Hank Breckenridge

The biggest mistake in thinking about the impact of AI on jobs is to imagine the world as doing exactly what it does today, but with AI automating away some of our work. In practice, what happens is every company gets a capability expansion, which then leads to downstream positive gains in jobs as a result. You can see how this will show up meaningfully just by taking a look at the historical gap between small and large companies. It’s traditionally been the case that only the largest companies have access to all the specialization necessary to solve most problems that come up. They have the engineers to stay ahead on features, various marketing functions to reach customers in more ways, supply chain teams, compliance teams and lawyers to help with regulations, and so on. Any other company in the world just starting out has none of this. This not only is an immediate barrier to starting a new company or trying out a new idea, it’s an inevitable point of friction in being able to grow rapidly as a small company. The impact of AI Agents is that every company in the world will eventually have the kind of resources that only the world’s largest companies have today. As a result, small companies will be able to grow way faster or generally do more. A new small business can generate the marketing campaigns, do market research, ship features, do outbound selling, or handle customer support in ways that would have been cost prohibitive before. In some cases they would hire for these functions, but most of the time the work just never gets done to the level that is desirable, or never gets done at all. And as a consequence of this growth, these smaller firms will naturally need to keep hiring people to do the work that AI can’t do in all the surrounding functions. Which is precisely where you’ll see AI be a driver of net job growth.