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

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
June 02, 2025

 

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.

Anthropic CEO: A white collar bloodbath is coming

Dario Amodei says AI companies and governments need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

Mary Meeker’s view of the AI economy

Yes, a 340 page slide deck. But an important and insightful view of where we are, and where we may be going.  

For some recent graduates, the AI job apocalypse may already be here

This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that are rapidly phasing out entry level jobs in favor of AI. Unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains.

Salesforce reinforces its AI cloud with $8B Informatica acquisition

The CRM provider plans to use the software company’s data governance tools to build “the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry.” 

For CEOs, AI tech literacy is no longer optional

Bridging the gap between AI hype and business value starts at the top. 

Job interviews enter a strange new world with AI that talks back

For better or worse, the next generation of job interviews has arrived: Employers are now rolling out AI simulating live, two-way screener calls using synthetic voices.

​​Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess privacy and societal risks

For years, teams of content moderators evaluated possible risks of user-generated content at Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook: Could it violate privacy? Could it cause harm to minors? Could it worsen the spread of misleading or toxic content? But now, up to 90% of all risk assessments will soon be automated.

Amid AI boom, Big Tech slashed college graduate hiring by 50% since 2022

College graduates vying for a career in tech may not have to just compete with each other, but with technology itself. New graduate hiring at the Magnificent 7 has decreased by more than 50% since 2022.  

Builder.ai's AI companion Natasha was actually Indian workers, now bankrupt

Fake it until you…get busted.  

Agent of the Week: Uizard

Generate and iterate UI designs with AI automation.

The two-step comes to media: Business Insider goes “all-in on AI,” laying off 21% of staff

A sweeping round of cuts that affected every department and drew swift criticism from former employees and their union.

The two-step continues at IBM

Big Blue lays off 8,000 employees in HR worldwide.  

AI agents make great teammates, but don't let them code alone - here's why

"While AI agents occasionally performed simple, isolated tasks well, the study makes it clear that they can't yet handle the kind of complex, dynamic work that humans excel at."

Can AI agents be trusted?

Can AI agents be trusted to act in our best interests? Will they work exclusively for us, or will their loyalty be split between users, developers, advertisers, and service providers? And how will be know?

AI didn’t kill Stack Overflow

It would be easy to say that AI killed off Stack Overflow, but it would be truer to say that AI delivered the final blow. What really happened is a parable of human community and experiments in self-governance gone bizarrely wrong.

Real-life ways accountants are using AI

From mail automation to technical memos to data analysis and marketing, CPAs are transforming their work processes.

“One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT”: the workers who lost their jobs to AI

From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?

And one more thing…

I replaced my fitness instructor with AI. I'm now stronger, more motivated, and saving hundreds of dollars

Why does AI keep going there?

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