What to Do if AI Comes for Your Job — with Aneesh Raman
Episode
29 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Productivity, Investing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Three-Bucket Job Audit: Categorize every task in your current role into three buckets: what AI already handles (research, drafts, coding), what you do alongside AI to elevate output, and what you do collaboratively with other people. If the majority of your tasks fall in bucket one, begin building skills in buckets two and three immediately before your role erodes further.
- ✓Skills Over Job Titles: Mid-career workers should stop defining themselves by job titles and instead articulate their transferable skills. Raman's own career spanned war correspondent, Obama speechwriter, and startup growth roles — none connected by title, all connected by explanatory storytelling and coalition-building. Identifying your core skill set makes you resilient regardless of how specific roles change or disappear.
- ✓AI Productivity Gap Is Real: A MIT study found 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered zero measurable P&L impact. Wharton research places AI's contribution to productivity growth at one basis point in 2025. Across all US workers, AI saves roughly 1.5% of total work hours. The gap between AI capability in controlled tests and real-world business transformation remains substantial.
- ✓Liberal Arts and Storytelling as Durable Skills: Rather than defaulting to CS degrees, college students should develop storytelling — the ability to take data, construct a narrative arc, and move people to action. Writing fundamentals, per Strunk and White's Elements of Style, underpin every presentation, pitch, and persuasion format. This skill compounds across careers in ways that narrowly technical credentials do not.
- ✓AI Layoff Narrative Is Partly Corporate Cover: Many companies attributing layoffs to AI adoption are masking post-COVID overhiring and weak demand generation. CEOs framing workforce reductions as AI-driven efficiency gains receive better stock market reactions than those admitting managerial errors. Workers should distinguish genuine AI displacement from rebranded cost-cutting when evaluating job market signals and their own career risk.
What It Covers
LinkedIn's Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman joins The Prof G Pod to answer listener questions about AI's impact on the labor market, addressing concerns from mid-career workers aged 40-60, college students choosing majors, and whether companies are overstating AI's near-term productivity impact across industries.
Key Questions Answered
- •Three-Bucket Job Audit: Categorize every task in your current role into three buckets: what AI already handles (research, drafts, coding), what you do alongside AI to elevate output, and what you do collaboratively with other people. If the majority of your tasks fall in bucket one, begin building skills in buckets two and three immediately before your role erodes further.
- •Skills Over Job Titles: Mid-career workers should stop defining themselves by job titles and instead articulate their transferable skills. Raman's own career spanned war correspondent, Obama speechwriter, and startup growth roles — none connected by title, all connected by explanatory storytelling and coalition-building. Identifying your core skill set makes you resilient regardless of how specific roles change or disappear.
- •AI Productivity Gap Is Real: A MIT study found 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered zero measurable P&L impact. Wharton research places AI's contribution to productivity growth at one basis point in 2025. Across all US workers, AI saves roughly 1.5% of total work hours. The gap between AI capability in controlled tests and real-world business transformation remains substantial.
- •Liberal Arts and Storytelling as Durable Skills: Rather than defaulting to CS degrees, college students should develop storytelling — the ability to take data, construct a narrative arc, and move people to action. Writing fundamentals, per Strunk and White's Elements of Style, underpin every presentation, pitch, and persuasion format. This skill compounds across careers in ways that narrowly technical credentials do not.
- •AI Layoff Narrative Is Partly Corporate Cover: Many companies attributing layoffs to AI adoption are masking post-COVID overhiring and weak demand generation. CEOs framing workforce reductions as AI-driven efficiency gains receive better stock market reactions than those admitting managerial errors. Workers should distinguish genuine AI displacement from rebranded cost-cutting when evaluating job market signals and their own career risk.
Notable Moment
Raman draws a parallel to early electricity adoption, where factory owners simply swapped steam engines for electric motors and saw no productivity gains. Only when factories redesigned entire floor layouts around the new technology did output surge — suggesting companies today are repeating the same mistake with AI implementation.
Episode Transcript
Support for the show comes from Northwest Registered Agent. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business. You start a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. That includes registered agent service, a business address, operating agreement, domain, website, professional email, phone number, and built in privacy. In other words, your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree. Oh, hey. Sorry. Love to chat, but I'm busy shopping all the rollbacks and more at Walmart. Grab a what? Cancel that. I gotta grab these big savings on the Walmart app online and in store, like, right now. See who? Nope. Unavailable. The only thing I wanna see are the prices just lowered on Tech Home and all my must haves. Wait. You wanna shop Walmart with me? Alrighty. I think I can fit you in. Wharton professor Ethan Malek says that with AI, his students are doing a semester's a semester's worth of work in just a couple of days. In Mollick's classroom, AI is required. I'm Henry Blodgett, and this week on solutions, I talked to professor Mollick about how he's radically transformed how he teaches and how he continues to test test the boundaries of what AI can and cannot do. Follow solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear our conversation. Welcome to Apopje on the future of work in AI, a special two part series on who wins, who loses, and how AI will reshape the labor market. We're joined by Anish Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn. Together, we'll be answering your questions on what AI means for workers, which jobs are most at risk, and where the biggest opportunities lie. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Anish, you ready? I'm ready. Let's do it. Question number one. Our first question comes from oh, what a day 10 on Reddit, and they say, can you discuss the future for a 40 to 60 year old with a family and bills dealing with age discrimination and young people from each side when AI comes for 60% of existing white collar jobs. Anish, you kick us off. Yeah. I well, first, everyone's feeling a lot of stress right now, a lot of anxiety right now. I'm grateful for the question because that's my peer group, and I think all the conversations we've been having about entry level work and what should new grads, think about as they enter a really tough hiring market, can make folks in that age group feel like, oh, this has changed that's gonna hit those coming into the labor market. We're sort of at this place where we're gonna ride out the work we've done. It's not coming for us. It's …
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Books
Elements of StyleRecommendedby Strunk and White
“Writing fundamentals, per Strunk and White's Elements of Style, underpin every presentation, pitch, and persuasion format.”
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