AI is coming for (some) jobs

The AI future is here, but unevenly distributed.

Doomsday predictions about AI’s jobs wipeout are overly influenced by tech companies and don’t reflect the reality that most companies don’t know how to use it, said Blair Effron, CEO of boutique investment bank Centerview.

“A year and a half ago, I was deathly scared that the issue of 2028 was only about jobs, that it was going to be an acute matter of unemployment going from 4% up to 10%,” Effron told Semafor at an event in New York Thursday. “I have absolutely changed my perspective 180 degrees.”

Nearly all the big companies that have explicitly tied layoffs to AI are tech companies, he pointed out. “Tech companies know how to do this, and they will,” he said. “Any company that isn’t native technology, it’s going to be quite a while before they figure out exactly what adoption looks like.” (Effron’s own business is being disrupted — or turbocharged, depending on your outlook — by companies like Rogo, an investment-banking AI tool spun up by three twentysomethings.)

“You’re hearing from people who run tech companies who write code that AI is taking over the world,” Julie Samuels, CEO of industry group Tech:NYC, said at the event. “But that’s because it’s really, really good at writing code. It is not really, really good at a lot of other things.”