Why this founder isn't hiring junior employees anymore

**Casey Newton** (0:12)
Good evening, everybody. My name is Casey Newton. Welcome to Platformer Live.
Incredible, incredible. We are coming to you tonight, live from Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco. And believe it or not, gang, this is, Platformer is five years old. This is the first live show we have ever done. You believe that? You are here for history, podcast and newsletter history. And you know, for so long, people say, Casey, when are you going to do a live show? And I said, I'll consider it. But two things have to be true. Number one, it has to take place at Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco.
And number two, I want to directly counter program Microsoft Build.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to tell you, we are here at Atlassian headquarters and Microsoft Build was today. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. So, if you're here tonight, I imagine maybe you've been following along with this fun project that we're doing. It is a mini-series about AI and jobs and the future of work. We actually just published our fourth episode that I encourage you to check out. It's with the amazing labor economist, Catherine Ann Edwards. But tonight, we have a conversation that I'm also looking forward to, in large part because it's live and we're working without the net. When we published these first few episodes, we've just gotten amazing feedback from readers because it turns out that so many of you, just like we are at Platformer, are curious about what it means that AI capabilities are advancing so quickly. What does that mean for the future of work? It seems like it's getting really easy to automate a task. At what point does that mean we can automate a job? So these are the questions that we're interested in and we're going to have a really amazing conversation about it tonight. A little bit later in the show, Eugenia Kuyda is here, the founder of Replika and Wabi Eugenia, somebody I've known for more than a decade. We also have a really fun conversation with Tamar Yehoshua from Atlassian. But to get things started, as we always do here on the Platformer podcast, to tell us about the latest news at the intersection of AI and Jobs, is Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent, Ella Markianos. Please welcome her.
Ella, how are you this evening?

**Ella Markianos** (2:33)
I'm doing great. I'm so excited for our first ever live event.

**Casey Newton** (2:37)
Me too, me too. It is always more fun to work without Annette.
I imagine that you have, as you always do, sort of gone out and found something for us to talk about at the intersection of AI and jobs. So, as you scan the horizon, what has seemed interesting this week? Yeah.

**Ella Markianos** (2:53)
So, something you may be very familiar with, if you've seen your Twitter Mutuals, like embarrassing job change posts, where they have three paragraphs about how they're going to change the world as a B2B, AI, account manager, etc.

**Casey Newton** (3:09)
Yeah. Be gentle because some of those people are here tonight.

**Ella Markianos** (3:12)
Yeah. I love you guys.

**Casey Newton** (3:14)
Yeah.

**Ella Markianos** (3:15)
But basically, AI, in addition to creating some doom and gloom around what our jobs will even be, once it's superhuman at everything, also has created new job titles and sometimes new job categories. And so I was interested to see a recent report about, in particular, Box's new categories of AI jobs.

**Casey Newton** (3:40)
So this is Box. This is the sort of AI collaboration company. Erin Levy, the CEO, was actually our first guest on the Platformer podcast. So you're saying they have recently introduced some new AI jobs? Yeah. Okay.

**Ella Markianos** (3:52)
Thirteen new types of AI jobs, which almost seems implausible to me. I feel like it's like you type a prompt into a blog code that's an AI job. But as it turns out, there's more than that.

**Casey Newton** (4:03)
Okay.

**Ella Markianos** (4:04)
So yeah, what's interested in me is there are some things that feel a little bit more old hat, where it's like an AI forward deployed engineer, which is something somewhere like Palantir pioneered, where you just basically have an account manager who knows more about the actual technical side of it to talk to people, say why and where you should be using your AI. But there's also stuff that gets a little wackier, a little weirder, like AI business automation engineers, where it's like you're doing a new frontier of management science, where you're trying to look at a team and see what part of their jobs can be found.