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Will AI make or take the next billion jobs? | The Development Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Hello everyone. Over the next decade, more than a billion young people will enter the workforce in emerging markets. And the World Bank Group president Ajay Banga has talked a lot about a potential demographic dividend. If enough jobs are created for these young people, it's growth, prosperity that could benefit everyone. That's with the right foundations, of course in place. If we get it wrong, the future doesn't look so bright. And just as that wave hits, artificial intelligence explodes. Machines that write code, diagnose design can change everything. Which brings us to the real question. Will AI take the next billion jobs or help create them? Let's begin by heading to Nairobi, Kenya, also known as The Silicon Savannah. IHub is an innovation and hacker space for the tech community. So what do people there think about the future of jobs and AI work
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B
that probably used to take us a week, now you can do in an hour.
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C
AI sometimes helps me to move faster. It helps me to do administrative duties or duties that you can automate.
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B
I see it more of replacing tasks and not really jobs and leave room
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C
for me to be a strategic thinker.
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B
However, we are starting to see once the AI becomes really, really smart, people losing their jobs because after they train the AI, they eventually are training the AI to replace them from the job. As much as you can do a lot of stuff with AI, it can never be a substitute for human interaction. So I don't think it's going to take my job as long as people still exist, help people still need that human connection. AI has taken over the conversation. So people, even when you look at products, they have to insert that. My solution is AI powered, but they're not really focusing on the use case of the problem AI solves. So this kind of creates a dependency or rather a hype that people are jumping onto as opposed to thinking of ways how this can help. Especially in a continent like Africa, for us to solve our basic problems, it is more about intuition than calculation. Personally, I don't think AI will replace me. AI will actually amplify human creativity and actually not replace it.
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C
It enables us or it challenges us
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A
to think about the ethics of AI,
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C
how to use it for the common good, you know, how to maximize on it, and then also how to think about putting guardrails.
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B
I think for the people sitting in positions of power and influence, we need to know how to support the youth, especially in Africa, because we are going to have a billion new people coming into the job market.
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A
So before we debate policy, before we panic, let's spot the opportunity with our very first Guest on the show, Marina Mogilko, also known to millions as the Silicon Valley Girl, has built businesses, media platforms, and a global audience around just one idea. AI isn't a threat, it's leverage. Marina, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining us. I want to start off by understanding a bit about your own experience in trying to understand the future of AI and its impact on jobs. You had an insightful conversation with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn a while ago, who's brought on his own AI avatar onto the platform. What was one thing you learned from him?
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C
First of all, thank you so much for having me on your podcast and thank you for bringing up one of my favorite conversations on Silicon Valley Girl. His thing is that more and more people are going to deploy AI and they will need people who know how to code. But the way I understand it, you know, we have this team of 35 people, we run this media company. Podcast is part of it. And of course I want to deploy AI, but I asked myself, do I really need, like, a developer who is, you know, who understands code deeply? And I realized that with current tools, one of our producers could actually learn how to vibe code and do dashboards. So for basic stuff, I feel like anyone can spend a few weeks learning vibe coding and they could start helping companies integrate AI. And the way we think about hiring these days is that we're not hiring just a person, we're hiring a person and their AI stack that comes with it. Back in the day, I would have to hire a few people, teach them how to do that. Now, I'd ideally take a customer support consultant that's going to come with his AI agents, his whole system set up, and I'm going to pay a fraction of what I would have paid five years ago to have an amazing customer service run by, you know, partly human, partly AI. It's just things are becoming much more accessible for small medium businesses. And I see this as a huge opportunity for people who want to build something.
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A
And specifically to your business. Do you see AI as a threat or an opportunity for content creators? I'm already hearing of AI anchors being launched by traditional news agencies, which is a bit worrying.
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C
I think it's both. I think it's a great opportunity, also a threat. From the perspective that we're getting flooded by content right ago, in order to create a piece of content, you needed, well, you just needed a phone, but also you needed an idea. And if it's like a talking head piece of content or even a written content for LinkedIn, you needed to put in a lot of work to come up with the idea to put it in the right words. Now you basically ask your ChatGPT. Good thing is we have algorithms and if it's AI slop, it's not going to get promoted. A great piece of content created by AI actually requires hours and hours of human work. So I feel like AI is empowering people to create content and not only people who are maybe like well spoken or have a good camera, but also people who are just good at prompting and describing their idea to AI. And it's still a lot of work. So do creators, can creators get more efficient? Yes. Do you need to start using AI to compete with them? Absolutely.
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A
You know, Marina, your LinkedIn profile says that you're helping ambitious people worldwide go from passion to profit. How so?
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C
Going from passion to profit is actually my personal story. I was born and raised in Russia and my biggest passion was English. I was able to go for two weeks to the UK to learn English. It was part of the exchange program that my school ran. And it was the most transformative experience in my life. And I kept thinking, how can I make it business? I didn't want to become a teacher though. I seriously considered that. But I'm like, I really want this study abroad experience to be available to more people. And this is how I started my company, helping people learn languages abroad. So I feel like the best thing you can do in your life is just follow your passion and think about different ways you can monetize it. So that's my mission, to empower people to think about what they love most and these days use AI tools to make it a reality.
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A
But Marina, how do you follow your passion when your passion is being disrupted by AI?
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C
As an English language enthusiast, I can totally see how I can ask my chatgpt to teach me whatever Italian. I also speak German. But at the same time there is nothing that really replaces the experience of going and staying with a local family, interacting in this language. Just a different type of brain connection that's required. And I was just talking to the founder of Duolingo. He highlighted something I understand from my own experience as well. You always need a human to guide you through the learning process.
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A
Thank you so much for your insights. Marina. Before we let you go, if you had to tell a 22 year old entering the workforce right now anywhere in the world, the one top skill they need to stay relevant in an AI economy, what would that be?
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C
Absolutely the top skill is curiosity and also positivity. You know, again, uh, A lot of people who are 22 today think they are entering the job market in the worst time because so many things are getting automated. So there's always something going on. The thing is, I feel when you're 22 today, you were born in the best time ever because you are the one whose brain is very flexible and adaptive. You are social media native, you are computer native. I got my first computer when I was 12 and all I did was play the Sims. I didn't really explore the world of automations and now it's available to everyone. So you are the one those small to medium business owners are looking for to help them enter this new era. Because you understand what's going on, you've been there and you breathe this air of AI and social media and everything that's going on. So find a niche that excites you the most. Be the one who introduces that shift to businesses who've been around for a while. And you're never going to be at a job if you deploy this curiosity and positivity mindset.
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A
So that's the opportunity. The next billion jobs. Will AI make them or take them? I think the big question that we are trying to address is whether AI will be the engine that transforms jobs of the future or will it be the disruptor that, dare I say, kills jobs for the future? I'm joined by a very special panel on this episode of jobs and AI. Sharad Raghavan is director of LinkedIn's Economic Research Institute. And my second guest on the panel is Mohammed Issa, who's the chief investment officer at ifc, leading global venture capital and direct technology investments. It's so lovely to have both of you on the show. Thank you very much for your time.
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D
Thank you.
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A
First and foremost, let's start off with the big number that the World Bank Group has been projecting in terms of its jobs projections going forward. The World Bank Group is saying that 1.2 billion young people will be joining the workforce over the next decade and potentially there'll be only 400 million jobs for them. Which means that there's gonna be a glaring gap of 800 million young people risking not having jobs. I wanna humanize this conversation a bit and understand from both of you, how do you feel feel about that number, 800 million? Sharif, I want to start off with you.
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E
Sure. So first of all, really appreciate you having me on here. So this morning I actually walked into a glass window or door, so hopefully the bruise is not too noticeable. Thank you. About this issue, probably thinking and getting stressed all right, the way we look at it, LinkedIn, I mean, our mission is to generate economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And so we do that by looking at, we call it our economic graph. It's the, the millions of jobs we have on our platform, the incredible base of our members. And so we use that to understand what are the trends in skills, what are the trends in jobs. I think it's actually pretty helpful to look back at other historical contexts. And so if you look at, for example, when the PC was invented, there was a lot of the same sort of anxiety. Now I think we learned two really interesting things about that. One is it takes a bit of time for technology to diffuse. And secondly, the productivity data that we eventually saw in this whole like PC boom took a long time to figure out. And so when you hear that number about, let's say, the risk of those millions of jobs, is it really due to AI? Is it really due to macro? It's too early to tell.
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A
No, it's too early to say. I know, but at a personal level, Sharadin Mohammed. When I heard the number for the very first time, I went numb Mohammad.
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D
So first of all, thank you for having me. This is a very important topic and to frame it in the right way, before AI, this issue was important. We have this sort of jobs deficit gap coming in, emerging market. I think AI has just increased a sense of urgency because that's now having a huge impact on that situation. We have to acknowledge that there's huge levels of anxiety at the younger generation. The difference with AI is the speed. Right? The pace of job displacement is very, very high. And to give you some data points, it took what, 15 years for penetration of PCs to hit a certain point. ChatGPT reached what, 200 million people in 12 to 18 months. Even universities in the US and other parts of the world were not quick enough to react. And this is not, you know, it's not discriminating between, you know, Ivy League versus, you know, state schools. It's all the same across the board.
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E
I would love to jump in here because I have a son who's a freshman actually at Stanford, and I. What I've seen in talking with him is one, there's this incredible interest in sort of combining like science based majors plus majors that deal with humanities, social sciences, really, that human connection. And we actually see it in our LinkedIn data. We publish a list every February called Skills on the Rise. We just did this a month or so ago. And if you look at the skills that are Rising to the top there. These are the skills that are in demand by employers but also being added to members profiles. A lot of those skills are AI of course, but you still see very human capable human capacity skills on there, people management, stakeholder communications. Now to go back to the story about college, I agree there's anxiety in entering the job market. Again, it's hard to disinterpret tangle. How much of this is macro, how much of this is AI? If you actually look at computer science graduates, we're pretty much at an all time high in terms of the supply of computer science graduates that are entering the market. So we could be in a situation where the perfect storm, we're at the peak of supply of graduates and the job market's slower because of the macro environment. What I wanted to point out is that at Stanford two of his good friends have actually taken leaves to do their own startups. They're both AI related. And so there is also a lot of this spark of entrepreneurial activity that's being caused. AI is enabling a lot of creation and a lot of those companies will be hiring folks as well.
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D
I think you've touched on a very important point which is now what is the opportunity to use AI? So I look at the world and say in emerging markets an AI company could be a fast food chain, a retailer, a laundromat. Why? Because if you look at their standalone non AI version has poor economics, low margin. The opportunity for us is to use AI to improve the operations of these businesses. That is think of the world as what does tech enabled businesses look like?
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A
Absolutely.
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D
So all we need is companies that spit out a lot of data. So now you have the ability to actually build. Yeah. And build a vertically focused AI application that says listen, I can transform what used to be a 5% margin business into a 15 or 20% margin business. And that opens up a whole gamut of opportunities in terms of the investable universe which goes back to what are the jobs of those 800 million going to be?
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E
Yeah, right.
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D
It's not going to be just computer science programmers.
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A
No, not at all.
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D
Right. And that is not where the most of the labor force in emerging market is anyways. Right. So if you look at Anthropic, they just released their actual survey of use cases and you can see in the US and Europe it's white collar jobs. That's the first use case. Programmers, legal marketing, et cetera. And what's not touched are the hard jobs like construction, retail, blue collar jobs. Right. Those in the West. So but again, the answer is not everybody should go, go study plumbing, right? That's not the answer. It just shows you that if a person who's running a plumbing business that adopts AI has a much more durable business opportunity than a computer programmer.
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E
Our job, like I mentioned, is to generate economic opportunity for the global workforce. So one of the sort of mandates of our team is to look at where we see, you know, jobs that are increasing in demand, skills that are increasing demand. And so the jobs that are increasing in demand, at least when we looked at it a few months ago, jobs in AI, like technical jobs, but a lot of jobs in healthcare, a lot of jobs in real estate. We see jobs in sales and business
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A
development in new categories that are coming up.
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E
Well, like data annotation is a big thing because a lot of these models need to be trained. We see a huge ecosystem around data center jobs. In fact, we just published a report on that, on that sector and we saw there was been a pretty decent size of job creation around data centers. And this is not just sort of the engineers, but it's the technicians, it's the plumbers, it's the H Vac, all of that ecosystem around data centers creates demand for occupations, AI for development.
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A
How do we push that theme forward? How are you investing in and around businesses that are focused on AI for development?
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D
So there's very positive news coming out of Emory markets, right? And I think again, it hadn't had the same impact like the short term impact that AI has had in the west because again, the job profile in the emerging markets is different. But we are seeing, like I mentioned before, the opportunity to leapfrog using AI to tackle problems that before were difficult. A great example of this is innovations we're seeing on how to solve healthcare in Africa because we don't have patient health records, right? And we talk about personalized medicine and getting rid of costs in the system, improving access to care. Well, we have invested in companies that are using AI to digitize healthcare in Africa and they're doing very well because they're using AI to actually build synthetic data to create the patient health records. But they're also now tying in the whole ecosystem of healthcare insurance providers, consumers, the government, who is a single payer, in some cases pharmacies.
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A
I do want to get your sense Sharath on for the developed world. What does this mean for the hybrid work model? What does this mean for the gig economy? What does this mean for the future of traditional roles?
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E
So I think we're seeing one aspect we just talked about was entrepreneurship a little bit earlier. And if we look at LinkedIn data, we see that there's been a growth in over 60% globally, year over year of members putting sort of founder, entrepreneurial like, titles on their profile. So that could be a signal that people are thinking about sort of their side hustles. They're thinking about, you know, starting a company. One of the data points that really stands out to me is that we just simply asked a really basic question. You know, if you look back 15 years ago and you compare it to people now, how many jobs do they have? Do they have, like, more the same, you know, less jobs? Are people staying in their jobs more or, like, longer? And what we found is that they have two times as many jobs compared to someone that started their career 15 years ago. What's the implications of that, if you're a young person, is that, you know, you have to be flexible about your career. A lot of people are thinking more about, as you're saying, the side hustles, thinking about how to expand the career in different ways. But it's also a story about reskilling.
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A
What about career progression in the sense that earlier the organizational structure used to be very linear. Entry level, mid level, senior level. Right. And now then every now and then you hear, oh, maybe analysts in consulting firms will be gone.
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D
Correct. Career definitely has changed.
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E
Right.
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D
And I think it's because certain things are going to disappear and new things are going to come and take its place. So as I mentioned before, the whole displacement, what are the new AI jobs going to be?
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A
Senior guy is doing the work of an analyst and taking out a full spreadsheet. Like he's doing all the work with the analysis on a company. Then where is the replacement? I see the displacement, I don't see the replacement.
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D
But this goes all the way to college and K through 12, which is, what are we teaching these kids? What are we preparing them for? So I think this goes all the way because you have to fix the problem early so that you're developing the right skill sets for high school and college.
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E
So our CEO Ryan Roslansky, and our Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, Aneesh Raman, they actually just published a book called Open to Work, and that book talks about the career ladder and how it is changing. So I agree with you. The career ladder is changing partly because of that stat. I just mentioned two times as many jobs someone's going to hold in their career. And so we're going to want to mentor people, we're going to want to Teach people. So I think that's really important to understand that in organizations there's always going to be a need to have different levels of people there. So you can actually feel like you're working with people and colleagues, like it's fundamentally human. Now to get back to your question about rhetoric versus hype. I think folks have a lot of incentives for creating sort of the loudest prediction of where the market may be heading in terms of AI.
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A
How fast is the pace of disruption
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D
according to both of you, Reality or hype? Yeah, I mean, so my view is, okay, there's stuff that is really for generating momentum for stocks because every time a company says they're axing 10,000 workers, their stock price jumps up 10%. Right. Those jobs you're terminating, right. Those are consumers, those are buyers of things. They travel, they go to restaurants, they consume things. Right.
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A
It's a feedback loop.
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D
So at some point you fall into this trap of saying, I've destroyed jobs for short term efficiency and long term demand destruction. So it's not sustainable. In the past two years, who do you think has been the fastest growing AI company globally? What's your guess?
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A
You know, because you're asking it the way you're asking it. I would say emerging markets.
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D
What would you say?
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E
I would say probably emerging market for one of them.
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D
So it came out of Kazakhstan.
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E
Hey, we're right by which sector in content creation.
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A
Okay, that's interesting.
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D
Yeah. You're not seeing LLMs being developed in the emerging markets because you're not seeing the hyperscalers because you need compute, connectivity, power. Those things are big infrastructure gaps in emerging markets. But using AI in emerging markets is not. You don't need to build that to be able to use it. And that is the opportunity in emerging markets. Right. It's finding innovative people who have really good ICT skills, have focused on a business problem and now have the tools to compete with Silicon Valley. So we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs saying we're going to start an AI company that's going after embedded finance and financial services and fintech or healthcare or retail.
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A
What's your advice on this issue of reality versus rhetoric?
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D
I ignore it.
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A
Ignore it. Okay, what's your advice?
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E
It reminds me of a joke. Can I tell a joke?
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A
Yeah, yeah, of course.
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E
Economists have predicted five of the last three recessions. Yeah, that. I'm done.
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D
My sister's an economist. I am as well.
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A
How does that equation work, I wonder?
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E
Sorry, go ahead.
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D
No, I was going to say when this whole AI issue came up, she Said, oh, it's nothing because we've seen this play out before. And I kept telling her, well, it's different this time because it's much more broad based. Right?
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A
You don't say it's different this time.
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D
Exactly. So now I think there's much more recognition that, okay, maybe we need to think about the impact of AI differently than previous tech disruptions.
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E
So kind of all jokes aside, I will say that if you think about what AI is doing, it's also actually accelerating a lot of demand for products. And so this is concept of this paradox that actually when a technology makes it easier and it automates a task, it actually can increase demand for it. And so all that's saying is that I kind of ignore all that, you know, hype. I kind of ground myself in the data and look at what we're seeing now and try to.
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A
And it's not as daunting as it's
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E
being projected when we look at the data. We actually just published a pretty detailed report about this in January. We looked at all the hiring data, the macro data, the AI data.
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A
Yeah, Sharath, I just want to come in there because you, I think in one of your reports you also highlighted how AI has moved from being a tool to a strategic asset for small businesses aiming to stay resilient and grow in 2020. Adopting AI businesses can streamline operations, reduce costs and accelerate decision making, creating space for innovation and relationship building.
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D
Absolutely.
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A
Which sounds very productive. It sounds very optimistic about AI being an integral part of our lives. Without upending things, one of our core
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D
developmental thesis is how do you ensure SME competitiveness in emerging markets? And AI is the perfect tool. These small businesses in emerging markets compete globally. Right. So the only way you get them a safe footing, equal footing, is by helping them adopt technology and AI. Yeah, yeah.
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E
So on that, absolutely agree. You know, we've actually spent a lot of time thinking about SMBs, small medium sized businesses. We see their adoption rates of AI literacy tools and skills increasing faster than large enterprises. And specifically you think about developing markets, there's this concept of sort of the missing middle. You have a lot of small firms that are really sort of micro firms. You have a lot of large firms. Nothing in the middle, but nothing in the middle. And that's not a healthy sort of ecosystem or economy. And so if AI tools can make people more productive, can increase their viability so they can move into that middle chain, you're actually going to have a lot more healthier economic structure.
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A
And so the last three questions have to Be very, very quick on your feet. Is AI making hiring fairer or just faster?
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E
I think it's both. At least from LinkedIn side. You know, we think very deeply about how to make hiring fairer. In fact, one of the early research streams that our team worked on was looking at hiring from a skills first mandate. And so the old signals of sort of like school or like what job you had before, you know, we're actually trying to make our tools highlight the skills that people have and how it relates to the job. So I think it can do both. Okay, great.
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A
Mohammed, what AI businesses will you back at this stage?
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E
Top three healthcare applications.
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D
They're all vertical applications of AI, so healthcare, financial services and public education.
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A
Okay. In emerging markets. Okay. That's where the valuation risk adjustment.
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D
Well first, that's where our mandate is. But second, that's true, but second, no but second, this is where we see the biggest problems to solve.
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A
Okay. If There is a 22 year old listening to us right now, fresh out of school, looking at his career, what is the one thing that he or she should do right now for future proofing their career?
- [27:39]
E
Always seek to learn. Find what you're interested in, what you're passionate about and seek out mentors.
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A
That's like 40,000ft, Sharif.
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E
Seek out mentors. So I was about to say to make it really practical, like you're never too old or too young to have a mentor.
- [27:55]
D
The training videos, the classes that are being offered online in terms of what is AI and how to use AI, anthropic has a great system. YouTube has a great system. I would say spend some time going down the rabbit hole and trying to understand or build a basic understanding. Then go to any of your local businesses and say, listen, I'm going to solve this problem for you using AI for free. So basically use that as a way for you to actually get real world application training. So go to your local shop and say, listen, I'm going to help you acquire more customers using AI. Right? So fail or try to learn by doing actual real world projects. Even if it doesn't succeed, you'll come out of it with practical AI skills that are not just theoretical.
- [28:41]
E
In a way, we're kind of saying very similar things. It's also like experiment. Absolutely right. It's, you know, think about how you can experiment with your, your own career in a way, right? Think about like where your skills can be really well suited and you know, find a match there. And maybe that is going out and talking to small businesses and seeing of where you can plug in and help with AI, learn those AI literacy skills that we see are rising so fast, you know, in. In the economy, but it's also going out there and actually interacting with people in the world, learning those human. Human, like, really core human skills are what makes work work and what should be the mindset. Be curious.
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D
Go fail multiple times.
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A
Yeah. Thank you very much, both of you. Thank you so very much. We'll see you next time.