The summer of shove

AI’s white-collar reckoning: from graduates to CEOs—And the jobs, industries, and future of work caught in the crossfire

 

The summer of shove

Is this the season that AI truly starts shoving knowledge workers out of the picture?

Eight years ago, Ben Pring, Paul Roehrig, and I wrote What to Do When Machines Do Everything—a survival guide for the white-collar class as AI loomed on the horizon. The good news back then? We had time. Plenty of it.

We foresaw a long prelude: a surge of hype through 2025, but no real shock to the job market. AI would light up TED stages and corporate keynotes, but it wouldn’t actually do much. Not yet.

Why? The ambition was real—but the machinery wasn’t ready. It was the Apple Newton and PalmPilot all over again: clever concepts, held back by weak chips, clunky interfaces, and sluggish infrastructure.

Now it’s 2025—and the machine works. Chips are fast, data is abundant, and LLMs are ubiquitous. The enterprise AI moment has arrived. If 2007 was the summer of the iPhone, this may be the summer of AI taking over workflows at scale.

The clear signals are showing up. Entry-level roles are drying up. Tech companies are scaling without hiring. And last week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, made headlines predicting that AI could replace half of all white-collar jobs, driving overall unemployment to the 10% - 20% range in the next few years.

But this isn’t the time to panic. There’s real upside for those who learn to work with AI—and especially with AI agents. Those who adapt won’t get shoved aside—they’ll move to the front. That’s why we built TalentGenius: to help you ride the wave instead of getting pulled under.

Agent of the Week: Uizard

Generate and iterate UI designs with AI automation.

And one more thing…

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