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Entrepreneur and bestselling author Tony Robbins has a message for those worried that AI will take their jobs: Take a hard look at your job, and then design a reinvention plan.
“I think no one is going to be replaced by AI. They’re going to be replaced by somebody using AI,” Robbins said on the Power Players With Brian Sozzi podcast (see video above or listen below). “Everybody said go become a software engineer, figure out how to write code, and you’re going to have a guaranteed job. And then all of a sudden our agents do it for us overnight. But the best code writers now are running 50 agents, and they’re doing more in a day than they could have done in the five years before. And so those people are invaluable. I think what you have to do is you have to be looking at what it is you do. And you’ve got to be honest.”
2026 has been dominated by large-scale layoffs at Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and many other major companies tapping into AI to do more work with fewer people. Experts believe the pruning of workforces at the hands of AI will persist in the year ahead.
In fact, Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei has famously predicted that AI could wipe out half of white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 20%.
Robbins has a first-hand look into the emotions of the employed and unemployed. He is a motivational speaker, bestselling author, and entrepreneur.
CEOs and elite leaders — from financial titans like Paul Tudor Jones to tech founders like Salesforce (CRM) co-founder Marc Benioff — have turned to him. Robbins bypasses traditional management theory to focus on cognitive restructuring and psychological conditioning. An approach proponents say helps high performers break through mental blocks to make high-stakes decisions under pressure.
Robbins thinks now is the time for workers to retool their skill sets to withstand the AI shift and thrive in it.
“If I drive a taxi or Uber or something of that nature, I got to be able to be honest with myself and say, that job is not going to exist in five years more than likely because of self-driving trucks, for example,” Robbins said. “And that’s just one industry that’s obviously going to be disrupted.”
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