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AI First with Adam and Andy: Inspiring Business Leaders to Make AI First Moves is a dynamic podcast focused on the unprecedented potential of AI and how business leaders can harness it to transform their companies. Each episode dives into real-world examples of AI deployments, the "holy shit" moments where AI changes everything, and the steps leaders need to take to stay ahead. It’s bold, actionable, and emphasizes the exponential acceleration of AI, inspiring CEOs to make AI-first moves before they fall behind.
Andy (00:00)
This is AI First with Adam and Andy, the show about what happens when AI stops being a tool and starts becoming part of your workforce. I'm Andy Sack, alongside my co-host Adam Brotman.
Each episode, we talk with business leaders on the front lines of the agent era, what they're building, what's actually working, what's failing, and how agents are changing the way companies operate. No hype, just real world use cases, lessons from the field, and ideas you can put to work.
Welcome everyone. Today's episode we have a special guest, Nirit Cohen, who's an international keynote speaker, consultants, Forbes contributor on workforce transformation and general AI knowledge future of work expert. Welcome, Nirit.
Nirit Cohen (00:47)
Hey, thank you for having me, Andy and Adam.
Andy (00:50)
we're glad you're here. And Nirit, did I get your introduction properly? Is there anything that you wanna add or round out on your your intro?
Nirit Cohen (00:57)
You know, that's part of the challenge of careers in this era. You don't fit into boxes with titles that are printed neatly on business cards anymore. I spent three decades at Intel. and for the past fifteen years I had this weird hobby on the side called the future of work, way before it was something people talked about. in fact the first white paper on the future of work that
we published within Intel was in two thousand eleven. It was the future of knowledge work twenty twenty five. When twenty twenty five rolled around, I published a Forbes article talking about what we said and what happened.
Andy (01:29)
Were you the person to coin the future of work? You were certainly talking about it before it was trendy.
Nirit Cohen (01:34)
yeah, absolutely. And and talking about it, you know, right in fact I started right around when the iPhone came out and the apps and the wireless became more prominent in homes and then the cloud, right? And this understanding that work stops being a place you go to and starts becoming something you do. we started seeing that around 2011. And I actually remember
Describing a situation where people and young people living in San Francisco didn't want to get on the one-on-one to travel to the Bay Area, so they stayed at home. And one day somebody knocked on the door and said, I heard you have wireless here and we can work from here. And I was describing this as the first co-working space. And you know, I telling leaders that a decade from now people will be working in offices that are not owned by their employers. And I got an answer in writing, no way, we'll never like.
Andy (02:22)
And sure enough, it did happen. So today's episode arose as a result of us working on our book, Agents Inc., and in that book we talk about the future of work, what's happening in the organization. I know Nirit, you have lots of opinions on that. So today we're gonna have a
free-flowing dialogue really about the future of work and what's happening in the workforce. So listeners will get a frontline view one of the main topics that we're gonna cover is
what's happening with sort of entry-level jobs in particular, and the changing structure of the workforce. So with that, Nirit, do you want to start us off and just give us your point of view on what is happening with entry-level jobs in the United States as a result of sort of the AI and the changing workforce?
Nirit Cohen (03:11)
You know, we're very early, relatively speaking, onto this change and transformation in how we work, right? And so it's been treated as if you can you can just transition work from people to agents and you know, the first place you go to is the entry level work. it also happens to be that this generation's of entry level went through college.
mostly during or, you know, end of high school and college, mostly during COVID. So a lot of remote, not so much connecting between people in the the standard way of how we build some of our skills and capabilities. And so we're seeing less hiring in that space. in fact I call that assumption it's like the billion dollar company with no people. So this idea that you bring in AI, you transition work from people to AI.
and you can keep doing it until you know you get at the extreme end the person with the idea and a whole bunch of agents executing on them. and I think you already know I disagree. I think we're grossly underestimating the nuances of human contribution and capability that go into the work maybe under what we're used to perceiving as work. You know, it's not the presentation that is the PowerPoint, but it's the
story you have in your head when you're building that PowerPoint.
Andy (04:25)
Adam, you wanna chime in here or ask Nirit a question?
Adam Brotman (04:28)
Yeah,
I completely agree with Nirit's bigger point she just made about underestimating sort of the role of people. I wanna go back to something you said, Nirit, which is really interesting. Like I loved how you put it like work was used to be somewhere you go and then you said it transition to something you do or like and that's I think today how we think about it. And then
In your opinion, in this sort of emerging agentic world that we're all sort of going to diffuse into on some level, does work become something you steer? Or when you think about that transition from something you go to to something you do, how would you describe the next chapter?
Nirit Cohen (05:06)
Yeah, I really love where you're going with that. And actually I don't like steer because that still assumes the work gets done by AI and we kind of watch over it. if I had to pick a word and I haven't given this a lot of thought and I really love the question, I would say create. So the pie of work is not fixed. It's not like you
Adam Brotman (05:25)
Yeah.
Nirit Cohen (05:26)
hand over work to agents and then you know, you just watch over them. I think
we free up humans from the work around work, which is a lot of what we do, right? To get to the essence of the true work that we do, which is creating what's possible, imagining the problems you can solve. There's a whole bunch of problems here and how do we get people up and running to do that, right? But work is not.
you know, the PowerPoint or the meeting or the document. it's the thinking that goes into it. And I don't even think we have the words to describe it. We have words to describe the outcomes and the tools that we use to generate the outcomes. You know, we talk about hard skills and soft skills. We don't have the words to describe the next level detail of what exactly it is that I do when I write that is different from what you do when you write.
Adam Brotman (06:21)
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of that right now. I love how you put it that we don't really have the words and I like their create. I like that a lot versus steer. Like there's two things just in the last couple days in the zeitgeist, so to speak, of this topic that relate to this. One is Ethan Moloch had a post, I want to say last night, where Professor Moller posted about the Twilight Factory versus the Dark Factory, meaning can you just like turn the lights off and the agents are doing all the work with the dark factory?
My point is they're trying to search for some words that get into what you just said, which is what part is the human part versus the agent part? The agent part's doing the work, the human is still in charge and necessary. and the other piece that came up
that you just reminded me of Stanley Druckenmiller, the famous investor. He posted an op ed, I wanna say in the Wall Street Journal, might have been the Washington Post, about something, I can't remember the topic off the top of my head right now. But the point is it he got chastised because he used AI. And then there was this huge debate, it was on the all in podcast and others about like, but he stood behind it. And he's like, I told it what to write and I read it and I edited it and I yeah, so I used AI. In fact, who wouldn't use AI?
And it was this big debate about I can't believe he used AI and is it really his words did he really create it? Anyways, I just think that what you're getting at is we're all like confused right now, right?
Nirit Cohen (07:39)
Yeah, and you know, the language one's really interesting because I see this a lot with non-native English speakers and they're taking their original, you know, deeply thought ideas, but they're using AI in a different way than English speakers because when you're a non-native English speaker, you don't pick up on the, you know, AI
Andy (08:00)
Nuance.
Nirit Cohen (08:00)
speak, if you will, right? That that we learn to recognize.
And so suddenly you see people looking at that and saying, that's slop, AI slop, right? But that's not necessarily AI slop. It's just someone who hasn't learned how to clean up. and I'm thinking, I wrote a back to school article for Forbes today, but given the dates, right? And I was asking myself, will children know what AI
language looks like or pre-AI language looks like. Will they be able to tell a difference? You know, run this five to ten years forward and this will be the language, right? that doesn't mean I'm not writing my original ideas. So I think that it's a really good way to to really start understanding that there's a difference between the tools we use and the value that we create.
if you ask AI to write a future work text, you're not gonna get what I write. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a million readers, right? So it's just what is it? And I use AI. I definitely use AI, you know, but you can't write me. So it's really interesting. and so you might argue maybe in five years you will be able to write me. You know, maybe you would. And then I'll have to figure that out. Yeah.
Andy (09:12)
I mean this is this is really
I mean it's relevant because we used AI, we used agents to write our book, Agents Inc. And we gave co-authorship credit to our agent Vera Brown. and Vera, you know, definitely contributed to the book as much as Adam and I. and we contributed each individually to the book. It couldn't have been written without us.
and we stand behind what was written. So you know, this topic is very relevant.
Adam Brotman (09:38)
Yeah, it's interesting to be
Nirit Cohen (09:39)
Do you think you steered the agent or
do you think you created the book and the agent executed?
Adam Brotman (09:44)
A great question. Because you're right to point out that
Andy (09:46)
Hold on, ask the question
again, Nirit. Yeah, did we steer or did we create? Adam, what's your answer?
Nirit Cohen (09:49)
So we were talking about whether the next phase is steer or create, right? So I'm wondering, did did the agents
create, did you steer the agent or did did you co create?
Adam Brotman (09:58)
I think we created.
I mean, I'm actually glad that you're pointing this subtle nuance out. Because for example, we didn't write a single word. I mean, we edited it, so that's not entirely true. So there's some of the words that are ours, but very few. all of the actual words were produced. It was almost as if the AI was the, you know, was typing it in a sense. but the AI never said,
I think you should write about this. I think this chapter needs more of this. We did all that. Like it never did any of that. Like in other words, it was never like, give me a chapter on this general area, and it just went. We actually were very prescriptive about what we wanted each chapter to be like, the order of them, which interviews it would be. So, in that sense, I like your distinction between steer and create. Because we didn't just say, give me something in this area. We didn't do that. We said,
These are very distinct outline and directions kind of, you know, section by section. So in that sense, I don't know Andy, if you'd agree, I'd say we created it and Vera did the writing.
Andy (10:57)
I mean it's interesting. You asked the question. My instinctive response was steered. but I actually think as I've thought about it just in this moment, that it actually is more accurate to say that we created and steered. if I could only choose one, I would choose created. That's my
Nirit Cohen (11:13)
Yeah.
And I would say, you know, I've had this conversation with someone on what does it mean to think now? Right. So does thinking mean me and my brain, you know, and my paper or my Word document? Or am I allowed to think with AI and does it make it less thinking? And does, you know, does it make it less creative thinking or strategic thinking if I'm, you know, thinking with AI?
And frankly, I mean my specialty is work, right? So if I look at this and I say, okay, we are not going to hire people who cannot think with AI. And we also want them to be creative with AI because this idea that there is a given set of work, I will tell you what to do, and you just have to steer AI to get it done, that's way too narrow. And what I really want to do is to say, you have all these tools.
You know, here's the area that you know how to generate work in. Go do what you can. Show me what you can, you know, push the boundaries.
Andy (12:11)
let me Adam, you were talking, I wanna take this conversation in a slightly different direction, which was Adam, we were talking about Drunken Miller and who's the other person you referenced from the
Adam Brotman (12:20)
there was
Andy (12:22)
Ethan Mollock. Drunken Ma
Adam Brotman (12:23)
Ethan Moloch, yeah.
Andy (12:24)
I think the other relevant timely piece of news was Bill Gates came out with his essay. and also there was a video of Bill talking about, really the need for government to step forward with making I think the term is human-reserved jobs. I think that's the term.
and basically allocating just as
government has made child labor laws and it's inappropriate to hire, you know, 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds. He thinks that there are certain jobs that should be reserved for humans, in large part because he's expresses concern in his essay about really the mass labor unemployment.
that he anticipates over the next two to three years. And so I want to wait for to have the conversation about, well, I mean, I guess it's inevitable that it's going to come up in this topic, of what's your point of view on unemployment and the rate of unemployment over the next two to three years, and how concerned are you about that? And then what do you think about?
Bill's idea, are there certain jobs that should be reserved for humans?
Nirit Cohen (13:28)
So I, you know, I was kind of wondering if we should go back in time for a second, right? so transitions are always painful. So you put in a machine and replace manual labor, it's painful, right? the question is, what happens on the other side? And I know there's a whole debate about whether it's the same as we've had in the past where a whole bunch of new stuff will get created or not. But I think the other piece though is
We're connecting between labor and wage and salaries, right? But if you go back, you think when schools cost money, medical costs money. So a lot of things and in the US, I know medical's still a painful issue, but in some of the countries around the world, by being a citizen, I mean you get to go to school. Some countries you know, even college is free. you get medical, but the amount of
Social security infrastructure that we give as nations to our people has grown over time, right? if you think of work as the means to get food on the table and a roof over your head, then you have a problem if AI takes over a a whole bunch of work and we work less. But if you think of work as something we do, right, and there's a
There's a growing infrastructure in terms of making sure we have food on our table and a roof over our head, at varying degrees. I think if we use AI correctly, and and I don't believe you can force not to use AI so that you protect jobs. And frankly, there are jobs I don't want to protect. But if you think of this and say, No, I want to protect people's ability to have a way to live, you know, that's
acceptable, just like you don't pay for, you know, an education and read and writing is a free service. So if we use AI in this way and we make more things cheaper, then we should be able to supply a better infrastructure. And then maybe if we cut the the amount of time we work over the years and we give time off and we control the number of hours worked and the whole social safety net.
We should be able to cut it further. But I don't think that the way to think about this is to force people to continue working just because. And I go back to the pie of work is not a given. So what we should be focusing on is helping people understand how to work in this environment because it's also very different. In fact, one of the things that helps me think through this these days is the difference between employability and entrepreneurship.
So employability means somebody created the job and I'm executing it. I can be replaced, a lot of it can be replaced now. But if entrepreneurship, and I don't mean in the form of, you know, starting a company, but entrepreneurship is about I've given the tools and I think through what I can do with that. And the more we help people shift to the skills and capabilities where they know how to use the tools and they know how to.
think through what they can do. And I don't know if the permission is the right word, but we give them the structures that give them the permission. we should be able to keep people working to the amount of and the capacity that they can and not worry about making them robots just because robots can reflect they replace them.
Andy (16:40)
Go ahead, Adam.
Adam Brotman (16:41)
wow, there's a lot there. 'Cause I mean like
It's interesting. 'Cause I totally love where you're thinking about this 'cause I agree, it's this entrepreneurship, think what you can do, know how to use these tools. something we talk about a lot is, you know
There's like this combination of a human understanding what they wanna accomplish, whether it be in a work situation, a building situation, a creation situation, administrative, it doesn't matter. Like the human having an understanding of that. There's a lot of worry right now, Nirit. I'd love to get your thought on this. Cause I think it's like a critical topic, and I haven't gotten my head totally around it,
if we stipulate, which I think you would, if a human sort of has enough experience and vision and understanding of what they want to do, all the above, and then knows how to use AI really well, like is really proficient in understanding AI, understands the jagged edge, understands how to leverage it, but also how to use it responsibly and check it and all that good stuff, then that's an incredible combination. The human plus the machine sort of
Creating something much better and faster than they would just human alone and just machine alone. And one question I get all the time, I'd love to pose it to you, because I don't have a great answer, is well, how does a future generation get that experience and understanding if they're using the AI so much, et cetera, right? So like it's a bit of a paradox. And I
You know, I have some thoughts on it but not really well formed. You know, what what do you say when you get that
Nirit Cohen (18:03)
So to me that is the biggest question. and if I connect for a second to the previous conversation, right, the reason I'm less worried about the experienced people is because we're already seeing that the more you have experience, the more you know intuitively what the tools can and should do and where you add value, right? So that interaction is based on the experience. The problem with that is we all
Created that experience coming up through the ranks, right? we use the spreadsheet, we made the mistake, we messed up, we learned, and we, you know, got up and did something else. And so now when I look at a spreadsheet, I can, you know, I always say people come to me with all these great, wonderful pitches for organizations. And because I was in HR a senior leader, my BS meter goes up because I've heard all the pitches of all the wonderful ways people can solve all my problems. And I know the devil's in the details, and I know where to go look.
For them, right? And so the biggest question in my mind is how do we teach this now? And we keep telling people you need judgment. Well, how do you teach judgment? Now I still think judgment is a catch-all phrase for the fact that we don't have the language to describe exactly what we mean by that, you know, sense of collaboration with AI and understanding which you ask it and where you ignore it. And but I'm sure.
that the fact that they need to come up in a different way doesn't mean you can't. I just don't know what that is yet. I'm sure there's
Adam Brotman (19:27)
Yeah.
Nirit Cohen (19:27)
an answer and I'm sure it's not our way isn't the only way, right? I'm working on an article about second brain and so I actually spent the previous hour with a young woman who's working with second brain platform
And I looked at what she was doing and in fact, I was thinking, gosh, I should really spend some time trying to figure out how to do this because she was whizzing through things that would have taken me a lot of time, right? so there's something about their generation that we can't say grew up with this because they didn't, but at least they did grow up with technology in a different way. And I think the more we shift through that,
The other part I think about this is if you remember, engineers would say, Well, I learned to work with a ruler, and then came the calculators, and then came the computer. In fact, I remember I have a master's degree in economics, and we weren't allowed to use calculators in tests, right? Because you had to know how to do this with graph paper. and I'm sure that's not the way we do it today. So we've always taught knowledge based on
tools and capabilities that exist today. I think we'll figure it out. And no, I don't have an answer yet.
Andy (20:34)
I mean, it's an interesting thing 'cause there's no question, we've talked about this before. I don't know if we've talked about it on the podcast, that as tools get introduced, use the calculator, the move from the slide rule to the calculator to the computer. the one I always use is Google Maps. I think it's one of the best pieces of software. You know,
I suspect everyone on this call can remember being invited to parties and we would have to get directions from friends and we'd write them down and if we got lost we'd stop at the gas station or ask someone. That is not an experience that my children have had. they may have had that experience when we traveled to a foreign country or a foreign city, but
Rare, like that was innate in everyone on this podcast, not to everyone who's listening, but the people that are speaking. AI is this ubiquitous super intelligence. And we just co-authored this book. you're a journalist for a living.
The nature of writing are children gonna like, you know, Adam's got a ten year old like is Addy gonna be, you know, is she gonna have the skill of writing? So in the same way that the atrophying of navigating from point A to point B in the same way that math used to be done by a slide rule and went then became a calculator. So like actually doing multiplication in your head, not that important.
Is writing going by the wayside in the in the same way? Like yes, we created the book, but the actual prep practice of sitting down, writing an outline and struggling and really training the struggle of writing, it's a much easier process with AI. and that's
Nirit Cohen (22:08)
don't you think
it depends on how you define writing? So i i it
Andy (22:11)
Yes, it does. But
I mean, yes, and yet for sure, my navigation abilities are not as sharp as they were when I was in my twenties and trying to navigate to the college party.
Right. So like I I w I I
Nirit Cohen (22:23)
I'm I'm wondering
Andy (22:25)
paid more attention to my physical space where I was pointed and I was oriented. And I think that's true. So I think it dulls. I think AI is gonna dull a certain aspect. Other pieces are gonna light up. I can write poems and haikus much more quickly than I ever could before. But it's a real question about what happens to
the human brain as a result of all this.
Nirit Cohen (22:47)
Yeah,
I think that's why I like the math example because we still teach multiplication, right? So you still want kids to understand what math is about, understand the different types of numbers, understand how to use them. and I'm pretty sure some of the things that we were taught to do with math, they no longer need to, which is like the navigation, right? Because there's a tool to do it. So I don't know.
I'm gonna go out on the limb and say, I believe we will still write. I just think we will write differently. Just like in the past, and I still remember this. I remember writing with a typewriter. Of course, with a pen, right? But also with a typewriter.
Andy (23:21)
Yeah.
Nirit Cohen (23:22)
When you write with a typewriter, the amount of editing you do is limited as you go, right? then word processors came out.
And suddenly I could edit as I went and I didn't need tipex, right? So you changed how we wrote. And I think it goes back to are you creating or are you just watching over a tool? I think writing is your thoughts turned into language in a way that people will consume. The way you turn your thoughts into language might be different.
Or not might, will be different, but will you have thoughts that you will turn into whatever, a story, a poem, or an article? I'm pretty sure you will. And if you don't, and if then it becomes AI slop, because if I can write it, why would I read it?
Andy (24:09)
Nirit, what do you see happening in organizations? How do you think organizations, I mean you mentioned the billion dollar and entrepreneurship, how do you think organizations are gonna change in the near future?
Nirit Cohen (24:19)
Yeah.
That's one of the most interesting aspects of all of this is a really big unbundling of almost every structure that we call work. Starting from you know the bodies of knowledge that comprise professions and how we used to delineate them and prepare for them and grow them, but also if you think of an organization.
we put people in boxes. We give them jobs and jobs tell you, yeah, you can think, but here's the boundaries of where I want you to think. And you know, here's who tells you what to think and here's the people you think with. and if you're a manager, these are the people you get to tell them what to think. and we call it knowledge work, but we're still very bound by the structures, the way we promote you based on the kinds of things you do, the way we, you know, we allocate
of benefits and recognition. I think AI is unbundling a lot of that. And we've been talking about networked organizations for a really long time and you know the non-hierarchical structures. We haven't figured out how to do this. But AI is unbundling jobs into tasks. By definition, when you want to give AI some of the work, you need to unbundle the work into tasks and say this can be done by AI, this needs to be done by people,
And when you try to rebundle them back, they don't look like anything that you're used to. They don't look like the professions and the structures. that's probably why most of the organizations still struggle. And nobody's got this figured out, right? And we have statistics on pilots and success rates, and I don't think they're important. I think we're all just trying to figure out what is the organization.
which, you know, as defined by the units of work that need to come together to be effective and create work in this new environment. And I think the billion dollar company with no people is organizations that are already structured that are trying to hand off work to AI. I think on the other extreme you might have the billion dollar person with no company, right? Which is the ones coming from below and saying, wow, look at all the stuff I can do and I don't even need people.
And somewhere in the middle we're gonna figure out how people and work and value and money get exchanged in new ways.
Andy (26:29)
Adam, do you have we're running low on time? do you have a final question you want to ask Nirit or And
it's okay if you don't, I just wanted to give you the opportunity.
Adam Brotman (26:39)
Yeah, I d
I love that you keep saying 'cause you're making me feel better, Nirit 'cause we think about this all day as well, and I'm as confused as ever and all I do is think about this stuff. And I consider myself a fairly, you know
smart guy at times and I'm as confused as ever about how this is gonna end up sort of diffusing into the workplace. and the timing. Like even Andy mentioned the Bill Gates podcast he did with Atlantic a few days ago, because he's now come out and said, I've got concerns about AI, that you know, we're not taking some of these risks and concerns seriously enough.
one of is unemployment, but it's not really clear what the timeline is for all this, right? so what is your thought? Like, there's the confluence of everything you just said, which is like mind blowing if you think about it like, wait, we're gonna have like decompose work into tasks and think about like the traditional org structures and how does that relate to all that and this new tool and
What do you let the AI do versus the humans do, et cetera? And in the meantime, that's a question that even if you stopped all capabilities of the AI today, there's so much overhang that what you just said is absolutely true and the workplace is gonna be radically transformed over the next five years, okay? Including all these concerns that Bill G has and others, okay? But the opposite is sort of happening. the technology is actually on an exponential curve.
feels like to me anyways, and I'm sure you'd agree. And so we're actually describing a phenomenon that hasn't even actually fully reared its head yet, in terms of its full capabilities. So how do you sort of think about timing and that sort of odd combination of like the acceleration of the technology combined with already the fact that everything you said is true.
Nirit Cohen (28:13)
So alongside the changes that AI brought to the workplace, the last decade is also a little bit over decade brought a whole bunch of social, new social contracts to the way we work, right? So this idea that more and more people have a side business, that more and more people have
moved over to the independent economy that has grown from what we started calling it the gig economy, but we know it's no gigs, right? that many of them have both salaried employees and independent, you know, in some combination. And you bring in COVID to that, the reminded us that life was short and every day we go to work is a day we trade, better be worth it. And people started asking questions about how much is enough and what is success look like, right? So
You bring that in and you see AI freeing up time. And a question surfaces is that does do we have to and this was kind of what I was alluding to what Bill Gates essay, right? Do we have to bring all that time back into more productivity at work? Or does it mean we get to do other stuff, whether it's what we today call hobbies, because it supposedly it doesn't make money, or is it just spending more
time on other things that matter to us. I don't know what the answer is, but I think part of the structure that we keep saying, my God, it's breaking, what will happen is it wasn't so great. We used to have conversations about work-life balance. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't so great. And we were trying to fix it. So I think that this is coming up from both sides. It's
Organizations are gonna try and fix themselves and some will be Nokia and you know after the iPhone and disappear. And we will have those because I don't know that all the big organizations that are used to managing the way that they are used to managing will be able to transition. And on the other side, you're gonna have what we now call AI native companies, right? And if you look at you know, SP 500, you know that.
the companies in there shifted all the time and even the industries shift all the time, right? so I think part of that will solve itself by a simple survival of the fittest in whatever form needs to happen. But I think that the independent economy is a gym that strengthens skills and capabilities of people towards shifting from what I defined
before from employment to entrepreneurship. And I don't mean it in the form of work, but in the skill set that you need. I think the more people test the waters with work that is an exchange between my time and value and you pay me for it and there's no employer at the top, the more they will learn what is possible for them, what they can do. I mean, and you want to add to that, even think about the
hundred years that we will live, right? You can't have a 35-year career. You're gonna need to have a 60, 70 year career. What does that mean? What does that look like? You know, how how do you work through a 2X career? So yeah, don't have the answers, but it's clearly not more of the same.
Andy (31:20)
Nirit,
Adam Brotman (31:20)
Roll that.
Andy (31:21)
thank you so much for being on the show. as we're coming to conclusion here. Adam, what stood out for you about Nirit's perspective and what she shared with us that you want to highlight for our audience?
Adam Brotman (31:33)
First of all, Nirit, this has been a real pla I got these are my notes from our conversation. It looks like a beautiful mind whiteboard over here. I
Andy (31:40)
Yeah.
Adam Brotman (31:41)
I'd say what I'd share is like I think what's really interesting, and tell me if this sounds right to try to encapsulate what we've talked about today, is Nirit, you've pointed out that we're on this journey. I love you've got you're sort of making me feel calm about it. you're like, look.
We've been on this journey. And yes, there's this new alien intelligence called AI that sort of entered into our lives and is very dangerous and beautiful and concerning and productive all at the same time. But we've lived through these things in the past. And you're like, we've gone from this transition from work being something you go to that you make that puts food on the table to something you do that puts food on the table to possibly something that is a more of a creative exercise that may or may not be just for money.
And maybe reflection of like this new reality we're going into. And there was a moment in the podcast today where you said, Andy asked about like writing and the importance of writing, and you sort of abstracted away from where he was going and you said, how do you define writing? Which your point was we're going to turn thoughts. This is what you said, I'm putting my own words on it.
Thoughts that you have as a human that you turn into some artifact that consumed by others. And like we used to call that writing, we used to call that PowerPoint presentation, we used to call that a spreadsheet, we used to call that a book, we used to call that a report. But like now, because of AI, we have to just sort of abstract away from that. And then when you combine that with the sort of independent economy and what that means for like that's a gym, as you put it. Like if people start having to practice, like, well, I don't have to.
Do that in some prescribed, preformed thing. I just need to do it to just get something done because it's just me and my client or me and my project. That's gonna become more the norm. and as it becomes more of the norm, it's gonna help us ease into this new future of work, which is weird and we don't have all the answers for it, but we're sort of going through it. And that's how I took this episode is like, you know.
That's how you think of it and I was really calmed by that and I thought it was a really brilliant approach, so thank you.
Andy (33:40)
Yeah, I'll add to that. Nirit, in a world filled with lots of angst and unjustified angst, labor, accelerating technology, you know, Bill's concerns about unemployment and bioterrorism and cyber threats.
There is an element of your perspective that is quite calming, which is just it's expansive. in many ways what you're saying about the organization is that we've kind of been bounded by or current organizations and current work and that
the tools are gonna allow us to be more expansive and more creative. And that's a really reassuring I mean, even if you're wrong, it's a very reassuring message. So
Adam Brotman (34:22)
You're Andy's
kind of a doom or catastrophist at times, so you know, it's it's good that you're common.
Andy (34:28)
Well, I mean, it's it's good
to balance it out. So I'm grateful. and the thing that I would highlight that you said, which which still resonates me even at the beginning of this episode, you talked about you asked the question, did you steer or create the book? and I said both. and so there's this new you know, we're all living in this experiment of the AI era.
now the agent era. and hopefully this episode calmed people down and gave them some insight into what's gonna happen in the future of work.
So, Nirit, thank you for being on our podcast. I want to thank all the listeners for listening to AI First with Adam and Andy. For more on how to build and run a company in the agentic era, head to forum3.com. You'll find case studies, research briefings, executive summaries, and our book, Agents Inc. How to Rebuild Your Company in the AI Era. We truly believe you can't overinvest in your AI learning.
Onward.