How to Keep Your Job in the AI Revolution, According to CEOs

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told employees that “efficiency gains” from AI would reduce the company’s “total corporate workforce” in the next few years.

Jassy may be the most prominent CEO to say AI is coming for people’s jobs, but he’s far from the first.

This is the advice CEOs have been giving about how to use AI — and avoid losing your job as a tech revolution threatens to reinvent the world of work.

Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman: Become exceptional at what you do

Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, one of the world’s largest freelance marketplaces, warned in an email to his team that: “AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call.”

Whether you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, or lawyer, “Al is coming for you,” he wrote in the email, which he shared on X.

“You must understand that what was once considered ‘easy tasks’ will no longer exist; what was considered ‘hard tasks’ will be the new easy, and what was considered ‘impossible tasks’ will be the new hard,” he said.

Kaufman continued: “If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months.”

“I am not talking about your job at Fiverr,” he added. “I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: Competition is between those who can use AI and those who can’t

“Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable. You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI,” chipmaker Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in May.

“What used to be human-coded softwares running on CPUs are now machine learning generated softwares running on GPUs,” Huang said at The Hill and Valley Forum in April.

But he added that “every single layer, the tooling of it, the compilers of it, the methodology of it, the way you collect data, curate data, use AI to guard rails, use AI to teach, use AI to keep the AI safe, all of that technology is being invented right now and it creates tons of jobs.”

Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn: Respond to AI with curiosity, not fear

“I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said on LinkedIn earlier this year.

He was responding to a backlash against previous comments about enthusiastically embracing AI.

“AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity,” the language app’s CEO wrote. “I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI.”

He added: “To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.”

Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison: ‘Stay close to the cash register’

Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison said his advice was to “stay as close to the cash register as you can.”

“When young people come to me and they desire to work in the corporate office, my advice to them is: stay as close to the cash register as you can,” Ellison said at a Business Roundtable forum in DC this month.

“Stay close to the customers, because you will always have employment opportunities to grow,” he added.

He also said, “AI isn’t going to fix a hole in your roof.”

“It’s not going to respond to an electrical issue in your home. It’s not going to stop your water heater from leaking,” he said.

LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman: Show off your AI skills to employers

“You are generation AI,” LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman said in a video in which he answered questions from college students on how they should navigate the job hunt.

“You are AI native, so bringing the fact that you have AI in your tool set is one of the things that makes you enormously attractive,” he added.

Hoffman said that AI’s impact on jobs was a “legitimate worry,” but he added that students could try to use it to their advantage.

“Look, on this side, it’s transforming the workspace, entry-level work, employers’ confusion,” he said. “But on this side, it’s making you able to show your unique capabilities.”

“In an environment with a bunch of older people, you might be able to help them out,” he added.

Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin: Bosses should give workers AI to do jobs without feeling swamped

Lattice boss Sarah Franklin told Business Insider that corporate leaders should be focused on how AI can help with efficiency.

The HR software company CEO said this includes using AI to give employees “superpowers to where they feel like they’re stepping into the Iron Man suit” and accomplishing what they need to in their jobs without feeling swamped.

She said that might include using AI to give each employee at a company an executive assistant or a coach.