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Is AI Coming for Your Job? Depends Who You Are · Common Sense - Red State Finance

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] From Red State Finance, this is Common Sense: the news, the money, and the nonsense explained for people who think. Here are your hosts, Cole and Savannah.
• 0:15
  January, Amazon cuts sixteen thousand corporate jobs. The memo doesn't say the letters AI once. But? But back in June, the CEO already told staff that AI would shrink the corporate workforce over the next few years.
• 0:30
  Okay. Now, Abilene, Texas, a local electrician loses two of his lead men and a bunch of helpers to the data center down the road because it's paying double what he can. Same economy, same AI boom.
• 0:44
  One guy's getting a pink slip. The other one's getting poached. So is AI coming for your job? Turns out it depends who you are. Today on Common Sense.
• 0:55
  Is the AI job apocalypse real, or is your boss just using it as an excuse? Who should be worried? Like actually worried. Why electricians are suddenly making six figures.
• 1:07
  And what to actually do about it, whether you're at a desk or raising kids. Stick around. [upbeat music] All right. Welcome to Common Sense from Red State Finance. Not left, not right. Just over it. I'm Savannah.
• 1:24
  I'm Cole. And today, the question somebody's going to bring up at Thanksgiving this year: Is a robot taking my job? Or my kid's job, which is honestly the scarier version. Let's do the scary side first.
• 1:38
  Mustafa Suleyman runs AI at Microsoft.
• 1:41
  In February, he told the Financial Times, quote, "If you're a lawyer, an accountant, a project manager, or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated within the next twelve to eighteen months."
• 1:53
  Twelve to eighteen months. That's like now. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said last year AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs within one to five years. And it's not just talk anymore?
• 2:09
  Not just talk. Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracks layoff announcements. In May, AI was the number one reason companies gave for cutting jobs. Forty percent of all announced cuts that month.
• 2:21
  In January, it was seven percent. Seven to forty in five months. Wow. And Bank of America looked at the S&P 500. Those companies added more than three million jobs over eight straight years.
• 2:35
  Then last year, total headcount fell by about four hundred thousand. First drop since twenty sixteen. [upbeat music] Okay, but let me be the skeptic for a second because some of this smells like a press release. Go.
• 2:50
  Resume.org surveyed a thousand hiring managers. Fifty-nine percent admitted they play up AI when they explain layoffs or hiring freezes because it sounds better than, "We're short on money." AI washing. AI washing.
• 3:06
  And an MIT study looked at company AI projects last year and found about ninety-five percent had no measurable impact on profit at all. So the robots aren't even doing the job yet. In a lot of places, no.
• 3:20
  But here's my take. It doesn't matter if your boss is fibbing about why. If AI is the excuse that makes Wall Street clap, you're still the one carrying a box to your car. And Wall Street does clap.
• 3:32
  In February, Block, the company behind Cash App, said it's cutting nearly half its staff, more than four thousand people, to lean on AI. The stock jumped as much as twenty-four percent that night. Twenty-four percent.
• 3:47
  That's the incentive right there. [upbeat music] So who should actually be worried? Group one, if your whole job happens on a screen: desk, mouse, keyboard. So most of America. A lot of it.
• 4:03
  The World Economic Forum surveyed employers on the jobs expected to shrink fastest. Near the top: bank tellers, data entry clerks, cashiers, administrative assistants.
• 4:14
  Basically, if a screen is the whole job, a screen can probably do the job. Group two, just another employee at a big company.
• 4:23
  Salesforce cut its support team from about nine thousand people to five thousand because its AI agents now handle a lot of those customer conversations, these days more than the humans do.
• 4:34
  And just this week, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about sixty thousand employees. That's roughly a quarter of the company. While it spends a fortune on AI data centers. Here's a check. Please leave.
• 4:48
  If you're a line item, not a relationship, you're a spreadsheet decision. That's the rule. [upbeat music] Group three, and this one's close to home for us, cold outreach: sales emails, sales calls.
• 5:02
  Ugh, I know where this is going. One well-known study in twenty nineteen found cold emails got a reply about eight and a half percent of the time.
• 5:11
  Instantly, one of the big email platforms says the average in its latest report is about three and a half percent. Different studies measured differently, but the direction is obvious.
• 5:22
  Because everybody's using the same AI to write them. Right. Outreach became free, so everybody's doing it, so nobody's reading it. Your phone screens the call. Gmail eats the email.
• 5:35
  And if it does get through, the person on the other end figures it's a bot anyway. Which, to be fair, it usually is. Trust is the thing that ran out. [upbeat music] Okay, enough doom. Who's going to bank?
• 5:49
  Group one, and I love this, people who work with their hands. For thirty years, kids were told, "Go to college, or you'll end up doing manual labor." And now the hands are winning.
• 6:01
  OpenAI told the White House last October that its data center plans over the next five years would need about twenty percent of the existing skilled trades workforce: electricians, mechanics, that kind of thing.
• 6:13
  Just OpenAI. And electricians are the big one, right? Huge. The electricians union says forty-five to seventy percent of a data center's construction budget goes to the electrical contractor. So what does that pay?
• 6:27
  Fortune looked at the union local in Northern Virginia, the data center capital of the world. Apprentices start around twenty-six bucks an hour. A journeyman makes about fifty-nine fifty an hour.
• 6:38
  That's over a hundred twenty thousand a year, plus a pension. Okay, I'm listening. On some big data center jobs, union electricians are making up to a hundred thirty an hour before overtime, according to the trade press.
• 6:52
  The national median is around thirty. And Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO, said at Davos that salaries in these trades have nearly doubled. And developers are building man camps out in rural Texas.
• 7:05
  Free steaks, golf simulators, game rooms, just to keep crews on site around the clock. Steak and golf to run wire. Meanwhile, the accountant's getting a calendar invite titled Quick Chat.
• 7:16
  The AI that's replacing the accountant can't run without the electrician. That's the irony. And it's not just electricians. HVAC, because these buildings need serious cooling. Plumbers, linemen, welders.
• 7:31
  The government expects about eighty-one thousand electrician job openings every year for the next decade. [upbeat music] Group two: who's winning? Small business owners, creators, side hustlers. This one's underrated.
• 7:46
  One person with AI can now do what used to take a whole team. The website, the bookkeeping, the marketing, the customer emails. Stuff you used to hire an agency for, you can do on a Tuesday night.
• 7:58
  So big companies use AI to cut people, and little guys use it to compete with big companies. Same tool, totally different use. Quick break.
• 8:07
  If you've got a buddy whose job just got reorganized, our shop has a shirt for that. Not left, not right, just over it. Links in the show notes. Made by humans, mostly.
• 8:20
  And group three: whoever already owns the relationship. If cold outreach is dying, the person you already trust wins.
• 8:28
  Your plumber, the one whose number you actually pick up, your financial guy, the newsletter you actually read. Speaking of which, this is exactly why you're listening to a newsletter podcast and not reading a cold email.
• 8:41
  Ha. Self-aware. I like it. [upbeat music] So what do you actually do about it? If you're at a desk, become the person who runs the AI, not the person it replaces. PwC tracks this.
• 8:56
  Jobs that ask for AI skills are paying about sixty-two percent more than comparable jobs that don't. Sixty-two percent. That's not a raise. That's a new tax bracket. If you've got kids, take trade school seriously.
• 9:10
  An electrician apprenticeship is usually four to five years, and apprentices get paid from day one. No student loans. If you've got a side hustle, now's the time. It's never been cheaper to start a business.
• 9:22
  And everybody, build relationships. Own your audience. Don't bet your whole life on one employer's good mood. So here's where we land. AI isn't coming for everyone. It's coming for the replaceable.
• 9:35
  So the question isn't will AI take my job, it's is my job a task or a relationship? That's the show.
• 9:43
  If you want to start that side hustle this weekend, grab eighteen side hustles that could cover your mortgage in the vault. Links in the description along with the free newsletter.
• 9:53
  And reply to the newsletter and tell us your job. We'll tell you how worried to be. Best answers might end up on a future episode. See you next time.
• 10:01
  [upbeat music] You've been listening to Common Sense from Red State Finance. If this made you think, share it with one person who needs to hear it. Get the free Common Sense newsletter at redstatefinance.com.
• 10:16
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• 10:28
  Common Sense, for people who think. [upbeat music]