The Skills That Matter Most in the Age of AI – with Aneesh Raman

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:54)
Welcome to the second and final installment of Prof G on the Future of Work in AI, a special two-part series on who wins, who loses, and how AI will reshape the labor market. We're joined by Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn. Together, Aneesh and I are going to be answering your questions on what AI means for workers, which jobs are most at risk, and where the biggest opportunities lie. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Aneesh, good to have you again. Good to see you again.

**Aneesh Raman** (2:20)
Yeah, thanks for having me back.

**Scott Galloway** (2:22)
Our first question comes from Christian Robin on LinkedIn. He says, which professions do you think are most overestimating the resilience AI right now, and which ones are being underestimated? That's a good question. Aneesh, any thoughts?

**Aneesh Raman** (2:35)
Yeah. Well, I got a little recent bias because of the headlines. I think underestimating resilience, I'd put software engineering in there. There was a great deal of hype early on that software engineers were done as the tools got better and better at coding. Then we started to realize, wait, these jobs are about more than coding and not all software engineers do the exact same job. Everyone's bringing different capabilities to it. Some of these jobs are more about working with customers. Some are now thinking about ethical implications of what they're building. You're seeing actually an increase in software engineer jobs. Look, we don't know where all this stuff is going to go and how it's going to play out. In our book, we talk about ATMs and bank tellers as an instructive example. When the ATM came out in the late 70s, we have this New York Times article where they basically say bank tellers are done. There's now an automated way for you to get cash. Bank teller jobs actually doubled between that moment and the mid-20s, 2010-ish because banks were opening up more offices in more places because now they could distribute cash at all hours. That meant you needed bank tellers. Then bank tellers just started shifting their job away from the basic task of giving out money to more of the relationship banking that has become core to what it is to go into a bank. Now, bank teller jobs are now dropping because of smartphones, because of how much banking we're doing on our phone. But you couldn't have seen that coming in the 70s. I think right now software engineers are a great job for us to look at because they're actually going up, not down even though the hype was that they were done. The instructive lesson there is that they're about more than one task. Those jobs are not just about coding and where they go next, and what they're called in the future depends on how work adjusts around the tasks that human software engineers are going to bring to work as these tools are able to do more of the coding and maybe other basic stuff. I would say on overestimating resilience, I mean, it's like anyone that feels safe right now shouldn't. The way I think about it, Brookings has a great study they did recently, which is we shouldn't be looking at job vulnerability alone because we're miscalculating stuff and what is disruption here, and not all jobs are the same. We should also be looking at ability to adapt. How ready are people to adapt to work as it's changing? Part of that is inside of you. Have you handled hard well before? Have you had to fail and get back up before? Have you had to reinvent yourself before? Those are all things we're all going to have to do. If you've been able to do that before, you have a leg up. If you haven't, that's going to be new growth for you. But also, are you in a community? Are you in a structure that supports you? A lot of that is financial security. I mean, to what degree do you have financial security to sort of like test and try things? And if you don't, you're a lot more stressed about, well, I got to land that job and keep that job. Are you in a place that's allowing you to change that job so you can stay in it as it changes? And in Brookings, they call out certain geographies of the US and certain job centers where there isn't enough that policymakers are doing or the companies are doing together to support people who are going to need to adapt, who aren't set up to adapt right now. So I think anyone that's feeling safe, you shouldn't. It just means you have more time to get ready for the change before it hits you. But the way to think about that would just be, do you have the fundamentals down on adapting either those habits or the structures? And a lot more right now rides on where you work than what you do. Like are you in an organization that feels like it gets that this is coming and that's starting to figure out how to change it and that's empowering workers to start to be part of that or not? And the more you're in the right environment, the easier it's going to be to adapt. And so that's what I'd say for that one.