In our recent flagship session with Eileen Wu and Descript CEO Laura Burkhauser, there was strong interest in a more hands-on workshop for tech leaders to create video content quickly.

This next virtual session on Thursday, May 21 is designed as that next step. Join Eileen Wu (AI Collective, Mavryx) and Trevor Howell (Descript) at 12 PM PDT / 3 PM EDT.

You’ll leave with:

If you missed our flagship conversation, you can find more takeaways here.

Coinbase laid off 14% of its workforce last week. Its CEO told staff the cuts were possible because engineers can now ship in days what used to take a team weeks. The same week, Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported over 83,000 US job cuts in April, with roughly ¼ of them attributed by employers to AI.

Yet despite all of the concern (and soaring stock prices) the data doesn’t necessarily justify the narrative that AI is imminently coming for your job.

For example, MIT's David Autor has spent decades measuring what happens when automation moves through a workforce, and his finding is consistent across periods and industries: the count of tasks automated matters less than what happens to the tasks that remain. For instance, between 1977 and 2018, automation removed 64.5% of routine tasks from job descriptions while adding 75.6% new ones. In this way, roles get recomposed around what the worker can now do that they couldn't before.

The Microsoft Work Trend Index has a name for what's happening, what they call the Transformation Paradox. Of the 20,000 AI users surveyed across ten countries, 58% said they're producing work they couldn't have done a year ago, rising to 80% among the most advanced users. But only one in four said their leadership is aligned on what AI is for, and only 13% said they're rewarded for redesigning their work with AI even when results don't immediately follow. The paradox is that the same forces accelerating individual AI adoption are holding back its institutional payoff. That's the gap that explains why most enterprise AI deployments haven't shown ROI even as individual workers report transformation. Boris Cherny at Anthropic told CNN that by the end of the year, the term "software engineer" probably won't survive. The job becomes "builder," because writing code is the smaller part of what building software now means.

So what about the 21,490 cuts in April? We don't know yet how many are real AI displacement and how many are convenient attribution during a macro environment that was always going to produce layoffs. Stock markets reward AI-driven cost stories. A CEO citing "AI efficiency" gets credit for vision, but at the same time, a CEO citing "we over-hired in 2022" gets credit for nothing.

What do you think: are these signs that AI layoffs are real, or inflated expectations?

This June, AIC is hosting 100+ events in one week, all built around a single question: what does it mean to be human in the AI era? It's the largest human-centered AI gathering we've ever run, across every chapter, on six continents.

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