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I can totally see a world in which in the next couple of years companies are kind of railing back on on their on their investment in in AI and for that to have devastating consequences for everyone who's used to having a free-for-all and for them to go, "Oh my god, this is absolutely horrendous." And now I'm having to do the boring bits back. But I don't have the help of graduates. I don't have the help of junior people that I can offload that work to because you got rid of them, too. You never hired them.
It's a mistake to wipe out whole skill sets based on the ability of one AI tool that you have as a subscription. That's not yours. You realize that? Like you rely on other companies that if you don't pay them or if you can't afford to pay them, they're going to take it away. Do you get that, right? Why would you risk changing your organization so profoundly that if your subscription goes away, you have trouble? If they want to be reliable? If they want to be trustworthy? Do you want to rely on a human being or an AI tool? That's that's the question they just need to be asking. And you know, I think a lot of companies just don't know the answer right now.
>> Hi, I'm Isaac Pound and today on the Tech Report, I'm joined by the tech journalist Natasha Bernau. Thanks for being here.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> A recent global report from PWC says that among other things, AI is exacerbating wage inequality. Wages and job opportunities are growing 42% faster for those that they call professionalized roles as opposed to those that they call de democratized roles. So that would be sort of your coders or even your sort of personal trainers versus your sort of your customer service roles or some secretary positions. Where would you say this divide is coming from? Is this a matter of AI being implemented in in maybe the wrong way or the limit of the the limited use cases of AI and or or something else entirely?
>> Yeah. So this report seems to be talking about a twotrack labor market essentially. You got your your professionals as you were saying the coders who are using AI as sort of a an able, I suppose, a tool to multiply the way that they work to make them faster, to make more efficient, to take away some of the the less useful bits of um their work. And then you've got the democratized roles which is basically um taking away the specialisms in a role which means that you or I or anyone anyone else could just sit and and you know and do it. Um, I think, you know, this whole idea of of coding um especially, you know, democratizing those roles has been a bit of a thing in the last decade or so. Um, clearly, it's just not useful for companies uh to have people that don't have any additional skills coming in and doing jobs like that. You know, you can simply hire people that have skills. So what seems to be happening is, and as you say, you know, is part of the implementation side of things. The focus from companies has been very much to try to get in on those roles where they can almost um erode some of the more boring or process driven uh bits of the job for people who are specialists in a subject or in a matter or in a job um and allow them to just focus on those on those specialized sides of their roles. Um, effectively though, it means that there are potential skills that are being lost, right? Just because you have an AI doing part of your job doesn't mean it's doing it very well. Um, in fact, a lot of time it means it's not doing it very well. And if you lose the ability to do those those jobs or if people who are coming into new sides of jobs that don't have those in the job description any longer, if they come in and they rely on AI to do that job for them and it's not doing it very well, they won't be able to check and balance what the AI is doing at all. So it's a bit of a problem I feel um in the in the future and in the now but um but it's something that doesn't seem to have been factored into the AI implementation of a lot of businesses. Um, I think this this report is interesting as well because it talks about um the sort of entry-level challenges that people having in different jobs and they're talking about how companies have huge expectation that people are going to do more specialized things in entry-level jobs than they have done in the past. Um, that they expect them to have skills that they wouldn't have normally expected someone that's just come out of university or an apprenticeship to be able to do. Um, and it's putting a lot of pressure on on the people who are entering into the job market as well, which is hugely problematic, I think, because you're you're talking about a generation of of people who are um almost entrepreneur um style, you know, hires where you're expected to be creative and have leadership skills and all these sort of soft skills that you just don't get if you don't have any experience at all in the workplace. It's very unfair.
I also saw a Goldman Sachs report which kind of touched on it as well that the there was some well that maybe this divide is going to get worse because AI deliver delivers gains similar to what the PWC report was saying to senior white collar workers or kind of cutting their legs out from junior white collar workers. And currently in in America, the employment figures that some of this is based off of are being skewed by uh what are most likely temporary data center construction jobs.
>> Yeah.
>> And I was just wondering how you think that dynamic is going to shape AI opposition given that automation has traditionally taken out the blue collar jobs which are now the ones which are being maybe just temporarily being increased.
>> Yeah. Let's look at the US, right? We've got the Bureau of Labor Statistics saying that hiring in the US has slumped to its lowest rate since 2020. The employment rate between those who are aged between 22 and 27 is at its highest level. So, we're talking about a huge level of unemployment since the pandemic. We've had warnings in the UK about the same thing potentially occurring perhaps triggered it by by AI in the future. And you've got a situation where you've got people who are relying more and more on AI to do larger parts of their jobs. I mean to me there's there's a lot of different things going on but the the the biggest voice I think in the opposition of all of this has to be something very simple which is what's what's playing out I suppose in in the in the you know the holes of all these different companies that have invested in AI right you got huge pressure from employers telling employees you must use AI we don't entirely know how you will how it will be improving your jobs we don't entirely know how you know much it will improve your jobs but we've spent a lot of money on it so we need you to spend you know some time using it. So you got all these quotas. So then you've got people who suddenly think that using AI as part of all of their jobs is absolutely fine. I found situations where you talk to people who are senior senior level in businesses who think it's absolutely fine to use AI generated content in their work who think it's absolutely fine to use AI generated emails to respond to people who think it's absolutely fine to just have that as part of their workflow when it's hugely problematic. If if you're being hired to give your opinion, if you're being hired to um you know consult or to be a lawyer or to be doing things that are really high level, your credibility goes absolutely down the garbage pan as it should do if you found out to be using AI as a massive prop. So there's there's a big cultural shift that's going on there and it's very much pushed by companies. What did companies expect? You're telling people to use it all the time. you're telling them that a lot of their their um performance reviews are going to be tied to it and then you're surprised that you have all of these headlines in the FT in the Times that are saying oh X amount of reports are produced by AI um and AI has hallucinated um you know promoting AI in a report about AI and it's is these kinds of things sloppy sloppy mistakes that are happening more and more you have a lot of lawyers that are suddenly accused of using AI in sort of papers for clients where there's no business that happening and it's it's sort of filtering into the psyche of acceptability which is really a disturbing trend. So you've got that that thing happening which I think is is a huge you know win for those who have been against the use of AI in the workplace because they're going you know it's eroding confidence. It's eroding you know especially in people who are supposed to know better. Um they clearly don't know better. So you know you got you got that side of things. And then you got the the problem of of companies that are sort of slowly finding out that actually the AI tools that they've invested in are maybe not so good or maybe they want to rein in a lot of the AI that that they've started to to deploy. And so you've got a situation where you've given everyone a free-for-all and now you're telling them to stop. And it's kind of like talking to addicts, right? You've got you've got used to using this tool. You use it like Google. You got it, you know, working in the background of all your projects. You got it doing all these different things. And suddenly your company might go, "Actually, sorry, but we've run out of money. We don't have any more money in our budgets, and we have to now get you to do that job again." And that's like a a seesaw situation that's like diabolical for people who have been pushed into using AI. Um, and it's something that we're seeing more of and it's been talked about on this program before. And so, you know, you you got a situation and then you enter another third third thing which is that the people who are entering into the workplace for the first time and they're finding themselves being asked for soft skills that are just completely inappropriate for their level and being told, "Oh, well, you'll figure out the the problems that we have with I our AI tools. We'll we'll let you figure out what we can get them to be useful for." Um, and don't worry about democratizing roles. We don't want that. we don't we we don't really want we just we just want you to just just figure out you're young you figure out you can come in here you can figure and so all these dynamics are completely messed up and it's it's really horrible to see but what what I think this report is kind of pushing towards is very much just talking about look the dynamics are are skewed we're seeing how this is playing out in in the real world and it's not a pretty picture and that no one seems to have the solution aside from the people who are saying actually we should maybe stop it while we still can. Um, and maybe like have a think about what might make sense might not make sense in the workplace and you know rather than having a situation where you're pushing people to use AI more and more just think about whether that makes sense for the kind of roles that they're doing at all rather than putting it as part of your quotas or as part of your productivity goals or as part of people's reviews. Um, yeah, it's it's it's I feel it's the the voices are getting louder against this. Um, a lot of people figuring out that it just doesn't make sense. Like, it just doesn't add up. Um, and the problem that that we're seeing in the meantime is you've got another cohort of super users who have got so used to using AI by now for everything that it's going to be really difficult to see how they can roll back from there if they need to or where the boundaries lie because no one's told anyone where the boundaries lie. That's another thing that's a really big problem. So you got a lot of people who are just using it inappropriately. It's there's so much going on, Isaac. It's just it's astounding.
One thing that strikes me is that if you're expecting if you have unrealistic expectation of of graduate employees or entry- level roles, then basically you're not really going to be hiring people. Well, sure you will eventually because you need to fill these roles, but if you're expecting these things, then you can't be hiring the people you want to be hiring. And then where does that leave graduates and and indeed companies if they are the bottom rungs of the career ladder are are missing and they're saying you need to be up here and also we're not going to let you get up to there. But then also, we can't hire the people we need to fill these roles in the way that we need them to be filled because of AI and the way we're trying to implement it.
>> It's absolutely diabolical. It really is because you you're in a situation where a what 21 you're being told, "Oh, we'd really like you to come in here because we've got a lot of the like basic level stuff that you might have learned how to use while you, you know, been doing internships or been doing work experience or the things that you've learned at university. We've got that covered. That's completely irrelevant for us. We'd love you to have some leadership skills or some soft skills or even some skills that you might think are more in the humanity side of things. Creativity, um, you know, be able to, you know, do do things think outside the box. We don't we don't care about your coding skills anymore. So, you got this whole generation of people who basically been told, you know, all the things that you've learned, all the stuff that you're hoping to learn in order to get to that next level, to get to that, you know, middle management level, um, that, you know, may or may not exist in in the next few years. But all that is completely irrelevant. scratch that, you know, throw that in the bin. We would love you to have all these skills that no one's maybe taught you how to do and that you wouldn't maybe have if you haven't been in the workplace before. It's that whole thing of you, you can imagine if you're 21 years old or even 18 years old and you're applying to your first job and they go, "Oh, we'd love you to have five years of experience in a graduate role." It's exactly that, but you apply that to AI and it's just ridiculous when you're in a situation where you go this is these are the expectations of of the of the new generation coming into the workplace. Um, it's to me it's a damning indictment that that if you if you look at the US in particular the people who studied coding the people who studied you know AI computer science um are less employable than people who have studied humanities and humanities often been put up as like the poster child of like oh if you study humanities I studied humanities by the way so
>> so did I.
>> Yeah. So so it's like it's always put up there like oh you're never going to find a job this is what like it turns out we're all in the same bucket. Turns out that thanks to AI, in this new labor market, everyone is is in the same bucket. And it's it's just it's not it's not pretty. I think the interesting thing here is we've talked before about on this program about the pipeline problem where you expect um a graduates to basically be able to jump over a graduate role and go straight into what would be a ne the next level of of the pipeline but then they don't have the skills to question the AI or to monitor the AI properly uh that they're using to do the majority of of the performative tasks that you would do as a graduate. So you've got people who don't have the ability to to control or do the checks and balances for work. That's going to have a huge problem in the pipeline for companies and in their productivity because you're relying more and more on AI to kind of sort itself out, not hallucinate, which we all know is not realistic. Um, then you've got a situation of of middle managers who are being told, "Oh, we want you to use more and more AI." But also at the same time, we're seeing a huge amount of companies going, "We can't prove that any of this is useful. We might need to rein it back. we're actually spending a lot more money than we need to. Um, ouch. Right. And so that dynamic is just terrible. So I think, you know, although we're talking about graduates at the moment, this has a knock-on effect for for everyone. It does feel like AI might be best positioned to maybe replace middle management than than anyone else in the chain here because it's more about sort of just watching what other people are doing when they work. And and to me it's really interesting when you think about what what this does to young people uh who are trying to get into the workplace at the moment. And you see universities trying to capitalize massively off of people's vulnerability. Many years ago it was learn coding, go into coding. Everyone must learn like all the children at school learn coding. It's going to be great. Um at one point it was Mandarin. Like everyone must learn Mandarin. It's it's going to be really important, really crucial for for everyone in the workplace. And there's this this whole Um, you know, you talked about data centers. Now they're talking about like you got to learn to be a plumber, you got to be learning to learn to be an electrician. All of this is very shortsighted thinking, but universities are capitalizing off of it. I was taking a look at some of the stats earlier of of like stuff that stuff that they're trying to trying to do like in terms of like you know attracting people's like the number of students that are taking a degree in UK universities that have some form of AI in it have have risen by 42% this year according to new research. Um and then you got you got a cost of these courses of up to £38,000 per year. I mean, you're absolutely fleecing a whole generation of people. And if you look at the the employment rates being so terrible, they're competing for fewer and fewer jobs. And so, you got a scenario where, you know, the the the demand and the supply is is so out of kilter. Um, and and is this all caused by AI? No, not just by AI, but it's by companies who have decided that that's what they're going to invest in um at all costs. And so you've got a situation where, you know, you've got people who are competing for jobs now trying to have new skills, find new skills to somehow make themselves more employable, paying through the nose to do so, and being told when they're at their interview, I'll be really good if you had some leadership qualities or could, you know, think creatively, how how can you think creatively if you've done like an AI coding program for the last four years, um, you know, in your university course and that's that's what you've been doing and you're just trying to figure out how to use AI as it's just h boggles the mind. I could go on for ages, but it is it's a really difficult situation to be in. It does feel like it's hitting the graduates a lot more than than anyone else. But interestingly, this PD this PWC study, it's saying that like the companies that are investing most in AI and finding most AI returns or who at least claim they've had most AI returns are investing in their headcount, too. So they're saying that, you know, the investment in AI is actually not, you know, the antithesis of of of companies deciding to invest in their headcount that they can have both. I do think though, it's kind of like um comparing oranges and screwdrivers. Do you know what I mean? Like it just it's it's sort of like saying, oh well, you know, I don't know, God, what what would an analogy that works would what would that be? I can add to my headcount and that could have absolutely nothing to do with my AI investment. Do you see what I mean? if you're a successful business, you can do both.
>> The one doesn't mean the other. And so I think that's that's a bit of a problem in studies like this where they kind of try and equate or bring together um two different factors because the two things can be true. You can invest in AI and you can invest in headcount. If you're a successful company, you can do both. Um, it is true that a lot of companies have been investing in AI and using that as an excuse to cut headcounts, but we all know that that often is kind of a false a fallacy of a of an excuse. Um, because really what they're trying to do is is invest money that they don't have and and divert that away from headcount. That's the easiest place to cut. And then you got a situation where you go, okay, right, you've got companies who have not figured out AI and they don't either they have no interest in it or they they don't really know how to do it properly. And so they've kind of ra it back and decided to employ human beings instead. But again, that's not an either or situation. It's it's it's more complicated.
>> Yeah. Correlation is not causation is I think the the shorthand. Uh I I was going to ask you I suppose does the change in entry- level requirements mean that universities should rethink what they're teaching? But obviously to your point they they kind of are in some ways. But I suppose I will ask instead like how do you think that should look like because I I remember I think when a lot of this AIA will replace everybody not just specific jobs was kind of a big thing people were saying oh we'll teach empathy in schools and emotional intelligence and that kind of thing and we'll teach human human characteristics that we need we've lost through well the internet um and yeah so aside from whether or not they should uh because they are and maybe not doing it in a great way. How how do you think that they should be trying to I don't want to use the word upskill annoyingly but trying to educate graduates and and people going into university and that that those sorts of people to actually be able to have these maybe maybe yeah maybe they have leadership courses or that kind of yeah how do you think it should look like?
>> It's hard, right? All universities have been so good um forever and jumping on the zeitgeist. I mean, I remember, you know, there was a course on like, you know, Taylor Swift songs or like learning Quidditch or the world of Harry Potter, you know, and they they will offer what what they think the people will pay for, frankly. Um and and there are there are certain courses that have been, you know, fallen by the wayside like philosophy. Um in a lot of universities really difficult to to find you know certain topics because they don't feel that there are enough people enough demand for it to offer it. Um so they will they'll jump they'll jump on whatever zygeist thing they think is going to you know create more money for them. They're money-making machines. These are not like charitable organizations. They will just you know offer something they think people will pay for. And so you got a situation you got a generation of people who are desperate. They can all see they're all clever. They can all see the panorama. you know, you're coming out of of school or college and you're in a situation where you know that that the the world is harder than it has been for a little while. Um the labor market is really really difficult. Um you've got AI at the at the gates of recruitment constantly. You know, the amount of people who who are being rejected by AI and their CVs are never seen by a human being is is gobsmacking. and you got a situation for them where they're going, okay, how can I best position myself in this rat race to find a job at the end of this um and universities are appealing to their desperation. And that's why you're seeing a lot of these courses where they're trying to say, okay, AI is not going away. AI is going to dominate the the labor market. AI is going to dominate your workplace if you ever get to it, if you ever get a job, if you're lucky. Um, you have to know how to deal with it. You know, you need to know how to, you know, answer these big questions that your employers will be giving you, which is like, you person, you you must have creativity that's not sat out of your veins from being in the corporate world for the last 20 years. You tell me how to use these AI tools and tell me how to, you know, make more tools that will be even more useful. Um, and the universities are trying to aim courses at answering these questions and being like okay how can we do something beyond coding and more you know something that will allow you to uh control manipulate um create AI tools that will be useful to you uh in in the workplace in the future and if you believe strongly that AI is going to dominate the workplace in the in the coming years then absolutely that makes sense right you need to get to know thy enemy you need to you know you need to know need to know how to control it. You need to know how to position yourself in the best way and you need to also be in a sense um the opposite of a liability for your for your workplace, right? And be able to show that unlike the people that have been figuring it out on the go um you have been trained to do something and you know how to do something that be useful and and will will give them a return straight away. Right? So you got that I can understand that theory, right? But then you got the other side of things where you kind of think about actually the workplace as a whole. It's it's a very um it's a we're in a size we're in a moment of seismic activity in the workplace. You got a situation where you've got an entire industry that is running towards what feels like a cliff, right? And they're going as fast as they can going like we need as much investment as possible. We need as much runway as possible. We're hoping once we get to that cliff we'll just fly. um if that doesn't happen, we're in a situation where you've got a whole generation of people that have been, you know, learning uh skills that are going to be completely useless to them. I'm not saying that AI might completely disappear, but that the and and by the way, when I'm talking about AI in this entire program, I'm talking about generative AI. I'm not talking about like AI as a whole, which I know a lot of people get really pissed off about, rightly, but it's a shorthand thing, so sorry about that, guys. um like generative AI the impact it's had on the workplace and the generative AI tools that have that have come after it they don't necessarily have the permanence that we believe at the moment they might have you know they rely on huge amounts of data they rely on huge amounts of of energy you know it is entirely possible that they become completely redundant should that pace of innovation not continue so you you're either bet as as someone who's going into university as someone who's going into the workplace you either bet on the fact that you believe that AI is going to be around for like the majority of your career or you're learning the equivalent of like metaverse 101 which as we know now at the time seemed like oh that's going to be the biggest thing whatever you know or or you learn that you know just learn about Taylor Swift it's not as useful do you know what I mean like it's it's either going to be super useful or not useful at all and I think you know the the the principle of the matter is it's really difficult to be in that situation at the age of or or whatever. Um, and then so you got other another whole generation of people who are going actually I'm not going to bother with university because I know that's the dynamic and I know that's not going to work for me. So in fact I'm going to go and I'm going to do something completely different that I believe is never going to be impacted by AI. And that's in in some degrees true to some professions. Um, but you know it's it's not an option for many. It's it's a really really difficult situation to to be in. Universities can't be the ones that are deciding what's going to happen in the future labor market. They're not good at predicting anything. They're not good at knowing anything because the people in the labor market themselves, the companies that are employing people, they don't know what's going to go on anyway themselves. So, it's all like we we get all these reports, these PWC, EY, you know, KPMG coming up JP Morgan coming up with all these amazing reports looking at them at the labor market and they're all saying kind of the same thing but kind of different things. But no one really knows how this is going to play out in the next five years. And that's the problem. When you study, when you're spending 38,000 pounds a year at university learning a topic, you kind of want to know it's going to be a little bit more useful than, you know, nothing in five years time. And that's that's the problem, right? And you've got a situation where we can look towards the US to see how that's playing out because it's a lot more serious there. what we're seeing about like the impact on the labor market, the amount of unemployment, like you can kind of tell where things could go. But here in the UK, you got some of the top universities of of in the world. You've got people trying to attract talent in startups and that the the conversation is dominated at the moment by AI and it's like you can't hear anything else. You can't you can't hear beyond that. And so adaptability is like the thing that that is is most prized at the moment. being able to say, "Okay, I've got this transferable skill that I've learned by doing this other thing and and that's how how I can survive in this market." But for graduates, that's really difficult and I really feel for them.
I'm going to do one of the the cruelest questions you can ask which is where do you think the things will be in in five to 10 years because also to go back to what you were saying earlier about the the the companies increasing headcount they were doing so supposedly by uh changing how they operate as a whole around AI rather than like buying a subscription and mandating its usage through arbitrary quotas to token max or whatever if you're Zuckerberg And and yeah, is is that increase in headcount something that you think is going to be maybe the success stories that then go on to define what people do with AI in yeah 5 to 10 years when the use cases are more defined and more industry defined as well. I suppose
>> I'd love to have an optimistic view and be like, "Oh yeah, this is, you know, we're going to figure out a way to use AI in a way that's completely perfect, reliable, infallible, it's going to be awesome. We're going to use it across, you know, all work forces. Um, it's going to transform the way that we work, etc." But that sounds like me three years ago when we were so excited about chat GBT. We were so excited about the potential of this industry and it still hasn't delivered. And that's that's the fundamental problem that I think I'm having. Um, when you see these things playing out in in the real world, it's kind of nasty and it's kind of gnarly, right? You got a situation where you've got line managers whose incentive, like middle managers whose incentive is, you know, to control the budget, to, you know, push push downwards um and and frankly to to continue investing in AI even if it doesn't make any sense. You've got the graduates who are like the scapegoats in all of this who are not finding any jobs, who are not able to get into the market. And if they are getting into the market, they're being told to do jobs that are not logical um without AI. So should that investment be reversed, they're screwed, pardon my language, but that that's that's basically what's going to happen there. And then and then you got a situation where the the entire um pyramid of an organization is being rewritten. Um and all of this relies on on the permanence of AI tools. And I'm not convinced based on what I've seen that this is a good thing. And that's that's the problem. Like you have this, as I said, this cultural change that seems to become really pervasive in the minds of everyone in the corporate sector, but certainly in in the more senior levels where they think certain things are okay and those certain things are not okay. like using AI tools um in a manner that's like willy-nilly that just kind of allows you to kind of offload things that you don't think are important based on your own personal criteria, not based on anything else. Can make your company look silly, can make your whole brand look silly, can make you look incredibly silly, but it doesn't get in their brain. And this is why you see the these things over and over again of mistakes. I feel like that's going to be a huge thing. And the problem we have at the moment is that we're not that many years in, right? the corporate world has not had AI at its fingertips for for so long, right? And already these things are happening. What's going to happen five years down the line? I reckon we're going to have huge howlers, absolutely huge howlers, where we'll have people who are basically using massive amount of shortcuts in their work and more and more are allowing their roles to erode. And that's if they have the budget to do so because we have talked about on this program about AI token maxing about what's going on there where you've got companies who are suddenly realizing that the unlimited AI quotas and the unlimited um you know please use AI as much as possible on everything actually has consequences to their own pockets and they're going oh we want to reverse this. So I can totally see a world in which in the next couple of years companies are kind of railing back on on their on their investment in in AI. They're going, "We're going to curtail this. In fact, we only want you to use AI tools for this and this and this." And for that to have devastating consequences for everyone who's used to having a free-for-all and for them to go, "Oh my god, this is absolutely horrendous because I rely on AI to do all the boring bits of my job because you said that's what it was going to do." And now I'm having to do the boring bits back, but I don't have the help of graduates. I don't have the help of junior people that I can offload that work to because you got rid of them, too. You never hired them. So now all I've got is like a partial AI tool that I've got to figure out how to use and plug in. And that's going to be a real challenge. I think that's that's the more likely scenario that you're going to have a situation where um the people who have been beholden um to to these AI tools because their companies have forced them to be so there's going to be a huge problem if there's a roll back of that if there's like a curtailing of of that investment. And I can see that being a really really big issue for a lot of businesses. uh and then the graduate hires will will happen. it the floodgates will open and again we'll return to normal because it's like you know everything is cyclical um and then suddenly you know AI tools will be used for a little bit and then they'll be used less and less but it won't be the same sort of pervasiveness as we've seen that is unless in the meantime the AI industry manages to somehow you know do that gamechanging revolutionary advancement that means the AI is so pervasive that we cannot avoid it in which case I can see a complete collapse of the labor market because the majority of jobs would just be taken over by more more sophisticated AI. Um, in which case we're going to have a a problem of a different kind which is more it feels certainly more apocalyptic in in nature. Um, I certainly hope that you know the upskilling side of things that people are starting to talk about will happen. I do think that a lot of AI tools are potentially useful. I do think that it's a mistake to wipe out whole skill sets based on the ability of one AI tool that you have as a subscription. It it just it just seems it's it's all I mean it's just yeah it's wild if you've got a subscription to AI you realize that subscription you pay for it every every so often right every quarter every month every whatever like it's not yours you realize that that AI tool is not like it's not unless you've created your own bespoke AI tool that you run on your own data centers that you run on your own chips that's not yours you realize that like you rely on other companies that if you don't pay them or if you can't afford to pay them they're going to take it away do you get that Right. And it's so it's like to me it's this absurdity of like why would you risk changing your organization so profoundly that if your subscription goes away, you have trouble. And yet this is this is the exact thing that we're seeing playing out at the moment. And you knowve talked about this on this program before um where you've got a situation where people are suddenly being told you're using too much AI. Whoops. Um please stop. That's that's a that's the bizarre conundrum that we're finding ourselves in where it's like you know supposedly there's so much demand for it. It's transforming so much, but the things that's transforming is is like uh it's not it's like one step forward, two steps back. So confusing for everyone that's having to be at the epicenter of it who's being told to do one thing and then being told to do the other because I'm fairly sure that a lot of people who have been, you know, told to use AI as part of their performance reviews, I bet you anything. I bet you anything like you know honestly people in the comments section if this has happened to you tell us because I bet you they haven't been told oh no now that we're rolling back our AI investments just forget about that for your performance reviews and actually we'll measure you on these other things I bet you that hasn't happened and so it's just quietly kind of like sh no like just stop using it stop it you know we've used enough for this year you can use it again in January 2027 I can just see that being a thing um so yeah I mean Look, you know, my my view is is not it's not as positive as it used to be because of of what I'm seeing play out in in the real world. And it is it is worrisome. And I think the companies that are really going to stand out are those who can see through that, who can see through all the BS and all the like the the marketing malarkey who have like a proper strategy. Whether it's saying we don't want to use AI at all because we've decided it's we haven't found a tool that is like going to be worthwhile us making this huge investment or we found a tool that actually works for us and and these are the return on investments that we can actually measure and make sense and aren't like vague ambiguous parameters and that's the tool that we're going to carry on with and we're going to carry on investing in people. I mean those are the kind of ones that will stand out in the marketplace, right? You want to work for the people who have a plan. You want to work for the people who are logical about things, right? You don't want to work for the people who are like, "Oh, yeah, we invested in this and like your quoter is to use Claude x amount of time a week for whatever." And oh, but that don't actually do that anymore because we've used Oh, come on. You don't want to work for those people. They're just they're just it's just not good. So I do think that um you know at the moment because of the demand and supply being so different those companies can afford to be going back and forth and you know um and about all sorts of things because the labor market allows them to do so. If we see more companies kind of willing to take a stand on like what they want to do and they understand that in order to hire talent that is going to be you know really really important in the future and like make them stand out and not have any of the AI generated hallucinations that might become pervasive in in the rest of the world if they want to be reliable if they want to be trustworthy you know do you want to rely on a human being or an AI tool that's that's the question they just need to be asking and you know I think A A lot of companies just don't know the answer right now.
>> Well, Natasha Bernau, thanks for taking the time.
>> Thank you for having me.
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