00:00 Speaker A
when you guys see job losses, are you thinking positive?
00:05 David
I mean, look, I work in media. So when I see job losses, I’m like, that sucks. and I’m scared. But like in all seriousness, the companies have an incentive to say that it’s due to AI because as we talked about earlier.
00:20 Speaker A
Right. Right. It’s an easy out.
00:21 David
Exactly. It’s an easy out and it’s also an indicator for all of their investors that we are actually implementing AI and seeing efficiency gains from it. So, until the aggregate numbers show like a real downtick in employment, I wouldn’t be too concerned on a full macro level, but I mean, for the employees themselves, yeah, it sucks.
00:44 Speaker A
Yeah.
00:44 Speaker C
Agreed, like until the unemployment rate moves significantly, it’s tough to like panic on a macro level. I do agree, David with your point as far as I think some of it is still an a hangover from open hire over hiring during COVID. I do think it’s AI driven, not in the sense that they’re not getting efficiencies where they’re able to cut jobs. They’re having to cut jobs because they’re pouring more and more money into AI. And that’s where the panic sets in is if they can’t eventually flip that switch and get that ROI, then we have a bunch of people who have lost their jobs and you’ve poured a bunch of money into a tech that you can’t figure out how to implement the right way. And you’re even seeing it something in some places where they’re hiring back, right? Like there was the big great flattening and then like Meta was like, oh, actually, we need some of those managers back if you want to come back. So like,
01:29 Speaker D
So are you saying it’s like a quick easy way to like take a cost off the balance sheet.
01:32 Speaker C
Yeah, because these the the debts are building up. They’re having to spend more and more on computer infrastructure or whatever it is as far as their AI. So it’s like, well, let’s just cut some head count and hypothetically when this does pan out, we won’t need these people anyway, right? At least that’s what their rationale is, but it hasn’t really panned out.
01:50 Speaker A
Is help me make this analogy and I could be completely off, but like is there a connection to like how software got killed and it was an overstep to the employment?
02:05 Speaker C
Yeah, I think there’s a little bit because like so the the SApocalypse was, AI’s here and we can code every type of software. so we’re never going to need salesforce or service now or any of these pieces because we’ll just, you know, vibe code it, which then there was a realization like, no, that’s actually really hard to build a CRM with Claude and you know, maybe it works for like smaller companies, but like JP Morgan’s not going to rip up its CRM just to, you know, vibe code something. So I think the the analogy would be like, we are going to invest so heavily in AI and spend so heavily in AI, we’ll we’ll only need one sales person. So we can cut the other 90 people. And then you invest and then it just never pans out. And then that one sales person’s kind of like, what like where’s the help guys? and then they kind of need to to pip it back.