If recent college graduates want to get ahead in today’s job market, they should focus on being “literate, conversant [and] facile” in artificial intelligence, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the CNBC Invest in America Forum on Wednesday.
“AI is not going to take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI is going to take your job,” Bessent said, adding: “At the end of the day for the overall economy, we’re seeing these big productivity gains that we really haven’t seen in decades.”
In terms of the stock market, AI has pushed multiple tech companies into rarified air: Nine of the world’s 10 most valuable public companies, by market capitalization, are involved in AI software or hardware. They have market caps above $1 trillion, led by chipmaker Nvidia’s $4.79 trillion and Alphabet’s $4.04 trillion, as of Wednesday afternoon. Some analysts have expressed concern over the AI industry’s boom, indicating that its top-heavy presence in the stock market could mask a weaker underlying economy.
Within workplaces themselves, AI adoption is increasingly common, but the technology’s ability to increase worker productivity is mixed. A majority of employees do save time using AI, but nearly 40% of their efficiency gains are offset by the time required to edit or fact-check AI-generated content, found a recent report from HR platform Workday. Long-term use of AI could weaken users’ critical thinking skills, some researchers say.
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Still, Bessent isn’t the first to suggest that AI-fluent people will get ahead in the workplace of the near-future. People who understand how to use AI could gain an inherent advantage over other workers across multiple industries, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference 2025 in May. Outside the tech industry, much of which has a financial interest in popularizing AI use, former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon warned workers of all kinds to adapt to the technology’s rise, before retiring from his post on Jan. 31.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job … Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it,” McMillon told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that published on Sept. 26.
Companies including Amazon, Salesforce and Block cited AI as a reason to lay off tens of thousands of employees in the last year. Companies including Amazon, Salesforce and Block cited AI as a reason to lay off tens of thousands of employees in the last year.
But “we could see a big pickup in small business,” Bessent said Wednesday, adding: “I talk to some of the great investors out in Silicon Valley. They think that AI is going to be a great leveler for small business. If you wanted to start an architecture firm, if you want to spin out of a big firm, maybe you would have needed 12 people for critical mass. Now you just need three.”
More entrepreneurs than ever in a three-month period filed business applications from November to January, according to a CNBC Make It analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. AI is responsible for some of that rise, according to industry experts and entrepreneurs alike: Some new business owners are launching companies in anticipation of AI taking over their previous careers, while others are using AI tools to start and run businesses more easily without necessarily needing prior entrepreneurial experience.
“The opportunity cost [of starting a business] is lower right now, just because the alternatives in the labor market are not as strong,” said Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the entrepreneurship hub at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
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