June 4th 2025 newsletter
A thought: Consider the biggest lessons you’ve learned in the last year. Share it boldly with someone else. We learn and grow together, we’re meant to share what we’ve learned.
Anthropic (the maker of Claude) said that AI will take a bunch of entry level corporate jobs. He's not the only one saying this, many others have. He did predict unemployment hitting 20% which would obviously be catastrophic.
What they're trying to say, and saying it poorly, is that AI will take tasks.
Last year, I showed a colleague how to do things with AI and they generated their entire marketing campaign, the campaign that took 6 months to create before, in about an hour. Was it perfect? Of course not. But you can foresee a world where this task goes from 6 months to a week or two. What does this person now do with all of that time?
I think it's helpful to think of the future here, I envision AI doing lots of tasks, with some varying degree of success, and the human having to review and step in to take that job from 80% to 100% done.
I think it's clear that less people will be able to do the same amount of tasks. But we are great at coming up with new tasks.
The people I worry about most are late career people who do a lot of repetitive tasks. They are the least likely to want to learn new technology, the easiest to replace with an ai bot. An AI can book travel, build PowerPoints, create invoices and make sure they're paid.
One task I think is squarely in the AI wheelhouse is anything around document research. Marketing research or legal research may become a one person job with a team of AI doing the grunt work and the human refining. McKinsey might be a lot leaner very soon.
If you work primarily off the computer, congrats, you're off the hook for now.
But if you wanted to assess whether your job was in danger of AI in the near term, try and replicate your tasks using AI.
If you want to try to ai proof yourself, focus your next career move on the tasks that the AI can't do. Today.
If I was to take a big logical leap and infer where all this might be headed, I think everyone needs to start thinking about themselves as a business owner who has AI employees.
So, I’m not Jeffrey Lail, I’m Jeffrey Lail Inc. I can hire and train (and I guess fire) my AI employees to help me accomplish more tasks and make my life more efficient.
Congrats, you now have a Jarvis.
Or to say it better, you have a bunch of Jarvis.
I know a couple of AIs that we all need as “employees”.
Career coach
Financial advisor
Relationship counselor
Depending on what you do, you may need more. I might even suggest a marketing employee to help you figure out how to best market (Your Name Here) Inc.
Social media enabled individuals to become brands, AI is going to enable everyone to become a business owner with human employees optional.
What a weird time to be alive.
To loosely paraphrase Jay-Z, you’re no longer a business man, you’re the business, man.
I want to ground what it means to “hire AI employees”.
If you’re currently an employee, what are some tasks that could improve your workflow if you were able to hire someone to help you.
Are you a non-coder who needs some coding work done to improve your job? Congrats, you can try to do this now with your new AI computer scientist.
Your first thought no longer should be:
How do I hire someone to help me?
Or even worse, I guess I’m just stuck doing these things inefficiently forever.
Now you have an employee right now who can help you solve these problems.
AI can be your designer, your marketer, your financial advisor, your coder.
Start with the problem you need solved, try to get the AI to help you solve it.
On the note of whether AI is going to replace humans, a recent study from PwC says that AI is increasing revenue per worker and making workers more valuable, not less.
That is, the AI is able to assist with tasks so that workers can focus on higher value tasks that require critical human intervention.
That may not seem intuitive but here’s a simple example:
Imagine a customer service AI becoming a first line of defense for handling customer service problems. It can easily troubleshoot simple problems and simple customers, and, this is important, it frees up customer service professionals to spend more time on more complex or valuable problems or customers.
This scales to all sorts of jobs. AI can help solve simpler problems and can be an assistant for solving more complex ones, freeing up humans to deal with higher complexity or human interaction problems.
Use AI to become more valuable. That’s the take home message.
People who use an AI for the first time often, especially if they’re older, start trying to use it like they use Google. They’re often impressed by the verbose responses.
The next iteration for some people is using generative AI to generate lots of content. There are huge downsides with generating AI essays for education, long emails for work, or content for the internet or publishing.
Don’t use AI to generate junk, do the work. Using an AI as an assistant for these things is okay, using it to generate the content itself isn’t.
Use the AI to learn more about the subject of the essay.
Use the AI to summarize long content
Use the AI to help generate ideas
Use the AI as an assistant, don’t hand your work over to the AI.
Some gurus are pushing business ideas using these generative capabilities (generate a bunch of blog content, generate photos, etc). I think the shelf life of this sort of work is minimal. And, the more people generating AI sludge, the less usable the internet will get, and the less usable the internet will get, the less people will actually look at your AI generated content.
AI generated content is easy but it’s lazy and laziness eventually destroys you.