The Rise of Experience Workers: Jobs in a post-AI World?
The Rise of Experience Workers: Jobs in a post-AI World?
The forthcoming "experience worker" economy as AI disrupts the job market
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a good friend who runs a rapidly growing $30 million dollar (revenue) real estate business.
Of course, they use technology, but it’s primarily a services business. Needless to say, he got my attention when he started talking about how much AI they are using!
One of the biggest use cases is customer service and support. They have thousands of customers and, as you might imagine, a reasonable volume of messages from those customers—everything from support questions to feedback for improvement.
In the beginning, customer feedback was processed by company employees. But as they were growing rapidly, it quickly became overwhelming. As he put it, it was not just a question of getting back to people—the real challenge (and opportunity for him) was analyzing that feedback and getting actionable insights. What were the themes for improvement or new features, services, or process improvements?
Usually, that type of work is done by a junior product manager. It’s not particularly difficult, but historically, it required a human to tease apart what different comments mean (e.g., “The food was sick!” and “The food was sickening!” are two very different kinds of comments!)
AI to the rescue. Rather than having a human analyze the data, he had an AI do it. He just gave it all of the feedback and asked the AI to summarize, categorize, and suggest improvements and actions to take. It took just a few minutes and all part of the twenty-dollar-a-month AI subscription!
As an interesting side note, he found that Claude worked better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT, at least the version he was using, was a bit too “lazy” in doing the work (and often would just summarize versus actually categorizing everything), whereas Claude was more diligent in categorizing. That is, of course, a moment in time—OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and others are constantly improving. Getting the right balance between conciseness and accuracy versus being wordy and hallucinating has been a challenge for these AI platform vendors.
He also double-checked the AI by hand. Claude’s results were actually better than any done by an individual human.
Of course, now he is using AI to process the feedback, not hiring a human to do it like he would have in years past.
One more job lost to AI.
How many more jobs are at risk?
There has been plenty of fear mongering on this concern and quite a lot written about it. McKinsey, for instance, estimates that 30 percent of the work done today could be replaced by AI. https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/generative-ai-and-the-future-of-work-in-america
I suspect the true impact will be even higher.
For any of my readers in a corporate or government job, think about how efficient (or inefficient) your company is today—even without the impact of AI! Do you have any work colleagues where you wonder, “Just what in the heck do they actually do?”
Having worked for and in both big companies and the government over the years, I have personally seen how inefficient organizations can be. Bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy!
There are examples where companies have been able to fight encroaching bureaucracy. The changes Elon Musk made at Twitter since he acquired it are eye opening. Set aside the political and media controversy he has attracted and look at it from a business perspective. He has now shrunk the staff by some 80%, yet at least from an external perspective, the company is thriving. New features are regularly rolled out (e.g., subscriptions), and the service is still running despite many naysayers predicting a total collapse.
I wrote more about the changes at Twitter last year on ThoughtfulBits, but for this analysis, just the observation that there are inefficiencies in many organizations is sufficient.
Eventually at least one company in any industry will figure out how to apply AI technologies to remove or reduce those inefficiencies, giving them a huge competitive advantage over legacy companies that don’t improve.
Is this the end then? Will there be 30% or more unemployment in the coming years?
My personal prediction is no.
I make that prediction based on history. AI is not the first technological revolution the world has seen: farming, the industrial revolution, and the computer revolution, to name a few, have each radically transformed the jobs landscape.
In 1850, some 60% of the US population was involved in agriculture. Now that figure is 3%. Historically speaking, food is now plentiful and inexpensive. While the challenges with global poverty and hunger still exist, as a civilization, we have made tremendous improvements in food production while needing far fewer people.
What happened to all of those farming jobs? They are now computer programmers and Instagram influencers. The idea that an Instagram influencer might be a real job was inconceivable in 1850 and arguably even thirty years ago! There are now millions of people working as influencers in an industry generating over $21 billion in revenue.
The World Economic Forum has some fascinating data on this shift over time.
I expect we’ll see a similar shift as AI starts taking over whole classes of jobs, particularly more junior-level knowledge worker jobs, as McKinsey noted above.
The Experience Worker
The key question is: “What will these new jobs be?”
To answer that, it’s easiest to take a first principles approach: What stays the same in the world, even with AI?
Well, the first answer is people!! And everything people need to be happy fulfilled humans.
Even with AI, people will still need a place to live. They will still want to eat, go on dates, have families, play sports, learn, be entertained, get together with friends, and so on. These are basic human and societal needs. While the setting may be different, all those things were true in ancient Roman and Greek times, just as they are now. The Olympics started in ancient Greece, after all!
With the rise of computers, we saw the advent of the modern “knowledge worker” class—think everyone working at an office for some company (as opposed to say a factory or farm). These jobs, be they digital marketing analysts or software programmers and so on, came about because of the computer revolution.
I expect we’ll see similar “AI-focused” jobs. Indeed, even today, there is a new job category called prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is for technical people focused on adapting AI technologies to specific use cases. As a simple example, think of the questions you might ask ChatGPT—the better you phrase the question, the better the results. This is the essence of prompt engineering. However, given how fast AI is evolving, it’s unclear how permanent the prompt engineering job might be.
Similarly, there will be countless “AI consultants” in the coming years to help people and organizations shift to AI technologies, just as there were countless local “PC repair” shops in the 90s. But as people became more comfortable with computers and the computers themselves became more reliable, those PC repair shops dwindled.
Prompt engineers, AI consultants, and the like will proliferate for a time, but what jobs will be more durable and long-lived in the post-AI world?
If we go back to first principles, what is the common thread about most of those universal and timeless activities?
It’s about people interacting with other people.
If we extrapolate, just as the Industrial Revolution and the advent of industrialized farming essentially opened up the economy for whole new classes of jobs, the replacement of many knowledge workers with AI will similarly open up new opportunities.
I’ll broadly categorize these new, post-AI jobs as “experience workers”.
Some of these experience worker jobs we already know today: tour guides, coaches, teachers, chefs, scuba divemasters, etc. Consider a chef’s table at a nice restaurant where you can see the chef preparing the food before you. That’s not an experience that an AI or AI-controlled robot will replace anytime soon!
While the experience may differ in each of these jobs (cooking versus scuba diving), the root of each is a human-to-human interaction and connection. That’s the timeless essence of being human.
In some cases, we may see an increase in the number of people in an experience worker job. History, again, can provide useful insights. Industrialized agriculture has lowered the price of food over time, and that, in turn, has led to an increase in the restaurant business over the last hundred years (pretty consistently until Covid!)
What will see similar increases thanks to AI? Consider teaching. On one hand, it’s easy to think that teaching may shrink as a profession (“Oh, AI can replace the role of teachers”). Maybe for some certain aspects of teaching, but ask anybody who is trying to teach a kindergartner to write—that needs to be done in person! I actually think AI will make teachers more effective and efficient—problem sets, grading, tutoring, etc., can all be really effectively done with AI tools now, which greatly reduces much of the busywork of teaching. This will allow teachers to spend proportionally more time with students.
In essence, AI will lower the unit cost of teaching, so I personally expect we will see a lot more of it! Not just teaching reading and writing but teaching in all forms.
For example, this past winter season, I tried out Carv.ski, an AI and sensor package for snow skiing.
I had a fascinating and fun ski season using Carv! It was humbling—even though I have been skiing for over thirty years, the AI still thought my skills were, ahh, how shall we say….“amateur at best”! The Carv AI definitely helped me improve this season!
But what I really want is an in-person ski instructor who can also see the data coming from the Carv system. That would be the best of both worlds—an instructor who can see how I perform in any given snow condition, combined with the data and insights of the AI.
In essence, AI could simultaneously make it easier to be a ski instructor (thus lowering the costs) while improving outcomes. That combination can be potent. Even without AI, there are plenty of businesses, from FedEx to Shopify, that exist solely because they took something that was hard and expensive before and made it simpler and cheaper.
This short interview with the founder of Shopify is worth reading! When Shopify started, the market for e-commerce software was tiny, simply because it was so hard to do! They made it easy and now have over a million e-commerce stores on their platform.
https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1779477221788561734
AI tools will make it possible to make countless industries and scenarios simpler and cheaper.
Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns
To borrow from a famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense, the really interesting question is: what are the jobs we know we don’t know about yet???!!
By definition, I do not know what those are! But I’m willing to bet the most interesting new jobs in the post-AI world will be jobs that we can’t really imagine yet, just as few people imagined the job of an Instagram influencer!
I am also willing to bet that those known unknown jobs will involve people connecting with people in some fashion, the experience worker job!
The Transition
I would be remiss not to comment on how fast the changes in the job market might happen. As I mentioned at the start of this post, we are already seeing it, but in small ways (e.g., one less job posted in a startup). What happens if the job market changes come about really quickly?
It’s one thing to say, “Oh, there will be a lot more sports instructors, so no problem!” But it’s quite a different thing when you get down to the specific people impacted. If you’ve been laid off, that’s not a theoretical economic exercise. That’s a real, live “what do I do now and how do I support my family?” exercise. If you live in Kansas, it might be hard to transition overnight from an office worker to a scuba or ski instructor or other newly invented experience worker job.
While I am optimistic that society will ultimately adapt to AI technologies just as we have every other technology revolution in history, that transition could very well be abrupt and messy.
That is a topic for another post, however!
In the meantime, if you’re working on AI, adopting AI, or are otherwise impacted by AI, stay focused on those first principles: People matter! The relationships and social interactions between people matter.
Technologies will evolve and supplement the human experience, but I don’t think it will replace it. That is the opportunity for all of us!
Great post, Alex. In my world of career readiness and student well-being, prep for future jobs is seen through the lens of transferable, foundational skills - from AI literacy to self-development. Because change is happening so much more quickly, humans must learn how to adapt and build a robust support system. I loved the Whistler restaurant photo - even if a chef robot could do that someday - I'm not interested in seeing it! Maybe Gen Z will feel differently...