What to Do if AI Comes for Your Job — with Aneesh Raman

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.