# Reid Hoffman on AI Valuations, SaaS Moats, and Vertical Strategy

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-06-27

## Transcript

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When you think about open AI and thrumping, well, if you believe that AI...
has the impact of applying intelligence with the scale and price of electricity across everything.
These are going to be two of the major providers of that.
We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches.
You know, well, one of them's going to win and the other one's not.
You're like, well, actually, in fact, there's a lot of room for both of them to win.
Incredibly.
Almost every dinner conversation I'm asked, like the big question is, can you make sense of the valuation of these companies?
So what should my answer be?
Think of it as a little bit like internet valuations.
Some of them will have turned out to be insane and go to zero.
And some of them will have turned out to be way too low and have gone up a lot higher.
And then the trick is, which ones?
Reid Hoffman is one of the leading tech investors of our time, and I'm lucky to call him a mentor and a friend.
He's co-founder of LinkedIn and has backed so many influential startups.
Plus, he served on the board of Microsoft for a decade.
He's recently said he's turning his focus to Manus AI, his AI drug discovery company.
With Anthropic and Open AI on the path to going public, and SpaceX surpassing a $2 trillion valuation after its IPO, I needed a check-in with Reed.
So we hopped on to talk about what's signal and what's noise in the AI race, and so much more.
I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast...
taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.
Hi, Reid.
Welcome again to Pioneers of AI.
My absolute pleasure.
It is always so great to have you on the show.
It's been a while since we last chatted, and as with everything in the AI world, lots of updates.
So I'm excited to catch up.
Likewise.
So I want to start with some personal updates on your end.
So after a...
decade of serving on the Microsoft board, you departed from the board.
Actually, I just said I wouldn't stand for re-election, which means I'm on it through the end of the year, but yes.
Okay, okay, okay.
But you largely did that because you are going back to founder mode and focusing on Manus.
So tell us more about that.
I'm actually really intrigued by that.
Well, you know, when Ujwal, Sid, and I had been doing the work in the last couple months, and we're beginning to see some...
small molecule proposals from our AI drug discovery engine that our computational chemists are looking at and going, oh my God, that's really interesting.
And that could work.
And I said, okay, I've really got to make sure that this thing is navigating and, you know, building these things really matters.
And so I got to focus on this and, you know, kind of talked to Satya.
I said, look, it's been a long time.
I'm always a friend and an ally.
We'll continue to help even afterwards.
I'd really like to spend my time more on building, on, you know, being a founder than essentially, you know, kind of being a governance person.
And, you know, I can still help when, you know, as a matter of fact, you know, Satya and I were just on the phone today talking about some piece of strategy.
Yeah, amazing.
As you reflect on the Microsoft board, anything that stands out, any takeaways, any reflections, insights?
It's been a couple of things.
I mean, one of the things is obviously the LinkedIn acquisitions, one of the epic M&A of history in terms of, you know, growth and impact and revenue, you know, having higher operating margin, et cetera.
Also continuing to be successful, right?
A lot of, you know, LinkedIn is thriving still, right?
And that's not to be taken for granted.
Exactly.
And then, you know, kind of.
Helping, you know, the, you know, kind of navigate the organization to buying GitHub, which, you know, was bought, you know, well over revenue in terms of comparable prices, but the strategic part of it and how that plays into the whole coding revolution now and so forth is really key.
You know, facilitating conversations of trust between OpenAI and Microsoft.
You know, those are some fun highlights.
Yeah, so incredible.
Okay, so I want to spend a little bit of time on the big news in AI.
So the SpaceX IPO was on June 12th.
Like it was only in February when SpaceX and XAI merged, right?
And a big part of SpaceX's IPO story is actually an AI strategy and an AI narrative.
And it seems that they want to like vertically own and integrate the AI supply chain, whether it's compute, data centers, you know, the model, Grok, Cursors acquisition, which, as we record this.
It was announced just 48 hours ago.
I would love your take on what that all means.
Well, in a sense, SpaceX talking about itself as an AI company is somewhat honest by the fact that, well, we bought XAI and what we're going to do is use our market cap to try to buy our way into being an AI company is essentially what it's going to do.
And so it's not surprising that, you know, whatever it is, X days after the IPO.
We're using our market cap to buy Cursor.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there were others as well because SpaceX isn't an AI company.
XAI is, as Elon himself has described, it's a complete train wreck for its, you know, kind of building of foundational models and other kinds of things.
And, you know, all the founders are left.
It's on its third restart, et cetera.
And so if you look at the revenue in SpaceX, it's the, oh, we're going to be charging Anthropic a lot for compute.
Right.
So you're like, oh, you're a you're a premium priced core weave.
I get it.
Which is not an AI company.
But the reason why they're saying they're an AI company is because they're going to go buy a bunch to try to become an AI company.
And I think what investors are buying or holding on in this was that, you know, they're going to go spend a lot of equity capital on buying a bunch of AI assets and seeing if they can be cobbled together.
You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI in terms of how it's playing.
I'd say it's TBD, watch this space, but use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance.
So Anthropic and OpenAI have also both filed for IPO with the SEC, and both are expected to also be historically giant offerings.
Now you're an investor in both of these companies.
So I think my first question for you is, do you think the order and the timing of these IPOs, both of them are important in relation to each other?
I'm sure the two companies do, right?
There's definitely a lot of rivalry between the companies, you know, and there's the theory of, you know, who gets out first and do you absorb the capital?
I don't think it matters.
I actually think there's a lot of room for both.
I think they naturally have categories that they're very strong in.
There's obviously everything that's going on with, you know, code and its applications.
And Anthropics clearly testing the waters on expanding in design and legal and whatnot.
And OpenAI with ChatGPT is clearly the front-end search Google kind of equivalent and is also testing the waters on other things and is coming up strong on codex is actually insufficiently talked about as a really compelling coding product.
As a matter of fact, it's kind of stunning how much it's cloud code and...
Like one of the questions in the SpaceX acquisition of Cursor is like, Cursor seems to be had its bright star some number of months ago and seems to be fading over the horizon.
So what the theory is that it doesn't completely fade over the horizon is an interesting one.
But we tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches.
You know, well, one of them's going to win and the other one's not.
And you're like, well, actually, in fact, there's a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.
Like almost every dinner conversation I'm asked, like the big question is, oh, how can you make sense of the valuation of these companies?
So what should my answer be when I get asked this question?
Well, think of it as a little bit like internet valuations.
Some of them will have turned out to be insane and go to zero.
And some of them will have turned out to be way too low and have gone up a lot higher.
And this is what happens when you have high growth, fast moving.
you know, tech companies of which the AI is most of it.
And so, you know, it's like, you know, look at what Google became from being an internet company and then other things bombed for being too early and other things.
And so I think there'll be a number of these valuations that'll just be like, oh yeah, you paid a lot for that and that turned into zero.
But I think there will be others, for example, when you think about open AI and the rubrics, so why should it be valued in, you know, the same trillion dollar company that these others are?
And the answer is, well, if you believe that AI has the impact of applying intelligence with the scale and price of electricity across everything.
And these are going to be two of the major providers of that.
And what's more, you can already see some of the revenue really, really well.
And frequently, the revenue comes later, like in the open AI category, you know, like advertising.
Because like, for example, Google's early theory of revenue was we're going to sell enterprise servers.
And it's like, well, that didn't work.
And then it's like, oh, AdWords, you know, thus far best business model invented in human history.
So, you know, if you're like all the valuations are crazy, you're wrong.
If you said some of the valuations are crazy, you're right.
And then the trick is which ones?
Which ones?
Yeah.
I think the other question that comes up a lot is, do we care whether these companies are profitable or not?
Is venture at the moment, and maybe eventually the public markets, are we subsidizing the cost of AI and the cost of tokens?
Like, how do you make sense of that?
Well, we're definitely subsidizing it for growing.
You know, kind of a modern exemplar, speaking of, you know, trillion dollar companies, is Amazon, which was unprofitable and barely profitable for a very long time, and yet has an amazing strategic position and continues to be that.
It doesn't matter if they're profitable to IPO.
It does matter that companies become profitable and then eventually become seriously profitable.
But part of valuations, which most people don't appreciate, is like it's future expected terminal value.
So you go, well, this thing is so strategically important, it's going to exist for a very, very long time and continue to grow and have an important market position.
Even if its revenues are...
modest or its profitability is wobbly, that still makes a very valuable company.
I guess the learning, too, is you're not always able to predict what these revenue models or business models are going to look like anyway, right?
Yes.
It's going to evolve.
It is evolving.
Yeah.
Part of the thing is, is there some possibility?
Like, because if you said there's the 3% possibility becomes an AdWords, that's huge.
I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Reid Hoffman.
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All right, so let's talk about what this all means for early stage AI startups.
Do you think, back to kind of these IPOs and where this is going, How does this change how we think about both how we evaluate defensibility in these AI innovation ecosystems and also what should we be looking for?
The change of defensibility and the change of what kinds of things lead to sustaining value, people tend to be overly dramatic and say it all goes out the window.
And that is certainly not the case.
But on the other hand, a bunch of things that used to be strong defensive modes don't.
And so part of the reason why people were talking about this apocalypse is because they went, well, The previous dynamic with SaaS companies was, you know, it ultimately cost a billion dollars to build the baseline tech that everyone would use.
You chip away and eventually get a ecosystem and customer base.
And then challengers, it's very expensive to come to because you're continuing to grow your customer base while they have to spend a billion dollars and then get the first, you know, couple customers.
And then you go, well, if all of a sudden.
It doesn't cost a billion dollars to make one of these things.
The product feature set of what's useful to them may change radically because individual companies may want things deeply personalized in ways that they can do it with the coding agents themselves.
And then so therefore the economic model, which was I could be, you know, have a high operating margin because switching is very expensive.
It's like, I don't want to pay you that operating margin anymore and competitors can come in and hence Saspocalypse.
Now, the reason why the saspocalypse is overly stated, and it kind of plays the defensive moat question that you have, the real question is not short all sass.
The real question is short any sass that's not aggressive and driven, committed to becoming AI native and by the sass that is as a direction.
And that then kind of gives you some code to also what moats might be.
There's a bunch of this kind of standard defenses that I think will continue in the current age.
Now, the interesting question is which things will add in?
And I wouldn't be surprised if there were new kinds of moats.
You know, people have speculated, will there be data moats?
Maybe, especially on things that are like real time oriented or like you can only serve the product if you have this particular data versus training data moats, which I tend to think would be a little bit more skeptical of.
You know, how do network effects play in?
You know, how does that work?
I think there's a set of different questions there.
There is the kind of like, in some senses, brand and trust.
matters a whole lot more.
So if you've established a brand and trust and gotten through the noise, how does that matter?
So I think there's a stack of things that matter there.
I do think it's one of the things that you and I love about both being founders and investors is that, hey, when you're throwing up all the cards in the air, it takes taking intelligent probability, risk-adjusted bets, working with speed, kind of making it happen, and that's fun.
Yeah, that is fun.
But, you know, we still believe that there is a lot of potential in vertical AI startups.
So like startups that are coming in with deep domain expertise to solve and reimagine workflows in, I don't know, antiquated industries.
But, or maybe it's an and, I think of, you know, let's take the legal industry, for example.
Three, four years ago, we saw a whole bunch of legal AI companies and they've been quite successful.
But then recently, Anthropic just released their legal agents, essentially, which is essentially what these companies were doing.
And so I don't know if I would invest in a legal AI startup today, right?
And I think that applies to a lot of these vertical industries.
So that is definitely kind of a question mark.
Well, I think you have to ask a couple of questions, because if it's just like your company is a thin wrapper on a model, you know.
You're basically just waiting around until the model company, you know, kind of decides to go first party.
And they may still allow you to run and all the rest.
And maybe you'll switch to, oh, I'll be using the Chinese open source, you know, Kimi as a way of doing this, which, you know, is kind of what Cursor ended up doing off Cloud Code.
But it's not as good.
And by the way, part of the reason why these startups are so valuable, whether it's, you know, coding or legal, is because they're dealing in very high economic value.
And so the difference is you say, well.
Kimi's almost as good.
It's 85% as good.
It's like in high economic value things, 85% kind of rounds to zero.
So it really has to be something that is not— A non-obvious problem to be solved?
Well, it has to be something that it isn't just that the model company can just literally almost kind of tell its model, go close the loop and learn everything about this and then just offer the product.
It could be that you're integrating data sources that's fundamentally not really available to anybody, including the model companies.
And so, for example, even if Anthropic decided, I'm going to start doing Airbnb, it couldn't do that, right?
And so take what Sid Ujwal and I are doing with Manas.
It's like, no, you can't just go, now, Claude.
Tell us about biological molecules that might actually, in fact, detect and prevent and or cure leukemia.
It doesn't work that way.
Right.
And actually, this is also, this is my thesis anyway, but I'd love your take.
I'm very excited about world models because I don't see Anthropic and OpenAI and kind of the big LLMs going into, they could with enough funding, but it's just, it's such a different play.
For now, anyway, which is why we're excited about the physical AI space and the world model space.
So I think the good thing is the physical model space is that there's a whole bunch of stuff that's pretty unique that's outside of the data sets that OpenAI and Anthropic are doing.
Including getting your own data for the physical AI world, right?
Exactly, right.
So the data for the physical world, what kind of actually, in fact, you know, compute fabric you need for that.
What can few fabric works in the right kind of timeframe?
You know, LLMs are still pretty bad at quote unquote real time, right?
I mean, they try to hack it in various ways.
So there may be a whole bunch of stuff there that creates something, but there's a reason why a lot of smart people are doing it.
It's a good bet because it's like, well, here's a new area that's different than LLMs that could be really interesting.
It's a risk adjusted bet.
Yeah, absolutely.
I want to talk about the huge influx of capital that will happen with all these IPOs.
So with the employees of these AI companies get a windfall from the IPOs.
What does that mean again for early stage investing?
What does it mean for funds like ours?
What does it mean for like, will we see a whole new slew of AI startups in the way that the PayPal mafia, right, kind of created?
What do you think will happen as a ripple effect?
I don't really know fully what the ripple effect is.
It does tend to be that when people make a pile of money, they tend to go into some philanthropy, which is a whole bunch of things, and some investing.
And one of the things that I think has been not told as loudly as it should about kind of how the ecosystem of Silicon Valley got both so broad and deep.
is because when you had successful people, they stayed there, and then they turned into angel investors and advisors, the next thing.
And then eventually, the compounds, compounds, compounds.
And so when my PayPal colleagues and I came out, we were talking to each other, investing in things, starting things, et cetera.
And so that will certainly happen, because it's not just obviously the founders of each of these companies, but what happens is all the executives and everyone else tends to make a bunch of money.
And the really interesting question is, well, what happens when you're like getting pitched ideas?
Let's just be a little bit fanciful on this.
Okay.
An AI is pitching you for their business idea.
And they're going to go execute this with a whole bunch of different compute fabric.
And, you know.
Either you or you plus an AI or an AI is making the capital allocation decisions.
Because, by the way, compute allocations will be capital allocation decisions, a compute capable part of it.
My guess is, like, for example, in that universe, there's some deeply utility things about there being firms.
Because the firms are running, you know, kind of competent, specialized AI with data and all the rest and all that.
This is all similar to the startup landscape becoming highly variable.
We now, of course, have the investing landscape changing shape too.
Yeah.
Well, you touched on this with your conversation with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.
You talk about this idea of a hybrid human AI organization.
One question that I have is how do we decide what work gets done by humans and what work gets done by AI and also in this like hybrid?
How do you build things like trust and culture and mission and values that are so important to the success of any organization?
Well, part of what has made capitalism so essential and so successful to humanity, to all the societies, has been that the allocation of resource decision tends to go to the things that drive.
quality up, price down, et cetera.
And so the answer of like, how does work get allocated is like, well, where does the work get done at a certain amount of quality at a low price?
Now, that being said, humans will always be, I think, central participants in this.
And so the question will be is, well, how do we feel that we are in a collective market game that benefits enough of us in this game that we will all hold ourselves to this game?
And so, you know, the kind of notion that human beings will say, well, okay, we're just less effective at everything.
The AIs are more effective at everything.
They should do everything.
It's like, well, but we still have to have roles and have to participate.
And so we'll be looking for those.
But I think we will create the markets that enable that.
Now, you mentioned legal before.
I think one of the funny things is, and I don't think they should, but I think they will.
I think lawyers will go, well, if it's law without a lawyer, It's not law.
And so we have to be there.
Right.
I spoke at this.
It was like a partner event for a law firm.
And I was talking about AI, obviously, which is why they invited me.
But I was intrigued because I think there are lawyers who are like rethinking what a law firm looks like in the first place.
And they're building it with a whole bunch of AI agents.
And it's very interesting.
Right.
They're just rethinking it from the ground up.
Exactly.
And by the way, that's what I think should happen.
I think the notion that we like, you know, a little bit like the Pope's great encyclical, it should be like, hey, be focused on what humanity at the center means.
It just doesn't mean historic humanity at the center.
It means a good role at the center and how the future is evolving.
I'll be right back after this quick break.
OK, so I want to switch focus here and I want to talk about politics.
And I will timestamp this to say we had.
We're having this conversation on June 17th because politics is also moving fast these days, right?
Or at least chaotic.
Yeah, chaotic.
They seem to love volatility.
Yes.
So I want to touch on this idea of a U.S.
sovereign wealth fund for AI.
Anytime Bernie Sanders and President Trump seem to be agreeing even a little, I'm like, OK, this must be interesting.
So I would love your take on kind of Bernie Sanders' proposal.
This idea of a sovereign wealth fund overseen by an independent source to tax some of the largest AI companies.
And then Trump's proposal, this idea of the United States taking a stake in some select number of AI businesses.
What do you think?
What do you make of this?
So one, I think sovereign wealth funds are a good idea.
I think they've been executed in good ways in a number of places in the world.
And it's one of the things the U.S.
is behind on.
You can look at the Singapore fund.
You can look at the Norwegian fund.
tons of these that are good.
Then I think it gets down to, well, how do you get the sovereign wealth fund started?
How does it go?
What's in it?
And I think a little bit of the question comes down to is, I'll put this in kind of classic, you know, American Wild West libertarian, but we're going to go steal some property from some people in order to put it in, right?
Like we're just going to go appropriate X percentage.
So, you know, that I think is very alarming and is destructive to the entire system.
Now, if you said something in between the two and you said, okay, look, this is going to have a huge amount of economic growth.
We're going to have civil disruption because of questions of how jobs and industry changes.
So we're going to go do something intermediate and say, hey, companies X, Y, and Z, you have to accept investment from us at the same price that you had been priced by the market most recently.
And we're going to invest a bunch and own a bunch.
And then you can use the capital to grow your business.
And that's part of the benefit of being here.
and you had some, you know, relatively equitable way, I'd prefer it wasn't forced to incent it to happen, then that's more like, okay, we'll have some economic basis of this.
Now, you know, part of it is I think that there's been a bunch of investment in Anthropic and OpenAI from a number of funds that oversee, you know, pensions, 401ks, all the rest.
There's already a certain amount of public participation in it.
So those are all some early reflections.
But I do think...
Sovereign wealth funds are a good thing.
I'm not sure anywhere in the world we've made state-owned enterprises kind of equivalent, functional entities, right?
I don't know if I've ever seen that.
I've seen sovereign wealth funds work amazingly well, kind of as venture firms.
But the, oh, it's a state-owned enterprise.
I mean, like, for example, utilities companies, just about anywhere, kind of a problem.
Right.
Okay.
I want to talk about AI safety.
So again, at the time we recorded this conversation, Anthropic was forced to pull its fable and mythos models off the market over U.S.
security concerns, which, by the way, Anthropic, they had initially raised these concerns as well.
I've always been an advocate for thoughtful regulation of AI, even back when I was running Affectiva.
And I don't know how to feel about this one.
Maybe it's mixed news.
I think it's probably bad news, but there's probably some good elements to it.
The bad news part of it is it doesn't look like there's anything that's a particular principled, you know, here's the way that we're navigating through things, apply kind of a rule of law and predictability.
It's more like, hey, we kind of had some contentious interactions with this company anyway, so we're going to hit them with a stick and we're not justifying why we're hitting them with a stick, but not OpenAI or others and so forth as ways of doing this.
They say, well, those models aren't the same.
It's like, okay, it's not uncredible relative to the cybersecurity particular issues.
I think that Anthropic was putting real energy into making sure even in their general lease, this thing didn't create any problems for key industries.
So it's a little unclear.
And a kind of a, you know, call it autocratic, willy-nilly way of applying it is very suboptimum.
Now, the good part of it is, look, I think we should be paying attention to major threats, cybersecurity, bioterrorism, et cetera, and should intervene.
when we need to on that.
And, you know, at least that's potentially a positive case of that.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, last couple of questions.
I am curious, what category of AI do you think is most undervalued by the market right now?
And what is maybe overvalued?
And what are you tracking even if you're not invested yet?
Again, asking, asking for a friend.
Asking for a friend.
Well, as an investor in your fund, You know, I'd say, you know, some of the— Yeah, don't share all the secrets on here.
Yes, exactly.
So, look, I mean, it's obvious that I think that the biopharma stuff is pretty important.
I don't think there's going to be room for only one with Monas, but, you know, one of the funny things about the Monas pitch deck is we have a—we are an AI drug discovery factory for creating monopolies, and you're allowed to say monopolies in your pitch deck because that's essentially what the IP is for drugs.
Right.
We're not making any antitrust violations or anything else.
And, you know, it's perfectly fine for it to be discoverable.
Yes, yes, this was our pitch deck.
Right.
Because of that.
And so I think, you know, there's a whole bunch of different stuff on that.
I think one of the maybe more uncomfortable areas, but will be huge, is a bunch of stuff going on in defense tech, because I think we are in a time of more war and conflict.
So I think that that area will be another one.
I think the questions about.
where the AI can be embedded in something else that has a really big moat is, I think, interesting.
I'll say one thing that's kind of not, I don't think per se, economic is like, what does AI mean for the reinvention of universities?
It's been one of the things that I've been kind of paying attention to.
And I don't think it's an economic thing, although I do know of one for-profit university in the UK that's going heavily in that path.
Anyway, so those are some random comments.
Is that great?
Yeah.
Do you have an anti-AI thesis where as everybody doubles down on AI, we will be craving more and more human experiences and human connections and what that could look like and whether AI has a role in scaling these endeavors kind of thing?
I think for sure.
It goes all the way back to John Nisbet's megatrends from, I think it was the 70s, which is high tech, high touch.
I think for sure as we get high tech, we want more human.
on a variety of things.
The question really is, like, what does it mean for investing?
And so, like, for example, just a couple weeks ago was in Japan and the kind of the focus on tea ceremonies and, you know, human experiences.
I think there'd be a lot of desire for those kinds of things.
Which of those things are interesting economic things at small scale or at large scale, I think, or TBD?
But I think the intense demand for the human will be very high.
And so it has like where does the buy side demand match up with the supply side pricing?
That's part of the reason why I think, you know, when people are thinking about like, well, what happens when we get to an AGI universe and they say live entertainment and hospitality and so forth?
You say, OK, well, you know, what's the particular way to bet on that in a way that gets amplified?
I don't know.
But, you know, those those kinds of things, like I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of people say, ah, sports teams.
No one's ever going to want to watch robots playing basketball.
Yeah, my daughter, as you know, Jana is a food anthropologist.
So she's definitely on that side of the spectrum and thinking about businesses in this.
And I look at what she's thinking about.
I'm like, these are great for humans and humanity, but I don't know if they're venture scale.
So I want to like, I'm trying to see if the two worlds can intersect.
And anyway, still don't have the answer yet.
Work in progress.
Work in progress.
Okay, so last question.
My kids.
So Jenna is 23 and Adam is 17.
They're actually very different users of AI.
Like Jenna does not really use much of AI.
Adam uses AI for everything.
I am curious what your advice would be for the young generation, not specifically about use of AI, but also broadly how to think about purpose and agency and possibility.
Well, you know, and as you know, this is part of the reason I wrote Super Agency, which is, you know, agency is to some degree a mindset.
And so I think what's really important is you embrace AI as part of your agency.
And you said, this is part of how I learn, how I work, how I live, how I do things and so forth.
And it isn't like I sit back and I do whatever the AI tells me to do.
It's the AI is my tool, companion, car, et cetera, as I navigate things.
And I think it's really important to start iterating and doing that.
And it's a little bit of like one of the things I've been thinking about, you know, kind of writing a...
essay on has been the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or, you know, otherwise dissing AI.
And you're like, look, you guys have the opportunity to be generation AI where you come into the workforce saying, I know this a lot better than all of you.
You should be hiring me in order to help you become AI native organizations and so forth.
And it should be an opportunity.
you know, not a threat.
And they say, well, but the entry-level jobs market's way down.
It's like, yeah, at the moment, it's actually not really because of AI.
There may be a this, that, and the other that is.
But it's actually, in fact, because of global turbulence and businesses being unable to figure out how to invest and plan.
It's because...
of basically overhiring in the pandemic and the, hey, maybe remote work really does work.
Oh, right.
Remote work's pretty hard, you know, to make work, you know, as a direction.
And so, yeah, it's AI washing of all that stuff.
But it's like, it's the embrace it for your agency.
The AI can do a whole bunch of amazing things itself, but is not complete.
And humans can add in a lot of significant and important things.
Okay, so the advice, not just for young people, but I love this advice to have an agency mindset.
Yes.
Love that.
That's a great way to end our conversation, Reid.
As always, such a pleasure.
Always awesome.
Thank you for joining us.
I always get so much out of my conversation with Reid.
When there's so much happening in the world, it's great to have a friend and a trusted voice to help unpack it all.
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll be back next week with a new episode.
Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original.
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