Khan Academy CEO: The Real AI Opportunity Is in Boring Industries

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**Sal Khan** (0:59)
And so they're asking, and we're saying, hey, use more AI, use more AI. Software engineering, design, product management, and all of these tech firms, including at Khan Academy, are changing fundamentally.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:09)
This is Sal Khan. He runs Khan Academy. A hundred million people learn on it every year. He built one of the first AI tutors in the world.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:18)
Excellent work.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:19)
No one has spent more time on how people re-skill for AI.

**Sal Khan** (1:23)
If we could do three times more with the same resources, we will do three times more. So that would never be the catalyst for layout. If you can automate yourself out of a job, we're going to give you a better job with better pay.

**Marina Mogilko** (1:33)
What are you thinking about the next five years?

**Sal Khan** (1:35)
Don't run to where everyone else is running. Try to find the lanes that are most empty. And I would say...

**Marina Mogilko** (1:42)
And we're in this interesting phase where AI is changing everything. And your previous book was called Brave New Words. And now you're writing a book called Job Shock.
So what has changed in the past two years?

**Sal Khan** (1:55)
Wow, what has changed? So much has changed.
You know, when I wrote in my last book, Brave New Words, about AI and education, when I was writing this in 2023, I was afraid that as soon as I write it, it would be obsolete because things are changing so fast. But I keep looking at it and it's still, I feel very relevant. I write about things like how AI will broaden the aperture of how we assess people, how, you know, people have talked a lot about AI tutors, but there's other forms of assessment, interviews, oral exams, and you actually are starting to see some of that. So we could talk a lot of, you know, some of those things that were just ideas three years ago, we're now seeing in reality. I just talked to head of admissions at Caltech and a lot of students who apply, they give these research papers they've done. And the admissions officer says some of these are real and some of them not clear if the student did the work, etc. And so they're already using AI to essentially do oral exams with these students to evaluate if they understand. And this is pretty high stakes. This is for admissions to top universities. So you're already seeing AI in that part. We've launched Conmigo out into classrooms. We've learned a lot. There's for a lot of students, it's been super useful, but we've also learned that AI 101 or the first 1 AI, it's waiting to be asked to do something. And some students don't know how to do it, a lot of them didn't. So what we're now, we're in the process of launching a new version. It's more proactive and it isn't AI for AI sake. It's how do we get AI to motivate students, give them more practice, have the teacher in the loop, etc. In terms of why I'm now writing Job Shock, which is some people are surprised because most of not just my books, but most of the things I've ever said tend to be pretty optimistic. But I am increasingly worried, not too far from, this was about, I don't know, I want to say about three or four months ago, maybe a little longer. I have a good friend from college who's now a prominent VC, and he said, hey Sal, I want to talk about re-skilling. So I remember I drove over to his place, not too far from here in Los Altos, and while I was driving, you see the Waymo's like you see everywhere here. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. This is cool. Look, I live in the future. Then I go over to his office, and he was telling me that one of his portfolio companies has a call center, that they've just automated 80 percent of their workforce with a general AI solution. I don't know the exact number, but it sounded like it was in the hundreds, if not thousands of people for that one call center based in the Philippines.