what you're gonna try to figure out and buy when and take me on that journey as an employee. That doesn't take a ton of time or a ton of effort. It takes somebody who understands like strut and narrative and internal brand and all this good jazz. But we have found that goes such a long way through alleviating some of that dissonance that your employees might be feeling about what's gonna happen to me. And by the way, their confidence in you as a leader that you have a game plan. I know that they see themselves in that game plan. Well, team level have that quarterly check in and make people feel included in the transformation at a bare minimum. It is shifting what they care about. And again, our culture is like identity to your work. It is deeply embedded in our DNA. I wanna see the quiet part out loud here. Most organizations have already spent the money. Spent mega bucks on this stuff. The tools are deployed. The question now is whether leadership is willing to do the harder thing, which is redesigning the orgs around them as we just talked about. And if that's true, then the real risk is that companies who move fast on redesign are actually gonna look like a completely different category to their competitor in the next 36 months because they have a different operating model and the one that pays attention to these things. So stop measuring AI success by adoption rates, start measuring it by what's structurally changed and start paying attention to your people. What this means on a Monday morning, although we're recording this on a Monday afternoon, here's what you need for the rest of your week. If you are running the business, you're a CEO, you're an executive. Here's a mystery you might be having that your adoption numbers are strong, so you're in good shape. The tell that is not the case, if your finance team cannot tell you where the productivity return is landing in your head count or your cycle time, your transformation has plateaued. So watch for that conversion there. The move, ask one question in the next leadership meeting where is the time savings from AI actually going. That's going to tell you whether you have this last mile problem that we're talking about here. If you lead a team, your misread might be that your team is using the tools and your job here is done. There's nothing else for you to do here. That is not the case. If you have not explicitly redesigned what your people do with the time that AI gives back, that time is being absorbed by low value work more than likely. Watch for your people who are busier than ever but can't say why because we read that article even a few weeks ago that talked about how this is actually creating double work for some people with all of the checking that they need to do. So one of the moves that you can make this week pick one role on your team right down what it would look like if you redesigned it from scratch with AI as the first class participant in their whole role. That is the gap that you can redesign for. So pay attention to that, work through that as a team, go through it one by one. Think about all the roles on your team. And if you're an employee, the misread for you is if I just use AI, I'm totally safe, which is also not the case. No. At all. But I think a lot of people have been communicated with. If you stay on top of it, that means you're safe, but that isn't the case. And by the way, it's never been the case through any transformation. It just hasn't. Unfortunately, you've got to be like Madonna folks, reinvent yourself. Here's a tell. Watch whether your organization is actually making these structural decisions about roles in budgets around AI, or if they're just celebrating people who are using the tools. One of those organization actually has a plan in place. Your expertise is something that needs to be encoded, not just executed on. That's what you need to pay attention to. What are your capabilities? What are your superpowers? How do you talk about them? And how does that evolve through this type of transformation? The people who stay essential are going to be the ones who really pay attention to their own brand story here. And what value that they bring. And the bottom line is, again, organizations that move away from this pilot-rich experience right now, and they move to the redesign in the next 18 months, that's going to be their game changer. So this is a real opportunity. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right. I have a few WTF and FIA news you want to hear them? I do. Yes, I did. They're a little bit off the beaten path, but I thought they were funny. What? Yeah, they're great. All right. This is the WTF news of fan literally unplugged the future. This week's story comes from Germany where a mask soccer fan apparently decided that he didn't like the technology. He just unplugged it. So here's the-- [LAUGHS] So I want to get some of these names wrong, so I apologize I do not spread because of the voyage. But during a German second division match between press and monster and Hortha Berlin, referee Felix Bickle went to review a possible penalty on the pitch side VAR monitor where they're like looking at calls that they want to challenge or not. And this screen was dead because a mask supporter had gotten into the interior area and just unplugged it so he couldn't make the call. I think it also displayed a banner that basically translated to pull the plug on the VAR. The remote VAR official in Cologne,
had to make the call instead and Herta ended up winning two to one. So here we are in an elite professional sport with a very expensive review tag. So we're not here to talk about sports necessarily as this signal, but it's like that our sisters are still pretty fragile. Like we keep building more and more tech dependent environments, which I'm not knocking, but a shocking number of them are still like one really dumb human action away from complete chaos. It's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. So here are a fuck yeah story, which I'm really excited about because every once in a while labor policy does something that feels like it belongs in this century, which is really great. Let's hear it for a Mexico. So Mexico's chamber of deputies approved a bill that would gradually reduce the standard work week from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 with their reduction beginning in 2027. Readers reports their reform would affect about 13.4 million workers if it clears their remaining state level approval that are expected. So this matters because Mexico has some of the longest working hours in the OECD. It's not really just a cosmetic move. It's one of those policy moves that may be signaling that human beings aren't just productivity livestock, which I'm here for. I am here for it too. I had no idea that it was at 48 hours. Yeah. It's interesting, right? I think it's a kind of fascinating thing. We talk a lot about AI driving a lot of future of work, but it's also time who gets it, who controls it, whether governments and companies finally admit to more hours, doesn't really necessarily equate to value. Listen, it was women, by the way, in the state of Connecticut, who fought for the eight-hour work day. And American Heart Association shows that anything over 50 hours a week is actually detrimental to your health. Yeah. So when does that start to come into play in terms of legislation worldwide? It is actually bad for your health. And you don't even get good ideas after 50 hours a week. Everyone's maxed out. What are the evidence do you need? My total polyanna utopia here is, what if we all just end up working maybe two to three hours a day? We all have lives where it'd be like, we at least have $200,000 a year of living situations. And we just have a wonderful life. I know that's super polyanna in utopia, but I'm like, is that be nice, right? No? It would be nice. It would be nice. But I don't trust the powers that be to deliver on that offer. Sorry. I'm being so pessimistic, curtain up. She'd been the current state of the world. But yeah, I think that would be lovely. That's what we're here for. What was, who said this? Oh my God, I'm going to totally butcher it. But what was it? We're here to just fart around, make our eat good food and spend time with our loved ones. Beyond that. Beyond that. That is what life is for. It's like perpetual summer break. I'm pure for it. Is that what being a trust fund kid would feel like? I don't know. Don't you want to experience that? Yeah. That's magical. If you haven't been listening for a while or catching up or you're new here, we launched a newsletter. If you want one media insight driven email a month where we share frameworks that you can implement for yourself, for your team, for your org, sign up over on your workfriends.com. And you can listen to the pod every Tuesday. We drop new episodes. So check it out and subscribe. Leave us your feedback and reach out to us at
[email protected]. Bye friends. Bye friends. Bye friends. [Music]
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