Most Replayed Moment: AI Is Changing How Teams Work Forever

Steven Bartlett (0:06)

When I talk to founders and operators about AI, the interesting question is no longer whether they're using it. It's usually where AI should do the work, and where a person needs to step in. This moment episode is sponsored by Asana, who are thinking about the same human AI handoff. In this episode, Daniel Priestley, Nick Hanauer and I talk about the changing division of labor between people and AI, what technology can take on, and where people become even more valuable.

Nick, I want to start with your background and your context, so I can understand your perspective and who you are. You sold a company for almost $7 billion.

Nick Hanauer (0:39)

Correct.

Steven Bartlett (0:40)

And what's so fascinating about you is you, typically billionaires have a certain narrative and perspective on the world. You seem to have a very different one. I do.

Who are you, where have you come from, and what is your perspective on the world, as it relates to the subjects that you know we're going to discuss today?

Nick Hanauer (0:55)

I was raised in a civic family, I should say. What does that mean? It means a family that takes civic responsibility seriously.

But we were middle class people and my father started to work for this tiny family business that his father had started, manufacturing bed pillows and down comforters, which is how I got my start in business. And to make an incredibly long story short, I had a very early intuition about the Internet and the role that it would play in commerce. And as luck would have it, I had a friend who agreed with that proposition, and his name was Jeff Bezos. And so he wanted to start an e-retailer. He was working in New York for a hedge fund, dating one of my closest friends. And for a variety of reasons, he ended up sending his stuff from New York to Seattle to my house. And we started amazon.com together.

Steven Bartlett (1:53)

Done. Same question for you.

Daniel Priestley (1:54)

Yeah, I grew up in Australia. And as a teenager, I discovered entrepreneurship. I got an entrepreneurial mentor very early on, and I did two years in a startup. And it was really exciting, and I loved it.

And I felt like I had discovered a cheat code in life, which was entrepreneurship and starting businesses and small businesses. And then at 21, I went off and started my own company, which was my first agency. And it grew really rapidly. Went from zero to a million in its first year, and then 10 million in year three. And it was like this exciting young company with all these cool young people working there and living there, we actually kind of did, yeah. We actually were in a big house and we kind of spent a lot of time together. Yeah, I just fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business and family business and all of those kind of things. And I also 15 years ago started an entrepreneur accelerator where people who want to get together and talk about entrepreneurship and figure out how to run their businesses can get together and figure out how to do that.

Steven Bartlett (2:46)

I mean, one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence. And we probably saw recently, Eric Schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students. And every time he said the word AI, one of the things that Anthropic, who are one of the leading AI companies, said recently is that entry-level jobs are at risk. And I've got this graph here showing the decline of entry-level job postings. I believe it was on LinkedIn, pulled from somewhere. It shows that they're consistently dropping and dropping and dropping. AI is, I think about it so often. I was up late last night trying to think through some of this stuff because Anthropic released a report yesterday showing that the AI models will be able to improve themselves theoretically in the future and what this might mean.

How disruptive do you think AI is going to be as it relates to job losses?

Nick Hanauer (3:34)

You know, I don't think Bernie Sanders' latest idea is terrible.

Steven Bartlett (3:37)

The US will own 50% of all the AI companies.

Nick Hanauer (3:39)

Yeah, it is absolutely true that AI has monetizing for free humanity's intellectual property. And a few people are going to directly benefit from that. And I think that in the same way that Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with this enormous asset that they had, creating a sovereign wealth fund with 50% of the value created by AI and recycling that into, I think it's unclear exactly how those benefits should be recycled, but trying to find a way to make some of that value a cushion for the disruption that it will inevitably cause, I don't think that's a crazy idea.