How should they be thinking differently and maybe even recognizing new opportunities right now?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is what is AI doing? What do I need to do with AI? What do I not know that I need to know? Like, what's amazing about this moment, and we anchor on this in the book, is that you wanna start with the strengths you have as a human, as an individual, and then start to realize the things you don't need to do anymore, 'cause old work is going away.

AI is gonna completely take away old work, the drudgery work, the efficiency work, but it's also gonna upend the systems of old work in a really democratizing way.

So what does that mean for you? If you are starting a business right now, you know what? You don't need access to a huge amount of capital anymore.

You don't need to build a huge team and s- have six months to test an idea, because now you can, like, research a market, build a prototype, launch a landing page in a weekend.

Like, you could just do it.

It's really about, is my idea worthy of it? How do I test and try it? What do I build around it? So the cost of starting has collapsed, like, dramatically.

Right.

What do you see in retrospect that and how your personal history shaped the way in how you're thinking about the current AI transition?

Yeah, it's a great question.

You know, I grew up probably more than anything else as the child of immigrants.

My parents came from India in the 70s because America was meant to be this land of opportunity.

So I was very conscious from my earliest days that my life was sort of in the shadow of their sacrifice and that I was in this country of opportunity and I should go take advantage of it.

And I lived a life that... delivered on that.

The harder I worked, I could go to Harvard, I could get a job as a reporter, I could work at the White House.

And we, one of the questions that seem, no one seems to have come up with a, relatively good answer at the moment is to work out how much humans, how much AI agents, and what's the reason for that 100X? Yeah.

Now, of course, these are nice things that I want to have with my colleague, but like what's changed now that these descripting terms have moved to become a competitive advantage for someone looking for a job?

AI.

Okay.

So a brief history of work for humans.

Up until about 300 years ago, work for all humans was to some degree or another entrepreneurial.

It was about figuring stuff out, being resilient, adaptive, inventive, come up with civilization to come up with the monetary order.

So humans were all being humans at work.

you

So how we can escape the situation, this sort of way with no exit that we are seeing in front of us, especially if you work into a white collar job.

Well, we're gonna have to because machines are gonna out machine us.

And that was one of the most, I'd say, surprising moments as we reported the book, Ryan and I, because to write a book is a pretty intense endeavor and your ideas evolve over time, your arguments evolve over time, you pull on different threads, you start connecting different dots.

And it was only in the process of writing the book that we even came to this realization, because for a long time, people thought, OK, there was this industrial age where people worked on assembly lines.

They went from the farm to the factory, but work was very mechanical.

We were all just these interchangeable humans that came and did one task at a time as the assembly line moved the production of goods across.

But then came the knowledge economy, the Internet, white collar jobs.

But the question is, is the technology we are using in some way designed to support these Cs? Or there is still a sort of fragmentation or mismatch between how humans are thinking and projecting in the future and how is the technology that we are using designed to interact with us?

Yeah.

We're going from an old world in work to a new world of work.

I think this is a gre- greatest disruption to work in human history in terms of speed and scale.

And so all of us are gonna have to manage that transition.

Um, it's called the messy middle.

It's really tough.

You've gotta keep doing old as long as the systems around you are validating things by old as you build new, because the systems eventually are gonna build around new.

Mm.

Why wasn't it just a foundation for everything?

You know, this one, um, is the most personal for me of the fives, 'cause my whole career, at some level, has been built around communication, and I have honestly struggled with that term.

There were periods of my career I ran away from anything that had communications in it, because I wanted to be more than and I didn't wanna be limited by.

Um, in the job I'm in now, I remember my coauthor, Ryan, early at LinkedIn, said, "You're a great storyteller," and I reacted negatively to that because I felt storytelling was around a campfire or with children's books.

It didn't feel real mature, business relevant.

Um, and I have over the course of writing this book, but also just coming to terms with my strengths and really what makes me amazing, so embraced communication now as, as so core to who we are at our best, um, as humans.

And I think some of the, the idea of communication and why is it a five C, it's already been out there.

[laughs]

Mm.

And so where work is going is one where compassion is gonna be critical 'cause the human part of work is gonna be the core of work.

Um, I think that's already immediately true for leaders.

You could be leading a team of three or a company of 3,000 or 300,000.

Compassion is so key because empathy is where it all begins right now.

I mean, every one of us are going through a moment of bigger change than we've ever been through before.

Every company is going through a moment of business transformation at a level it's never gone through before.

So if you had one p- piece of advice for people increasing compassion, what would you want people to do after listening today?

Tell us a bit more about creativity.

Yeah.

There, there are a few reasons I love creativity.

I love all the five Cs, but this one, um, in particular for a few reasons.

First, um, creativity is, to me, the imagination of what's never been, and as we think about AI and a lot of the fear of AI and its ability to do things like write really quickly or create videos really quickly, um, to do a lot of the technical analytic tasks, creativity has been under duress.

Uh, you look to the creative professionals who are justifiably really afraid of how this tool is gonna replace them, but AI's gonna just make generically creative content widely, universally available, and the human bit of creativity then becomes an even higher premium.

But at the end of the day, like, innovation and entrepreneurialism, which is our best articulation of what work becomes for us all, is a creative endeavor.

Yeah.

... one of the five capabilities that helps people get ahead in the age of AI.

I mean, cou- again, we were looking across human history at what has made us us and what has led to everything up to and including an AI, but going back to nation states, to civilizations, to the monetary order, all the things humans have done before the industrial age, and courage is just so central to that.

I mean, we talk about in the book exploration, which defined the human, you know, humanity for a period of time just to explore the world.

We talk about the Polynesian wayfarers just going into the ocean, into the unknown, not knowing if they'd come back, what would be out there, and finding places where they seeded cultures that exist still today.

We open with Apollo 13.

Think about what astronauts do, the courage it takes to go out, you know, beyond our atmosphere for the sake of humanity and our understanding of the world.

So actually, like, curiosity has fed courage, 'cause courage is necessary to feed curiosity as we wanted to know more.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, how did the insights help you to come up with the five C's?

Yeah, you know, we are in the middle of a really charged conversation, I think, around AI and work, and it's fueling a lot of fear.

I think worst of all, it's fueling this fatalism that everything's predetermined, and that for a lot of us, this is the end of the road, humans are done at work.

Uh, and so when we were seeking to push back on that to try and present a different story that we could make... you know, take to make us less anxious and give us more agency, we had to start with this question of what makes us, us.

What are the unique human capabilities that we wanna bring to work as AI takes some of the old work, the efficiency work, the drudgery, the places where we've been trying to out machine machines? And, and so we talked to neuroscientists, we talked to organizational psychologists, to behavioral economists.

We read works from researchers like you about the squiggly line, and I am a squiggly-

Yeah.

That's where we need to get sort of not just education in terms of the Socratic method and don't just memorize facts, write them down in a quiz, and then we feel like we've educated you, but debate and discussion as something kids are learning from the early years on.

So, like, how did you and Ryan vision this together, and what was that process like?

Well, thank you for saying that, 'cause it is, like...

It's so hard to write a book that I've turned it from a noun to a verb.

Like, to book is really difficult.

It's an intense endeavor.

For anyone that ever wants to write a book, call me up.

I will try and dissuade you with every solid argument I have.

So again, I'd love to get your, your take on what I just said.

Can you share what you mean by this, and what advice do you give to people who then need to explain or pitch their career climbing wall?

There'll be a theme.

It starts with self, is the most important thing I would tell everyone.

We are living through what I think is the greatest disruption of work in human history.

What work is going to look like in five, definitely 10 years, is going to look very different, if not nothing like what work has looked like for the past 300 years.

As we've been in the industrial age, work had a certain predictability, clarity, stability to it.

The industrial age was entirely about efficiency.

Break down for us the three buckets, and then articulate, once we find the things that you'll tell us is in bucket three, how do we then really lean into our bucket three skills?

what does the new workplace look like?

So there are like these two truths that are both true and they're inconsistent that I think everyone is trying to wrestle through, especially leaders of organizations.

The first truth is we've been here before.

We have had these disruptions from electricity, from the internet.

We know that generally at the other end, there's more employment, not less.

We know that you've got to kind of build around this new technology with new workflows and new training about different skills.

But also, we've never been here before.

Like what – tactically is that new skill that if you could only know one thing about someone in your organization, you'd be like, they need to have this in order to grow.

Aneesh, any thoughts?

Yeah, that-- Well, uh, I got a little recent bias 'cause of the headlines.

I think underestimating resilience, I'd put software engineering, uh, in there.

There was a great deal of, um, hype early on that software engineers were done, uh, as the tools got better and better at coding.

And then we started to realize, wait, these jobs are about more than coding, and not all software engineers do the exact same job.

Everyone's bringing different capabilities to it.

Some of these jobs are more about working with customers.

What exactly will their judgment be based on?" It's an interesting question, Anish.

But yeah, there are some domains in which we, we are being out-efficiency-ed by the AI.

Yeah, and I think that's okay.

It's not okay right now because it's causing a massive disruption to work.

It's changing the rules of the game, which are hard to manage if you've been playing the game the old way and you've done everything right and suddenly new math won't, or old math won't solve new equations.

But I think it's an opening for people that see it.

We were never meant to be machine-like.

We were never meant to spend our days doing the work of efficiency and more, better, faster, more, better, faster, more, better, faster.

W-what's your take on this?

Aneesh, your thoughts?

Yeah.

Well, uh, this is, uh, the it question for a lot of college kids, for their parents.

I don't have a single answer in the way that for a while it was go get a CS degree or a coding boot camp, um, certificate, or before that, the MBA, and, and I think that's a good thing because I think where we're going at work, and a lot of educational institutions, most, aren't adapting fast enough, so you can't count on them.

You've gotta sorta like push this new way of learning, uh, into your day-to-day on your own.

Where we're going at work is that you gotta know the AIs.

That's becoming table stakes at, um, at every interview.

What do you think about this gap?" Anish?

Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

biggest company I've ever worked for.

So it's been a process of learning new math for me.

And a lot of it was just the work started to build in a certain way where by the time you get to a conversation about a role or a title, it just makes sense given where the work has already sort of gone.

So for me, I've been at LinkedIn five years now.

Pretty quickly after I joined, our CEO, my co-author, Ryan, he was soon into his job as CEO.

And both of us bonded pretty quickly over...

Are you seeing anything that's supporting that theory? Are you seeing something to the opposite of that? What do you see?

So what is that? Why?

Well, I hate the setup because it makes me sound like an optimist.

And I know that means you all will find everything I say not credible.

So my optimism about AI is born from extreme levels of pessimism, cynicism, and skepticism.

Okay.

about how work has worked to date for humans.

I'm at LinkedIn.

Is there fresh data you're seeing that sort of gives us any clue about whether any of that

How fast is this change happening? Are companies already hiring fewer and newer grads, or do we not quite know yet? Everything's happening and everything's not happening because there's

no, again, like universal way.

It's not an either or situation.

So I think a lot of what we got to push beyond is this sort of our entry level jobs going away.

Are they going to stay? It's neither.

It's both.

It's yes.

Or is it? Are you a different kind of engineer then? Well, I would disagree with that.

How can entry-level work be fixed?

Yeah, we talked about a couple of examples in the piece.

KPMG is now giving new grads higher level tax work that used to go to people that had, I think, two or three years worth of experience 'cause AI is handling a lot of the grunt work.

Uh, McFarland's, this law firm in the UK, they're training early career lawyers on complex contract interpretation, not just basic document review.

If you think about it, a lot of entry-level jobs are basic jobs with basic tasks.

All we need to do on the employer side is uplevel the tasks that we give entry-level workers and be more deliberately appreciative of the know-how they bring.

This generation is incredibly resilient and adaptive.

What's your advice to members of the class of '25 who are looking for their first jobs now?