I have a network of about a thousand entrepreneurs, founders, and small business owners who read my blog posts daily of the 114K subscribers to this blog. I get a chance to ask them questions and poll them once a month or sometimes more often.
Over the last few months as part of a project, I have been polling them frequently and asking them about AI and the impact at work. Most of these are software entrepreneurs (a smaller number are eCommerce founders).
The poll I conducted yesterday was:
“Are you reducing the number of people you hire because of ChatGPT, generative AI and other LLM – Large Language Models”?
– generated many emails and a few phone conversations.
One particular example was telling which a friend related to me yesterday.
The company has 10 people, 8 of them are developers. The CEO of the company provided subscriptions to ChatGPT ($20 / month) and GitHub Copilot ($19 / month) to all the developers and mentioned that he won’t hire for another year and instead the developers could use the AI tools to do their job.
- The CEO is happy since he hired one fewer person
- The employees were happy since they are getting a chance to use new tools (AI prompt engineering looks good on the resume now).
- The HR person is happy since they don’t have to hire and train, onboard, and recruit a new person
All around goodness.
AI is already starting to reduce the number of jobs. It is just doing it a little slowly.
