Most Replayed Moment: AI Is Changing How Teams Work Forever

AI At Work: Mass Unemployment Or A New Era Of Human Potential? Nick Hanauer is a billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist and outspoken advocate for a more inclusive economy. Daniel Priestley is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and co-founder of multiple businesses helping people build and scale companies. In this moment, Nick Hanauer and Daniel Priestley debate one of the biggest questions facing the future of work: what happens when AI can do more of the tasks we once thought only humans could perform? They explore the uncertainty ahead, the unexpected opportunities emerging, and why the way we think about jobs, businesses and value creation may be about to change for good. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/J19xuXhj85b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/CZYh3Skj85b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Sponsor: Asana - try it at https://asana.com

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a podcast for Morgan Stanley. Some investing lessons only become clear after you see how a call plays out. On Hard Lessons, iconic investors sit down with Morgan Stanley leaders to go behind the scenes on the critical moments, both successes and setbacks that shaped who they are today. Watch or listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:36Steven Bartlett?

  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 labour 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.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:10Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  I was raised in a civic family, I should say.

• 1:28Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  That 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.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:23Steven Bartlett?

  Done. Same question for you.

• 2:25Daniel Priestley?

  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'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, 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, we 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 kinds of things.

• 3:06Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 3:16Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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.

• 4:00Steven Bartlett?

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

• 4:04Speaker 02

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

• 4:07Steven Bartlett?

  US will own 50% of all the AI companies.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is absolutely true that AI has monetizing for free humanities 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.

• 4:49Steven Bartlett?

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

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes.

• 4:54Steven Bartlett?

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

• 4:59Daniel Priestley?

  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 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. Like 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

• 5:44Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 5:55Steven Bartlett?

  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 editing tasks or whether it's 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, and 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

• 6:36Steven Bartlett?

  point is what role will entry-level team members have in these kind of companies?

• 6:42Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 6:52Steven Bartlett?

  Who have you hired? Entry-level people?

• 6:54Daniel Priestley?

  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, 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.

• 7:29Steven Bartlett?

  But it doesn't get around the point that like, if you think about Uber, Dara's been pretty clear that the nine 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.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Correct. If I put on my more optimistic hat, the thing is, is that all businesses operate in a competitive environment, and there are two 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 five. Right? And yeah, you could eliminate that job, or you could keep that person, give them the right tools and out-compete your competitors.

• 8:27Steven Bartlett?

  The right tools.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  The right tools.

• 8:28Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's an assumption that will.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  You had to be there to realize how freaked out people were about calculators. Right? Like, people were talking about, like, what are the accountants going to do? And will kids learn math anymore? I mean, it was, it was like extremely controversial to bring a calculator to, to, 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 going to 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 two ways to choose to compete.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  If you, you know, you can get rid of somebody and do X, but you could keep that person and have them do five X and outcompete, 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.

• 9:41Steven Bartlett?

  I think, I definitely agree that there's going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals. I think maybe the difference between like 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 like 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 it, looking at, and it was like this Windows 95 machine that had like no memory on it. So the distribution, the sort of disruption was much slower.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  The pace is much slower.

• 10:29Steven Bartlett?

  Right. And I understand that, like with my, 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.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:47Steven Bartlett?

  And a lot of companies, I think, are in that position. We're actually, we're 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 have, 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.

• 11:08Daniel Priestley?

  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 script writing and a few of the things that they do. They launched a waiting list for this. They got five and a half thousand 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 four 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 a bigger business.

• 11:52Daniel Priestley?

  And this is something that could never have happened. They haven't had to raise billions, millions of dollars. They haven't had to hire 30, 40 people. So this, this tiny little SaaS opportunity is suddenly possible because of AI. And take, take that AI away and that fast growth, dynamic little business is.

• 12:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think anecdotally, I could come up with lots of examples as well, where particularly 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.

• 12:25Daniel Priestley?

  Oh, totally.

• 12:26Steven Bartlett?

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

• 12:29Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 12:55Steven Bartlett?

  So what do you do about it? UBI?

• 12:58Speaker 02

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

• 13:00Steven Bartlett?

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

• 13:02Speaker 02

  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, the whole valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption. You can't, you can't get to those numbers unless you're displacing lots of jobs.

• 13:24Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:36Steven Bartlett?

  This is a bit of a socialist idea, right?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  I don't call that socialism.

• 13:39Steven Bartlett?

  What do you call that?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I don't know, just common sense.

• 13:42Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 13:53Speaker 02

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

• 14:04Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 14:16Steven Bartlett?

  Which are private property.

• 14:17Daniel Priestley?

  So for example, the Dubai government owns the physical hotel buildings that, 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.

• 14:36Steven Bartlett?

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

• 14:40Daniel Priestley?

  The difference was that the Dubai government actually developed those assets.

• 14:44Steven Bartlett?

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

• 14:48Daniel Priestley?

  So we might say, 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, 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 seize.

• 15:09Steven Bartlett?

  You stole it, you stole it from Africans and British people. You stole it from people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada.

• 15:15Daniel Priestley?

  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 a economic system called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally changing. So in economics, there's four 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 at the moment.

• 15:54Steven Bartlett?

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

• 16:01Daniel Priestley?

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

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Okay, but Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.

• 16:08Daniel Priestley?

  He's a socialist.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  He, he says he's a socialist.

• 16:11Daniel Priestley?

  We'll take him at his word.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  So should, no, socialism is, you know, the government owning all the means of production. Right? Look, there are a million forms of capitalism. Right? We, 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.

• 16:47Steven Bartlett?

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

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  And the infrastructure.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 16:52Steven Bartlett?

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

• 16:58Speaker 02

  No, but.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  The citizens.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  We effectively do take part of them in the form of taxes. Right? Now, now, now the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue, and Dan may, may agree, are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give them. They don't return equal value.

• 17:20Steven Bartlett?

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

• 17:23Daniel Priestley?

  Well, Amazon is very successfully avoiding taxes.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:28Steven Bartlett?

  So would you agree to increase the taxes?

• 17:29Daniel Priestley?

  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.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Like the guy at the pub that you're talking about pays.

• 17:39Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Right?

• 17:40Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  He pays a lot of tax.

• 17:41Daniel Priestley?

  And, 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 one six hundredth 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.

• 18:22Daniel Priestley?

  We have basically a revolving door between financial, industrial complex, technology, industrial complex and government. 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.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Singapore is a miracle of governance.

• 18:42Daniel Priestley?

  Amazing governance.

• 18:43Speaker 02

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

• 18:47Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, totally.

• 18:48Speaker 02

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

• 18:56Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 02

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

• 19:05Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the solution with this AI revolution? It's, 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.

• 19:23Daniel Priestley?

  We always ask.

• 19:23Steven Bartlett?

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

• 19:27Daniel Priestley?

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

• 19:29Steven Bartlett?

  It is, and that takes time.

• 19:30Daniel Priestley?

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

• 19:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and that takes a lot of time.

• 19:35Daniel Priestley?

  In my hiring, I asked 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.

• 19:42Steven Bartlett?

  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 eight 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.

• 20:19Daniel Priestley?

  My only thing that I can say is that the future is small businesses. It's, 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.

• 20:35Steven Bartlett?

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