Surviving AI – Navigating AI Job Displacement and Automation

Surviving AI with Carlo Thompson
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Join Carlo Thompson on Surviving AI, your definitive resource for understanding AI job displacement and mastering AI survival strategies. This podcast breaks down complex artificial intelligence trends affecting jobs and offers practical guidance on skill development and navigating job automation challenges. With expert insights and structured content, listeners are equipped to protect their careers and capitalize on new opportunities in the changing economy. Surviving AI delivers:  ✓ Early warning signs your job is vulnerable ✓ Skills that AI can't replicate (yet)  ✓ Career pivots that protect your income  ✓ Geographic arbitrage strategies for the AI economy  ✓ Real case studies from the automation frontlines  ✓ The truth about "AI will create more jobs than it destroys." This is a structured, season-by-season curriculum — not a news recap. Seasons 1–2 cover the foundations: automation risk, protected careers, skilled trades, corporate survival, and business ownership. Season 3 goes deeper into strategic positioning — where to live, where to invest your energy, and how the map of opportunity is being redrawn. For professionals who'd rather adapt than be replaced — regardless of industry. This isn't fear-mongering. It's a wake-up call. Because hope isn't a strategy, but preparation is. New episodes weekly.

  1. 4d ago

    The Most Dangerous AI Misconception, according to a 40-Year IT Veteran, CEO Joe Turso of Hivepoint

    Send us Fan Mail "AI doesn't replace the human; it enhances the human." That's the flat answer Joe Turso — Co-Founder/CEO of HivePoint Group, a managed service provider that has spent the last several years building an AI-native operating system for small and mid-sized businesses gives when asked whether AI is costing his clients jobs. In this Season 5 closing guest conversation, Joe walks Carlo and Ainsley through what actually happens when small businesses adopt AI without a plan: shadow AI instances popping up department by department, data silos that never talk to each other, and — the episode's real turning point — the most dangerous misconception he sees in the field: that AI can fix a broken process. It can't. It just makes a bad process fail faster. Joe also lays out the framework behind his own product: governance before adoption, "Experience Level Agreements" instead of just SLAs, and a concept he calls the "living persona" — an AI trained closely enough on how you work that it can answer for you when you're out. And in a genuinely candid turn for someone who's built his business on AI, he says plainly: he doesn't trust AI himself — which is exactly why his product keeps every client's data centralized rather than sending it to a model. This episode closes Season 5's human-skills arc from the employer's side: what businesses actually hand to AI, and what they keep human on purpose. Chapters: 00:00 Intro Meet Joe Turso, HivePoint Group 01:54 The philosophy: AI enhances, doesn't replace 04:53 Real-world enhancement the email-triage example 05:46 AI hype vs. reality: shadow AI and data silos in small business 09:15 Is AI different from the cloud, mobile, and cybersecurity waves? 10:15 Why governance has to come before adoption 12:30 What AI adoption failure actually looks like 14:03 Experience Level Agreements vs. SLAs 16:02 Early warning signs your AI is going off the rails 18:06 Trust, feedback, and the "one-person corporation" myth 20:10 Where to start: AI Readiness and the Four Ps 25:33 Hiring in the AI era: culture first, human first 28:41 The "Living Persona" and building HivePoint from scratch 34:24 The most dangerous misconception — and what to tell scared owners 38:22 Where to find Joe, and closing Find Joe and HivePoint Group at hivepointgroup.ai. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · YouTube · Spotify — new episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    The Most Dangerous AI Misconception, according to a 40-Year IT Veteran, CEO Joe Turso of Hivepoint

  2. 6d ago

    25.87% of Black Applicants Hit an AI Hiring Wall That Isn't Illegal, Yet

    Send us Fan Mail "The silence is the tell." That's how this episode opens because if you've sent out dozens of applications and heard almost nothing back, the instinct is to assume something's wrong with you. It isn't. Roughly a quarter of everyone currently unemployed has been searching for 27 weeks or longer, and the average search now runs about six and a half months. Carlo and Ainsley dig into why: most applications today are screened by automated systems before a human ever sees them, and those systems were trained on years of historical hiring data which means they can quietly reproduce old bias at a scale no individual recruiter ever could. Amazon found this out the hard way with its own internal recruiting tool, which it scrapped in 2018 after discovering it was penalizing resumes that simply contained the word "women's." And the pattern goes further: one landmark independent study found that a meaningful share of Black applicants' submissions was consistently filtered out by the same systems across completely different companies — what researchers came to call "algorithmic blackball." So, what do you actually do with that? This episode is built around two practical moves. First, a reality checks most job seekers skip: a real chunk of live job postings may not be genuinely open at all — "ghost jobs" posted for pipeline-building or already spoken for internally — and there's a three-check test (posting age, division layoffs, visible new hires) that takes about ten minutes. Second, the human bypass: weak-tie networking, the kind of loosely connected relationships that get you in front of a person before a system decides you don't belong in the room. Carlo shares his own early-career habit of showing up at conferences outside his industry — and Ainsley connects it directly to decades of research on why acquaintances, not close contacts, are how most people actually find their next role. The episode closes with the Next-Door Challenge: a four-step, ten-minute-a-day plan for anyone in a long search, checking whether your target roles are real, running your resume through a free ATS scanner, reaching out to three people at target companies, and confirming whether your target category is actually growing. Because getting through the door is only half the job; showing up ready when it opens is the other half. Episode Resource: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gyvmm3mgZvIyJL3B4B9aVvRxWOB7M3nn/view?usp=sharing Chapters: 00:00 Intro — "The silence is the tell" 03:15 Welcome, and the friends who've been searching for a year 04:16 Amazon's discarded recruiting tool 07:57 Proxy variables — how bias hides in plain sight 11:01 The algorithmic blackball stat, and the case for pivoting industries 16:25 Weak ties, Granovetter, and the blind-audition study 19:02 A conference habit that built a cross-industry network 22:17 Naming who this episode is actually for 23:33 The undercounted — who the unemployment number misses 25:57 Setting up the ghost job problem 27:07 Ghost jobs — the three-check reality test 30:41 Where the pivot starts, and the gig-economy question 32:46 Referrals, runway, and the EU vs. US legal gap 35:55 Reactivating a cold network 37:40 The loop AI hiring creates, and the Next Door Challenge 41:38 Carlo's closing story 44:56 Wrap-up, and next Monday 45:31 Bonus: mirror the new industry's language Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · YouTube · Spotify — new episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    25.87% of Black Applicants Hit an AI Hiring Wall That Isn't Illegal, Yet

  3. Jul 8

    77% of Companies Say They'll Help You When AI Cuts Your Job. Only 19% of Workers Ever Find Out.

    Send us Fan Mail As of July 2, 2026, AI has been the number-one stated reason for U.S. layoffs for four consecutive months  101,743 jobs cut so far this year with AI explicitly named as the cause (Challenger, Gray and Christmas). That's not a projection. It's a count of what already happened. Meanwhile, a survey of 11,000 HR leaders and employees across seven countries found something almost as alarming: 77 percent of HR leaders say their organizations already have redeployment programs to move at-risk workers into new roles. Only 19 percent of employees have ever experienced or even recognized one. Fifty-eight percentage points. That's not a communication problem; that's a safety net that's functionally invisible to the people it's supposed to catch. (LHH is a talent-solutions and outplacement business worth knowing whose research this is, even though the finding itself is well-sampled and directionally credible.) This episode closes the Responsibility Trilogy — Corporate (S5E6), Government (S5E8), and now Individual with an honest ledger of what each actor actually owns. Corporate had the resources and mostly chose efficiency over people. Government had the mandate and the scale, and where the right programs exist, uptake still lags badly. Neither of those failures disappears just because this episode is about individual action. But waiting for either institution to show up is not a strategy; it's a bet, and four straight months of AI-cited layoffs says it's a losing one. The framework: Invisibility (you're more likely to be cut for being unreadable than for being bad at your job), Inventory (three separate audits AI exposure by task, human skills, relationship inventory — that most people collapse into one), and Leverage (domain depth plus AI fluency, not a pivot to prompt engineering). This isn't just a white-collar problem — the episode makes the case that the same mechanism applies whether you're a software engineer or a shift supervisor at a distribution center. And individual responsibility doesn't mean going it alone: from a nearly-900-member worker association in Africa to a regional training community in Latin America to a program reaching a million small business owners in Nigeria, people are already building this leverage collectively. Season 5 closes here. Season 6 is coming. 📌 Listener Resource: The Invisibility, Inventory, Leverage Workbook — the full framework, three audits, and the Human Edge Challenge. Link in show notes. 🎙️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/surviving-ai-navigating-ai-job-displacement-and/id1864360631 ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SurvivingAIRisk 🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5rd6gdFu76HPdLBuvV5K0X 🌐 survivingai.co Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    77% of Companies Say They'll Help You When AI Cuts Your Job. Only 19% of Workers Ever Find Out.

  4. Jul 6

    The More You Trust AI, the Less You Think. 50% of Executives Are Watching Their Teams Lose It.

    Send us Fan Mail PwC analyzed more than a billion job postings across 27 countries and found that entry-level roles most exposed to AI are now seven times more likely to require senior-level judgment and leadership skills than less-exposed roles. Those "seniorized" entry-level roles grew 35 percent since 2019 — while every other entry-level role shrank 10 percent in the same period. The ladder didn't get harder to climb. The first few rungs got removed. And the AI-skills wage premium — now 62 percent and climbing — isn't really paying for technical AI operation. It's paying for judgment about AI output. Almost nobody is teaching that. Here's what makes this urgent and measurable: a peer-reviewed Microsoft Research study of 319 knowledge workers found that confidence in AI output and confidence in your own judgment move in opposite directions. The more you trust the tool, the less critical thinking you do. The more you trust yourself, the more scrutiny you apply. The cycle is self-reinforcing — and AI is engineered to sound more confident than it has any right to be. BCG surveyed 70 C-suite and senior executives (BCG also advises those companies on AI deployment — take the finding in that context): 50 percent are already observing de-skilling inside their organizations right now. The skills disappearing fastest: judgment and problem framing. This is not a projection. This is observed, happening today. Season 5 ends here. Every human edge skill this season — empathy, story, negotiation, leadership, physical intelligence — requires someone to decide, in the moment, that their judgment is worth putting on the line. That's this episode. The Human Edge Challenge this week: Tier 1 (five minutes) — name one recurring decision where you just accept AI's first answer. Just notice it. Tier 2 (this week) — run one AI output through first principles before you use it; write down what you actually verified. Tier 3 (ongoing) — choose your AI-free zone and make it your signature. Season 6 is coming, with interviews, new ideas, and survival frameworks. 📌 Listener Resource: The Critical Thinking Audit — the trust inversion explained, the three-tier challenge, and four first-principles questions for evaluating any AI output. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cZUfaPHnH8s-oCd57jFk4pJH068MsuMf/view?usp=sharing 🎙️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube PINNED COMMENT QUESTION (see below) | CHAPTERS BELOW | SUBSCRIBE LINKS BELOW 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/surviving-ai-navigating-ai-job-displacement-and/id1864360631 ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SurvivingAIRisk 🎙️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5rd6gdFu76HPdLBuvV5K0X 🌐 survivingai.co Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    The More You Trust AI, the Less You Think. 50% of Executives Are Watching Their Teams Lose It.

  5. Jul 1

    35,000 People Applied in 7 Days. Only 1,000 Got In. Here's What They Know.

    Send us Fan Mail Thirty-five thousand people applied to Meta's fiber technician training program in seven days. One thousand spots. No experience required. Five weeks, free housing, free tuition, daily stipend, guaranteed job at the end. Meta saw the demand signal and turned it into a $115 million commitment — America's Workforce Academy — the largest private-sector guaranteed-job trades commitment in US history. That's not a press release. That's a construction timeline that was being held up by a human bottleneck, and Meta went looking for the humans. Meanwhile BlackRock committed $100 million to train fifty thousand electricians, HVAC technicians, and plumbers. Lowe's: $250 million for the same. Combined: $465 million toward physical worker pipelines in roughly one quarter. Larry Fink says America needs $10 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2033 — and "capital alone isn't enough." When institutional capital of that scale moves toward physical worker pipelines simultaneously, it is not a trend. It is a market correction. This episode walks through the Four-Phase Physical Career Pivot: Assess what you actually have, Test it before you commit, Enter through one of three zero-debt paths, and Specialize into the roles where the base salary becomes the worst year of your career — not the best. Plus: the mathematical case for trades vs. college over ten years, the psychological piece nobody prepares you for, and the one action you can take this week with no money and no commitment required. A companion to S5E9 Physical Intelligence — best listened together. 📌 Human Edge Challenge: Tier 1 (today): Go to apprenticeship.gov. Search one trade in your city. Don't apply — just find the pay scale and requirements. Tier 2 (30 days): One informal conversation with a working tradesperson. Tier 3 (90 days): Attend one trade orientation or shadow a technician. Most are free. 🎙️ Subscribe: [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] | [YouTube] Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    35,000 People Applied in 7 Days. Only 1,000 Got In. Here's What They Know.

  6. Jun 29

    41% of Trades Workers Retire by 2031 — Here's Who Gets Paid to Replace Them

    Send us Fan Mail Randstad analyzed 50 million job postings and found skilled trades growing three times faster than professional roles — while 102 people leave manufacturing for every 100 who enter. The pipeline is going in the wrong direction at exactly the moment AI is driving demand the other way.  Here's the irony that keeps landing: the machines displacing desk workers cannot build themselves. Data center electrical work accounts for 45 to 70 percent of total construction costs, there's a shortage of nearly half a million workers in that sector right now, and a 30-year-old electrician in Texas is clearing $240,000 to $280,000 a year — debt-free, with a starting salary that beats most junior white-collar roles before the student loan math even runs.  In this episode, Carlo and Ainsley map the Three Tiers of Physical Intelligence — the framework that shows where AI resistance actually lives in the labor market, why the body is the liability anchor that no model can replicate, and what the honest career math looks like for the worker still telling themselves physical work isn't for them. Plus: what Carlo held back from saying at his son's graduation when the valedictorian announced they were going into accounting. This is Episode 9 of Season 5. The through-line: judgment, empathy, negotiation, physical intelligence — and next week, the capstone. Critical thinking. What you need if you want to earn $300,000 a year in the AI era. See you Monday. Episode Resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m8b26UogNzu_NRcbAkp7EsiDX7ZI5YLH/view?usp=sharing CHAPTERS: 00:00 The Hook: 102 Leaving for Every 100 Entering 02:30 The Data Center Paradox (AI Can't Build Itself) 04:00 Geographic Arbitrage — It's Not Just Trade vs. Desk 06:00 The Trickle Effect: Why the Urgency Doesn't Feel Real Yet 08:00 Three Tiers of Physical Intelligence 11:00 Show Me the Money: $240K–$280K at 30 13:30 Zero Student Debt and the Net Numbers 15:30 The Graduation Moment: A Parent's Honest Take 18:30 The Data Center Bridge — Picking the Right Role 21:30 Human Edge Challenge: The Three-Question Audit 🎧 Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube 👉 New episodes every Monday and Wednesday. Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    41% of Trades Workers Retire by 2031 — Here's Who Gets Paid to Replace Them

  7. Jun 25

    Meta Could Reskill 20% of Its Workforce for Less Than 1% of Its AI Budget.

    Send us Fan Mail Meta is reportedly considering laying off up to 20% of its workforce to help fund $600 billion in AI data center investment through 2028. The headline got attention. The math behind it didn't. Carlo Thompson comes back between scheduled episodes because this story can't wait and because the number at its center changes the entire conversation. Meta generates north of $50 billion in revenue a year. The payroll savings from cutting 20% of its workforce are somewhere around $2 to $3 billion. Against a $600 billion infrastructure bet. That is not funding the future. That is a narrative designed to move a stock price, dressed up as a strategic sacrifice. And the people whose lives disappear inside that story don't experience it as a bold vision. They experience it as the economy contracting around them without warning. What makes this episode land differently: Amazon did the opposite. One hundred thousand workers upskilled — at hyperscale — because they ran the math and decided it was cheaper than the alternative. The model exists. The economics work. Which means when Meta looks at the same numbers and reaches a different conclusion, that's not a resource problem. That's a values problem dressed up as a financial decision. Carlo and Ainsley trace this beyond Meta — into the ecosystem logic the cuts ignore. Consumer spending is 70% of GDP. The workers buying the products that run on AI infrastructure are the same workers being displaced to build it. We've seen this before: the late-nineties fiber overbuilds built highways through towns that couldn't sustain the demand. The builders who couldn't read what was actually coming took the whole sector with them. This episode ends where Surviving AI always ends with your agency. Not a rant. A question: Who is writing the story you're in right now, and what does it look like for you to start writing your own? If you've been impacted by AI displacement — quietly, without a headline — your story belongs here. Reach out. The world needs a face, not another opinion. Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    Meta Could Reskill 20% of Its Workforce for Less Than 1% of Its AI Budget.

  8. Jun 24

    One Country Solved AI Job Retraining. Most of Its Citizens Still Didn't Use It.

    Send us Fan Mail Roughly 76% of workers plan to build AI skills this year. Only about 13% have actually received any training — and 42% say their employer told them to figure it out on their own. That gap hasn't closed in two-plus years of explosive AI growth, which means it isn't a motivation problem. It's structural. And structural problems at the scale of an entire economy point to one actor: government — not as a safety net, not as a regulator-first rule-setter, but as the gap-closer. In Part 2 of the Responsibility Trilogy, Carlo Thompson and Ainsley take the corporate framework from last week — audit, visible pathways, legibility — and scale it up to a country. They hold up Singapore's Skills Future as the global benchmark, then deliver the number that complicates the fairy tale: even with the best-designed training system on earth, the majority of eligible citizens never used the expiring credit. Government can build the road; it can't make people walk it. Then the sharpest idea in the episode — procurement. Government is one of the biggest AI buyers on the planet, and recent procurement frameworks could attach one condition to every contract: show us your workforce transition plan. The machinery exists. Nobody's pulled the lever. And in the spirit of the show's truth standard, this episode is honest about where government has already underdelivered — the EU AI Act's diluted, lagging literacy duty, and a US retraining precedent that gets people back to work but barely moves their wages. This is the internationally minded episode — Singapore, the EU, the US, India, and the Gulf, with an honest on-air disclosure of where the data was missing. Part 1 (Corporate) aired June 18. The season finale (Individual Responsibility) airs July 8. Resources: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P7RbO5oqa-sMzBh9qKGRdfM5ZOAWrmiY/view?usp=sharing Please visit our website for more information - Surviving AI: Navigate the Future

    One Country Solved AI Job Retraining. Most of Its Citizens Still Didn't Use It.
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About

Join Carlo Thompson on Surviving AI, your definitive resource for understanding AI job displacement and mastering AI survival strategies. This podcast breaks down complex artificial intelligence trends affecting jobs and offers practical guidance on skill development and navigating job automation challenges. With expert insights and structured content, listeners are equipped to protect their careers and capitalize on new opportunities in the changing economy. Surviving AI delivers:  ✓ Early warning signs your job is vulnerable ✓ Skills that AI can't replicate (yet)  ✓ Career pivots that protect your income  ✓ Geographic arbitrage strategies for the AI economy  ✓ Real case studies from the automation frontlines  ✓ The truth about "AI will create more jobs than it destroys." This is a structured, season-by-season curriculum — not a news recap. Seasons 1–2 cover the foundations: automation risk, protected careers, skilled trades, corporate survival, and business ownership. Season 3 goes deeper into strategic positioning — where to live, where to invest your energy, and how the map of opportunity is being redrawn. For professionals who'd rather adapt than be replaced — regardless of industry. This isn't fear-mongering. It's a wake-up call. Because hope isn't a strategy, but preparation is. New episodes weekly.

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