Future of Work 2026: The Only Jobs That Will Survive the AI Era

AI is transforming the job market, and in this video we break down why layoffs are happening and which roles are actually at risk. You’ll learn what to do in your current job, which skills will matter most in the future, and why you need to build a strong personal brand in the AI era. We’ll also explore whether education still matters — and finish with a clear 3-step plan to make yourself irreplaceable. 🎧 Episode with Linked CEO Ryan Roslansky about the future of work:⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sa1EeC262QyyZow3bfwYY?si=55maoBEITMWE02O8rV78nQ⁠ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sa1EeC262QyyZow3bfwYY?si=55maoBEITMWE02O8rV78nQ More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Marina Mogilko?

  Just this year, more than 100,000 tech workers worldwide have been laid off. Of course, companies like Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and Salesforce. Amazon alone cut 14,000 corporate roles. Klarna reduced its staff by nearly 40% as it leaned into, guess what, AI. Duolingo is phasing out human contractors in favor of automation. And this isn't limited to tech. In the UK, 1 in 6 employers now expect AI to reduce their workforce in the next year, with junior roles hit first. AI, political turbulence, economic pressure, together, they've created what's Some people are already calling it apocalypse. Here's the paradox.

• 2:14Marina Mogilko?

  Companies publicly say, if we don't adopt AI, we won't exist in 15 years. And at the same time, they're hiring fewer juniors than ever. It really feels to me like this first step of the career ladder is cracking. And if that first step is gone, what does that mean for the future work? And for the careers of recent graduates. On my podcast, Silicon Valley Girl, I talk to CEOs, investors and founders for actually hiring people and who are building the AI tools everyone is so anxious about. And you know, I'm a mom. I have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. I used to worry about my career. Now I'm worried about my daughter's future because it's so unpredictable. And that's one of the reasons why I do the podcast, because I want to hear from those people.

• 2:59Marina Mogilko?

  I want to ask my questions as a mom and as an immigrant. And in this video, I want to bring their insights together and show you which jobs are actually at risk, which careers will grow because of AI, and what you can do right now to make your career as AI-proof as possible. Let's start with what's really happening to jobs today. When I talk to founders and CEOs, they all say the same thing. In five years, we will most likely have AGI and there will be massive unemployment. For decades, the life formula was simple. Go to school, get a degree, get a job. Now the formula is breaking.

• 3:39Marina Mogilko?

  Education prices keep going up, but graduate job openings in some countries are down by 40%. So if the job market feels like a closed door, it's not because you're doing something wrong. The system is preparing people for a world that does not exist anymore. And here's how Daniel Priestley, a British entrepreneur and founder, describes this gap.

• 4:01Speaker 04

  It's both. It's the easiest and the worst time. So there's more money than ever before. There's more opportunities than ever before. You can reach global markets faster than ever before. So in theory, it should be the easiest time. The reason it's not the easiest time is because our schooling system is rooted in the industrial age and it's built around getting people ready for factories and offices that no longer exist, really. So the reason that so many people are struggling is because they went through this arduous training, day after day after day, for 12, 15 years, preparing them for an industrialized economy. And when they get out there, all of these skills make them very functional. But now we have automation and outsourcing.

• 4:45Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  And it's like, great, we trained you as a large language model that's not as good as the the current version.

• 4:50Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Teaching people to do functional work that can be automated or outsourced way faster, way cheaper, way easier. Especially in the West, you are not only in competition with the technology, you're also in competition with someone who's armed with the same technology in a country where you can live pretty large on half the price.

• 5:09Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. So the question isn't, do I have a degree anymore? The real questions are, can I solve ambitious problems end to end employing those AI tools? Can AI actually 10x my output? Can I do something beyond what a model and a cheaper freelancer could do together? And that leads us to the next part, which jobs are actually in danger and why? When people ask which jobs will AI replace, they expect to hear coders, designers, maybe copywriters. But the reality is more nuanced and in some ways more scary. So I asked Perplexity to analyze my portfolio.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:44Marina Mogilko?

  And I asked it whether I should find my financial advisor. And it was like, yes, you should do this immediately. Like that, that's the first time I saw something that definitive from AI. Like what's going to happen to these professions? Financial advisors, real estate brokers.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:58Marina Mogilko?

  Because Perplexity does it now and it created the whole strategy for me to rebalance and everything.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Getting the listings on like Redfin or Zillow with like a comment like browser, let's say you just have a recurring task that's running, doesn't work yet, but it's going to work pretty soon, which is you could just have a task that says, you know, every day morning, just look at all the news on Redfin, uh, something like every time there's a house below a certain budget. Uh, and and that's within this neighborhood. Make sure to like, send me a push notification, uh, and and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting for a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything you can, you can. So. So if your agent only shows you listings on Redfin and Zillow, I think they're useful. But if your agent is doing off-market deals for you, they're pretty useful because those things do not exist on the web.

• 6:48Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  I feel like having the power of like intelligence and computer at your hands, it always comes back to that, means you can push the existing industry to like, like, work harder for you. Same thing with private wealth management or financial advisors. Like, what are, if the job of the financial advisor to tell you like what stocks to buy, then I don't think, they're not going to be smarter than perplexity, which you can go and summon and ask it to go read all the analyst reports in every stock and like all the morning day news and they come back to you and tell you like the impact on your portfolio. What Warren Buffett do if he had exactly your portfolio? Like, like it can answer questions like that, that no financial advisor can.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  But if your financial advisor does more stuff for you, like getting you some access to certain funds, like private equity or hedge funds, or access to like funds of Citadel or like some startups, venture capital, which you cannot get through just the public markets, then maybe they're useful, right?

• 7:49Marina Mogilko?

  Clear pattern shows up. AI is not killing entire professions. It's killing the shallow version of those professions. A lawyer who just rewrites templates? That's easy to automate. A financial advisor who just picks a few mutual funds from a list? Also easy to replace. You can already do that with perplexity. A real estate agent who only sends you Zillow links? You don't need a human for that. But a lawyer who negotiates, strategizes and builds deep trust with clients? Very valuable. An advisor who gets you into deals you can't Google? Oh my God, yes, please. An agent who finds off-market properties and navigates messy human situations? Oh my God, yes, I've been through that. I relied on my person.

• 8:34Marina Mogilko?

  If you enjoyed this episode on the future work, you're going to love my recent conversation with the CEO of LinkedIn. We went deep on the exact same topic. Link is right below. Check it out and I'll see you in the next one. So let's look at the job loss problem at a different angle. Let's say you already have a pretty good job and you like it and it's interesting. You're inside the company, you see all these changes and you're thinking, okay, how do I not get replaced by the next wave of tools? I ask my guests what they're doing with their own teams right now.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  There's still higher value work to do.

• 9:13Marina Mogilko?

  So they're still in the company?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  They're still in the company and there's still work to be done, like everything's elevating. But what we discovered is that there's this, there's this ability to pull the scalable element out and address a market that was never even being addressed.

• 9:26Marina Mogilko?

  So it's not like you're replacing people, it's more of you're elevating them?

• 9:30Speaker 04

  There's definitely an element of replacing people.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And that is because there are always these jobs that are repetitive, functional, annoying, frustrating jobs that we can actually replace. There are some people who say, I don't want to elevate up. And unfortunately, there's not much I can do if you don't want to elevate. If you don't want to play at the higher game, I'm moving fast. So you've got to either elevate towards that or find something else.

• 9:57Marina Mogilko?

  This is basically the new contract at work. AI takes the boring, repeatable tasks. Humans move up to higher value problems. If you refuse to move up, you eventually move out. And big tech CEOs are thinking the exact same way. We see big companies put a stop on hiring and they say like, hey, to their employees, you need to figure out how to do this with AI first before we hire someone. What do you think about that?

• 10:20Speaker 06

  I think it's a reflection of, you know, a fast changing market and a lot of uncertainty, both, you know, in the political environment and in the tech environment of where things are going. And the natural tendency to do is to go slower a little bit. And you might decide, you know, some people are no longer the right folks in my company for that kind of environment where things are moving incredibly fast, where you're.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Almost forced to use AI to keep up with the competition. I like the realization, I think, that many companies had in the last few months is that if we have employees that say we don't want to use AI, that ultimately means that we as a company are no longer set up for success because our competitors are all using AI or they're mandating AI. And I think this is the transition phase we're going through. You know, things like Mark Zuckerberg getting the Scale AI team into the company.

• 11:11Marina Mogilko?

  Fifteen billion dollars.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  I think that shows where Mark's head is and where he believes the future is going to be. He's willing to invest into it.

• 11:18Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, yeah. So if you already have a job, your number one goal is very simple. Become the person who knows how to do your job with AI, not in spite of it. And if you're a manager and you're watching this, another meaningful thing I took away from a conversation with this lady who runs this nonprofit helping students apply to colleges. And when she was introducing this AI tool, when she was talking to her team, she told them to focus on the problem that they're solving with this tool. Because that tool allowed her team to spend their limited amount of time on actually encouraging students to apply and motivating them versus answering generic questions. So in order to become a person who knows how to do their job with AI, you can start with really easy practical exercise.

• 12:01Marina Mogilko?

  Ask yourself, what are the three most repetitive things I do every week? Is it writing emails, making reports, doing research, cleaning data? Then build a tiny AI system around each one. This can be prompts, small automations, agents, very basic, anything that saves time. I really like spaces in perplexity, like I have a space for my high cholesterol. I have a space for guests that I'm researching. And then you just notice how you save thirty to fifty percent of your time on that repetitive stuff. I don't type my emails anymore. I just talk to ChatGPT and it writes my emails. So keep asking myself, what higher level work can I move to? Where is this highest ROI? Where should I invest more time in? And where should I delegate to AI?

• 12:46Marina Mogilko?

  That's how you move from replaceable task doer to irreplaceable operator. That brings us to one of my favorite questions. My daughters are four and six, and I always ask entrepreneurs, what skills should our kids learn for this new world? And honestly, the answer is very similar for them and for us. Generally speaking, AI, I don't suggest waiting because part of what you want to be doing, you know, just like

• 13:13Speaker 06

  Any new technological revolution, whether when YouTube was happening, when the internet's happening. The folks who go and adopt and play with it early then have a differential edge in the change that it means in the industry and their society. And so even though three years from now, the coding tools will be and agents will be much better than they are now. The people who started playing with them now will probably be the people who know how to use them and deploy them much more comfortably early.

• 13:42Marina Mogilko?

  So what do you think parents should be teaching their kids now?

• 13:45Speaker 06

  I think it's still important to be good at like learning knowledge from first principles yourself and not depending on the sort of AI tutor leading you through. Like, I think one of the most important things is from school is the discipline of being able to teach yourself. That's a meta skill and that, you know, that that comes with friction. So I think as a parent, you still have to introduce like discipline and friction into the process. Because if it comes all too slowly and it's always on tap, you know, then the then there's a risk that the child could just get used to having everything instantly available and doesn't learn from the hard work. You know, the benefits of hard work, which I think are important.

• 14:28Speaker 06

  So that's like something to think through now that everything is going to be so seamless.

• 14:31Marina Mogilko?

  Then I asked the founder of Replit, Amjad, what he's teaching his own kids. Because he's an immigrant and his kids are the same age as mine.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  When I'm thinking about my kids and what we're going to do in the future, I think about this idea of being more of a polymath, right? Like, if you think about, you know, even before the industrial revolution, the people that are most memorable, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example, did a lot of things. Was an engineer, was an artist, was all sorts of things, right? And the the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things, about spending a lot of time learning about everything. And I think this is Where the education needs to be headed, where the industrial revolution created a world where humans are treated like machines.

• 15:19Speaker 06

  If you think about corporations or factories, factories are one big machine. And every individual person kind of doing the assembly of one thing is a part. And I think it was very dehumanizing. And I think we're going to go back to a moment of time. Where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship, even when you join a company, you're. You're going to be judged by how much of a real business impact you're going to have as opposed to how task oriented you are.

• 15:51Marina Mogilko?

  The new AI age wants you to be what researchers call a human epoch. Someone who brings the five abilities AI still can't replicate. Empathy, presence, opinion or ethics, creativity and hope slash leadership. And these aren't soft skills anymore. Let me give you a simple example. Two people can both use chat GPT to write a report. But only one of them can walk into a meeting and read the room. Understand why a client is nervous, understand what could be a hesitation, reframe the problem when the model's answer isn't enough. Make a judgment call when the data conflicts, inspire the team to move forward.

• 16:33Marina Mogilko?

  That combination, human psychology plus AI fluency is what companies are paying a premium for. And then there is something most people still underestimate, personal brand.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Personal brand is going to matter even more, a lot more. Because personal brands get 20 times the cut through as business brands when you're trying to get attention. But it's going to be nearly impossible to build a personal brand. Imagine the scenario where there's an airport and there are planes that are on the ground. And there are planes that are already up in the air and the fog comes rolling in. And the air traffic control says, if you're already on the ground, it's too foggy, you can't take off. But if you're up in the air, you can keep flying. That's what's going to happen to personal brands. So new personal brands are going to be harder and harder to get through the fog. Existing personal brands will be already up in the air. I think there's probably two to three years where you've still got time to build a personal brand.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  I think one of the greatest assets anyone can build right now is a dedicated following of two to 20,000 people who know who you are. They they get you. Doesn't have to be millions. But if there's two to 20,000 people out there on your LinkedIn, on your Instagram, on your YouTube channel, whatever it is, they feel like they've met you or know you. They've got a parasocial relationship to you. If you've got two to 20,000 people out there who have that parasocial relationship with you, that is going to be one heck of an asset to have.

• 17:59Marina Mogilko?

  In a world where AI can generate infinite content, people follow people. Your edge is a mix of AI fluency. You know how to use tools better than 90% of your peers. Polymath skills. You can connect dots across fields and ship real things. Personal brand. None of that requires permission from a recruiter, but it does require something old fashioned. Learning. And no, we're not all about retiring at 30, but how we work is changing fast. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger described it perfectly when he talked about Claude and AI agents. What do you think is going to happen in two or three years? How we're going to progress in advance? I think part of it, and I was having this conversation this morning even with some of our researchers,

• 18:44Marina Mogilko?

  the the progression or the the dynamic that I see is if last year, maybe the beginning of this year, these models, and I'll use Claude as the example, were really kind of assistants that were helping you with maybe a question at a time or maybe a task, right? This year, they're moving more into collaborators where, especially if you watch somebody use Claude code, for example, they're actually delegating what would have taken them maybe 20, 30 minutes and Claude's going off and doing it. And then you're checking in and you're more on the sort of validating or verifying work, right? Going into next year, you're going to delegate even bigger chunks of time or even like pieces of the job out to that. So it's not just, I have this very specific thing, please go do it.

• 19:26Marina Mogilko?

  And it could be more sort of think of it Claude as something that's in the loop of your business. So, hey Claude, watch for any new user feedback and maybe propose a change based on that. And you can imagine evolving that, don't just propose a change, write the code to make the change and I'll check if it's a good idea or not. And then the next step there is Claude actually being an entire sort of coworker where it has a discipline. So not just a project that happens to be a good thought partner for product management, but an actual product manager in your company. This for me is the blueprint of AI-proof careers. You work with models that see patterns better than any human ever could. And you bring the things that absolutely can't. Judgment, taste, ethics, lived experience, emotional support.

• 20:11Marina Mogilko?

  In other words, you become the translator between messy human reality and superhuman AI systems. With all these tools, it's natural to ask, do we even need formal education? I asked perplexity's CEO, Arvind, if he'd still do a PhD today and what he'd tell an 18-year-old starting from scratch.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  The fundamental thing you learn a PhD is learning to learn. Like I, I did a lot of research in my PhD, which doesn't matter today. But I got the ability to like go learn a new topic, dig deep, understand everything, gather my information, consult like whoever's the best expert. Which by the way is not needed anymore because you have tools like perplexity, subject expertise to go make decisions and like, you know, branch out. That is what you acquire, that skill. Zoom out and think beyond materialistic goals, like just foundationally as a person, you become a lot more grounded in like the, the willingness to seek truth. The relentless questioning, the Socratic method of learning and learning to learn.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  And, and, and I feel like these three qualities are like, like reflective of this proverbial phrase, right? Like give a man a fish. You feed them for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Like, that's how I feel about PhD.

• 21:27Marina Mogilko?

  So, no, you do not need a PhD to succeed in AI. But you do need the thing a good education was always supposed to give you. The ability to learn fast, the ability to ask better questions, to go deep when everyone else is just skimming. AI makes it easier than ever to access knowledge. It does not replace your responsibility to actually use it. So let's put this all together. Yes, entry-level jobs are disappearing. Yes, simple, repeatable work is becoming less valuable, even if it's intellectual. The people actually building this future keep saying the same thing. This is both the hardest and the best time to build your career. If you want to be on the winning side of this shift, here's a simple plan you can start this month.

• 22:11Marina Mogilko?

  Something real, something doable. Step number one, learn to work with AI, not around it. Write down the tasks you repeat every week, reports, research, emails, content, and keep iterating. Don't stop there. Build AI workflows for them using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, keep trying those new tools. Your goal is to cut the time in half for just three to five tasks in the next thirty days. And put it into your CV or LinkedIn. Reduce X task by fifty percent using AI workflows. That's a language hiring managers understand. Step number two, go deep in one area, then expand. Pick a field and commit to one full year of uncomfortable depth. Courses, side projects, real work you can show. After that, add an adjacent skill.

• 22:55Marina Mogilko?

  A marketer who codes, a doctor who understands AI, a designer who knows data. That's how you go from task doer to someone who actually moves the business. And then step number three, build a small but real personal brand. We've hired some people recently and most of them came because my COO followed them on LinkedIn. She liked their way of thinking, she liked their experience, she reached out on LinkedIn. We were not chasing people with million followers. Just a couple of thousand people who know what you're good at. Post once or twice a week about what you're learning, building, and improving. Share experiments, share case studies. And numbers document the journey instead of waiting to feel ready. So to wrap this up, the future work isn't humans versus AI.

• 23:39Marina Mogilko?

  It's humans plus AI and the gap between those who adapt and those who don't is getting wider every month. If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl podcast on your favorite platform. New episode every week on AI careers and how to not get left behind. Thank you for your support.

• 24:00Speaker 07

  When everyone's finally together, what makes mornings even brighter? Keeping things deliciously simple. Whether you're pouring up a glass of morning refreshment or topping off festive drinks for a family brunch. Simply Orange brings that 100% fresh squeezed taste to every moment. Deliciously bright and delightfully easy. Simply Orange is made for all your seasonal gatherings. Simply Orange, say yes to simple.

• 24:30Speaker 07

  It's getting chilly outside, but you know what that means?

• 24:36Speaker 07

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