Transcript of Most Replayed Moment: AI Is Changing How Teams Work Forever New

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 Hanua, 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 wanna 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.

Correct.

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 gonna discuss today?

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.

Dan, same question for you.

Yeah, I grew up in Australia and as a teenager I discovered entrepreneurship. I got an entrepreneurial mentor very early on and I did 2 years in a startup and it was really exciting and I loved it. And I felt like I'd 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. It went from 0 to 1 million in its first year and then 10 million in year 3. And it was like this exciting young company with all these cool young people at work. 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.

I mean, one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence. And you probably saw recently Eric Schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students, and every time he said the word— Yeah, 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, and 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 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?

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

US will own 50% of all the AI companies.

Yeah, it is absolutely true that AI is 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.

It's a good idea for China and the US.

Yes.

Yes.

But not for anywhere else necessarily. It's not going to help Senegal or Southampton much.

No.

In fact, it'll damage a lot of those places. You know, like the Philippines has benefited enormously by being the outsourced back office for a lot of small businesses that AI can now do a lot of those those jobs. One of the things that I always come back to is the idea that, say, the UK has 5.7 million businesses. We have a million unemployed people. We need one-fifth of the businesses to employ one person. AI does actually make your business better. AI is really good at helping you with your marketing. AI is great at helping you do legal contracts. There are 100 ways that AI could actually make 5.7 million businesses a little bit better to the point where they want to hire someone. And if we can incentivize those things to happen, businesses are trained on how to use AI to their advantage, and tax breaks for small businesses that are hiring. And we will, you know, there's actually 5.7 million businesses and a million unemployed people. That's a good— there's a good match there.

You know, a lot of people have been talking about AI agents, and what an AI agent can do, for anyone that doesn't know, is it can go on your computer and it can get any task you want done on the computer, whether that's, you know, editing tasks or whether it's, you know, manual data entry tasks or whatever it is. It can click around on a computer and do things. A lot of the entry-level roles we're often given are that kind of work. I think my entry-level job after I dropped out of university was kind of doing that kind of thing. There was also a little bit of a sales component where I'd cold call people. AI can now do the cold calls too. And increasingly, if we just play the rate of development forward, we'll be able to do those things. So if these businesses get more and more efficient, again, it comes back to this entry-level point, is what role will entry-level team members have in these kind of companies?

So what's interesting for me, I have a group of companies, small businesses, dynamic small businesses. We've implemented AI in all of them. And as a result, we've hired people.

Who have you hired? Entry-level people?

We've hired some entry-level people who are augmented by AI. So they become more valuable because of AI. But like things like appointment setting, we've ended up hiring more salespeople because we get more appointments. We use it with our marketing and we end up hiring people who can actually have those final conversations with people. At the very core of my organizations, we have an AI layer, and the AI layer has context and skills and models and security layer, right? All in there. And it spits out amazing information and data and reports and tells us who to talk to and why to talk to them and what to talk to them about. All these things are happening because of AI.

But it doesn't get around the point that, like, if you think about Uber, Dara's been pretty clear that the 9 million drivers they have, I think it is, are going to lose their jobs in the future. If you think about the other sort of white-collar professions we've described, those roles won't exist in the future. Well, I should say those roles will be changed.

Correct. If I put on my more optimistic hat, the thing is that all businesses operate in a competitive environment, and there are 2 ways to compete. One is to be cheaper. The other is to be better, right? And the thing about AI, is that, yeah, there are tasks that you can automate away, but one person with good AI tools may be able to do the job of 5, right? And yeah, you could eliminate that job, or you could keep that person, give them the right tools, and outcompete your competitors.

The right tools.

The right tools, right?

I think there's an assumption that—

I mean, this is of course what happened with computers, right? I mean, I am older than you guys, so I remember when calculators hit. You had to be there to realize how freaked out people were about calculators, right? Like people were talking about like, well, what are the accountants gonna do? And will kids learn math anymore? I mean, it was like extremely controversial to bring a calculator to school. And then along came computers. And the truth is that computers didn't reduce the amount of work that people did. They increased the amount of work that people did. And I do believe that there are ways in which AI is probably gonna do that. And so the job loss may not be as apocalyptic as it now feels like it may be, because again, at the end of the day, you have 2 ways to choose to compete. If you, you know, you can get rid of somebody and do X, but you could keep that person and have them do 5X and outcompete, Hmm. you know, your competitors in another dimension. I think that, that, will be something that people are likely to do. Doctors are just going to be better doctors.

I think I definitely agree that there's going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals. I think maybe the difference between calculators or computers versus this is AI is coming into a technological economy, and it is coming in with instant scale in a way that when Anthropic shipped their new model last week, it went to All of us at once, everywhere in the world. We were all, boom, step changed. With computers, I remember the day that my dad ordered the first computer for our house, and we waited for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then we got it. It was super expensive to get one. We unboxed it. I remember us all stood around looking at it, and it was like this Windows 95 machine that had no memory on it. So the distribution, the sort of disruption was much slower.

The pace.

The pace was much slower.

Much slower. Right.

And I understand that with our team, there's no intent. We have no intention at all to let anybody go because of AI. We're reskilling people, training people. However, would we end up hiring less people, especially in the near term, than we would have otherwise? I think that's maybe conceivable.

Yeah.

And a lot of companies, I think, are in that position where I actually was speaking to someone yesterday and they said, we're just letting the natural attrition in our call center take care of the shift, which means they lose 25% of people from their call center naturally. They're just not hiring other people back in. And actually Klarna's CEO said the same thing. He said, we're just letting the attrition take care of it.

I'll give you another example though, just to counter that. I work with a husband and wife couple in the north of England who they had a little video production agency and like one or two people who did a little bit of contracting with them. They used AI to create a piece of software. And that piece of software helps automate scriptwriting and a few of the things that they do.

Yeah.

They launched a waiting list for this. They got 5,500 people to join the waiting list. They then signed up their first 1,500 clients to a piece of software that cost almost nothing for them to build in 4 months. And now they're hiring a team of 10 people. And this is a husband and wife who had a small constrained business who are now building out bigger business. And this is something that could never have happened. They haven't had to raise millions of dollars. They haven't had to hire 30, 40 people. So this tiny little SaaS opportunity is suddenly possible because of AI. And take that AI away and that fast growth dynamic little businesses is—

Yeah, I think anecdotally I could come up with lots of examples as well where particular people are highly entrepreneurial. They come across an opportunity, but there's this broad, if you just zoom out on the way that people generate value in the economy at the moment, so much of that is going to change and it's going to be quite quick, it feels like.

Oh, totally.

And I don't know what you do about, like, what do you do about that sudden shift?

Well, this happened in the Jevons paradox. The person who had a tractor displaced 100 people who were in the field. And those 100 people went into the city looking for work all at once. And it was Charles Dickens wrote The Tale of Two Cities. He wrote Oliver Twist. Guess who else came out of the Jevons paradox? Our good friend Karl Marx, who came up with the most toxic ideas ever created and written down, right? He came off the back of the Jevons paradox.

So what do you do about it? UBI?

I'm not a big fan of UBI at the moment.

Isn't that kind of what this 50% Bernie Sanders thing would do?

Well, it's sovereign wealth fund, basically. But you have to find a way to help manage through this transition. And you have to, I think, depend on the value create— look, the whole valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption, right? You can't, you can't get to those numbers unless you're displacing lots of jobs.

Exactly.

And, and if that's true, then we should grab some of that value that is created and recycle it into the economy to try to cushion the disruption that it creates.

This is a bit of a socialist idea, right?

I don't call that socialism.

What do you call that?

I don't know, just common sense.

But wouldn't that broadly apply to all, all companies and rich people if there's If they are disrupting the economy and taking an unfair share of that disruption, should we not just grab and recycle back in?

But that is the basis upon which every high-functioning democracy in the world operates. I mean, every high-functioning democracy in the world has progressive taxation, labor standards, the law.

There's a difference between seizing private property, which would be a socialist way of doing things and a communist way of doing things. and owning strategic assets, which—

Which are private property.

So for example, the Dubai government owns the physical hotel buildings that run Dubai, and it leases those out to hotel operators, but it keeps money in its sovereign wealth fund because it says basically a big part of Dubai is that we own these kind of land assets.

So do you think we should go and take a portion of these companies.

Well, the difference was the Dubai government actually developed those assets.

Right, but we're already too far down the line within a capitalist society like the United States.

So we might say that data is the new oil and data is a common good and it is a common asset that has been sequestered illegitimately by these companies. So therefore you're not seizing what they created. You're basically saying, I'm sorry, but you need to pay a license back to this sovereign wealth fund because you're using a common asset that you were able to essentially You stole it from Africans and British people.

You stole it from people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada.

The biggest issue that we're having is that we're actually— the nature of the entire economy is changing. So this happened 250 years ago where the nature of the economy was land and we had an economic system called feudalism and colonialism. And then the nature of the economy was industrialization and we had an economic system called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally changing. So in economics, there's 4 factors of production: land, labor, capital, enterprise. We're now swinging like a pendulum from land through capital, labor, and now we're actually in an enterprise economy. And we need some sort of economic system that reflects the reality of how money and wealth is made.

And what is that? Is that go to OpenAI, take 50% of their company, and then pay out the profits of that 50% to the people?

I'm always skeptical of any socialist ideas. If it comes from Bernie Sanders, I'm skeptical.

Okay, but Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Like, let's be clear. He says he's a socialist. Well, take him at his word. No, socialism is, you know, the government owning all the means of production, right? Look, there are a million forms of capitalism, right? Every country operates slightly differently. And there, I don't think that Bernie Sanders is saying that we should abandon markets. What he is saying is we should manage markets for the public benefit, not exclusively for the benefit of the owners of capital. And I think that's really different.

You know, with like an Amazon, they're using the roads.

Yeah.

And the infrastructure.

Correct.

Would you go take 50% of those companies as well for public benefit and then pay it out to the citizens?

No, but we effectively do take part of them in the form of taxes right now. Now, the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue, and Dan may agree, are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give them. They don't return equal value that we should.

So you're saying increase the taxes on companies like Amazon? You both agree?

Well, Amazon is— very successfully avoiding taxes.

Yes.

So would you agree to increase taxes?

So I think we need to have— we need to close tax loopholes. We need to make sure that they're paying taxes like all other companies that operate within the economy.

Like the guy at the pub that you're talking about pays, right?

Yeah.

He pays a lot of tax.

Exactly. And the retailers and all that sort of stuff who are in competition with Amazon. Look, one of the biggest issues that we have is we have widespread incompetence in governments. And I'll give you a quick stat on this. In the UK government, you are 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance. And the UK government fires people at 1/600th the rate as normal businesses for incompetence. So we have an accumulation of massive incompetence in government. So the idea you can come up— we can come up with all the best ideas under the sun at this table. We have a fundamentally incompetent set of people who have misaligned incentives. We have basically a revolving door between financial industrial complex, technology industrial complex, and government. How do you get so far? Well, the Singaporean government, they basically said that we're going to have a very high degree of meritocracy in government that essentially we promote and fire based on outcomes and merit.

Singapore is a miracle of governance.

Amazing governance.

It's a miracle of governance. but it is a very small place.

Yeah, no, totally.

And perhaps the only place in the history of planet Earth that has benefited from a well-meaning dictator. Yeah, right.

Well, yeah, Dubai.

It's an astonishing story of capability, competence, foresight.

So what is the solution with this AI revolution? I think we all agree that there's going to be job disruption and there's going to be a new type of job. There's going to be probably a delta of people transitioning to those new types of jobs. I've said this before, but I even noticed that within our recruitment processes now, we are really looking for people that have a certain set of skills.

We always are.

And it's harder and harder and harder to find those people.

Well, that's training. That's education and training.

It is.

And that takes time.

The school system needs to produce people that you would want to hire.

Yeah.

And that takes a lot of time.

In my hiring, I ask the question, how deep are you in the AI rabbit hole? And anyone who says, oh, a lot, I'm like, okay, join the team.

And also, if you think about humanoid robots, Elon Musk's pay packet mandates him to deliver millions of humanoid robots, or else he doesn't get his big pay packet. If we think about robotics and humanoid robots coming through, we watched the other day, Figure AI released this video showing a humanoid robot sorting packages on a production line for 8 days straight, beating a human sorting those packages on the production line. My car in Los Angeles now drives itself, as do the taxis, and there's a huge race to make autonomous vehicles. I'm sure there's new jobs created, and I understand in foresight it's hard to understand what those will be. I assume there'll be more human jobs, more sales jobs.

My only thing that I can say is that the future is small businesses. It's small teams of 10 people making YouTube channels. It's small teams of 10 people making software. It's like when you have millions and millions of little small businesses, everyone's happier.

Whilst we debated a lot, we can agree on one thing. Knowing what to automate and what still needs a person really matters. With Asana, their AI teammate can keep routine work moving while decisions that need judgment stay with people. So AI handles more of the process and people can focus on the work that matters the most. You can try Asana at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A.com.

What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you wanna listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.