What’s going on with AI? And will it take away my job?
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Welcome to the Most Innovative Companies podcast. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined here by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. Happy first episode. Thank you. Well, kind of first episode. It's a reboot of sorts of the Most Innovative Companies podcast. We're only making reboots these days. I'm so done with it. Well, I like a reboot. I'm kind of into it. Did you watch A League of Their Own? No. Okay. Well, you have to check that out. I don't know why I said that so angrily, but it was like...

I felt like it was marketed very poorly because it didn't look funny or interesting. Shots fired at Darcy Carden. Yes. But that's a reboot and this is a reboot. Maybe we should tell the listeners how this show is going to work now. All right. So basically each week I'll be doing a deep dive into one of the biggest news stories in the world of business with one of our all-star reporters on staff. We will also have an interview in each episode with a

innovative leader from one of the many companies making change in their industry. And we'll be running down all the other headlines you need to know that week. So if you haven't already, and you probably haven't because this is the first episode of the reboot, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button on whatever podcast app you're listening to right now so you don't miss a single episode. And if you like what you hear, give us a rating and review, but only if you like it.

Only if you like it. Five stars only. On today's episode, I'll be talking with Loom CEO Joe Thomas. And for those of you who don't know, because the name doesn't really give you anything, Loom is essentially TikTok for business, which sounds crazier than it is. Stay tuned for that. But first, we're going to talk about the biggest story of the year so far, at least in the fast company world, which is AI and what's going on with it. And to help me figure that out, I've got our tech editor Max Uffberg here. Max Uffberg

Hey, Max. Hello. So let's talk generative AI. Okay, let's do it. So generative AI is something that Fast Company's been keeping an eye on, and it feels like every big tech company is investing in it. It also feels like AI is going to touch almost everything we do with computers in some way. But here's what I really want to know. Is it coming for my job? Is it coming for our jobs? Well, the short answer there is possibly. Great. Good. Okay. Tell me more. Okay.

Well, there's a survey from Goldman Sachs released just a few weeks ago that suggests AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs in the next not too many years. Not a great outlook. Maybe not, but it is worth noting that a lot of experts think AI could ultimately create more jobs than it eliminates.

Organizations like the World Economic Forum and the Harvard Business Review have predicted as much. So I think the argument is always the same, which is that society has gone through a number of tech-centered disruptions. And in each case, we've come out ahead to some extent. So I think there's maybe a little bit arguably wishful thinking there.

Or, you know, the flip side is historical precedent would suggest that this actually won't be the society destroying force some of us fear. So you sound like a professor there, but is there anything like concrete you can say about what's coming? Well, I think we can say for sure that people are going to need to develop certain skill sets that

that can't be performed well by AI, at least in its current iterations. So, you know, we've seen with LinkedIn data, for example, the number of job listings mentioning ChatGPT have increased something like 50% from 2021 to 2022. Wait, is this like a job posting where somebody's like, can use ChatGPT? Yes, it means a job posting where someone is saying, not can necessarily use, but also can use the...

underlying tech with ChatGPT to sort of incorporate within a company. So it's kind of like the new Microsoft Office suite can use Excel on your resume? Exactly. So if anyone is sort of entering the workforce now or thinking about a career change, there are definitely opportunities that are going to continue to emerge

that sort of would require engineering expertise. You know, that's one route. And then beyond that, there are always going to be the kind of hands-on jobs that probably won't be going away, at least for a while. So cooks, stonemasons, construction, like those are all jobs that aren't. How is stonemasonry? Stonemason's the number one. I mean, is that a gross industry? You know what? Stonemasonry. I...

Look, the stonemason lobby got to me and I had to mention that in this podcast. Well, I mean, it is, I guess it is part of the larger point of like, like you said, hands-on jobs aren't really going anywhere. Like they haven't for, I mean, I mean, how many technological evolutions have we seen that haven't really affected some of those jobs?

I mean, there are AI tools in some of those professions. Yes, there are AI tools. And I think, you know, the argument a lot of people working in AI would make is that AI is, again, a tool, not a replacement. It's something that's going to aid and certainly transform a career, but it won't

replace it. Having said that, I think there are certainly like inarguably many jobs that will be slowly eliminated. So I feel like we're screwed, but what other jobs out there could stand to be eliminated? Well, there's a paper released in March by researchers at UPenn and OpenAI, and it predicts that people in jobs that involve data or information processing could be at risk. So I want to ask a

question, just going back to that like 300 million number, like every time there's a new technology, I think there's always this calculus that it's like, well, it may destroy X amount of jobs, but it's going to create even more jobs, which I think in the kind of 30,000 foot view realm is like, oh, okay, this is a net positive.

But like in the short term in reality, and I think this is what we're talking about, there's real people who are going to lose certain jobs or opportunities or have to do major switches in careers because of a technology. It's not necessarily like on the personal level something that doesn't have a negative effect.

which I think is what's making people so fearful. I'm like quite bad at figuring out numbers, but especially when you say 300 million, like is that the population of a small country or is that like, is there a sense of scale that you can convey here? I think spread across so many industries, it's not the sort of like dystopic Skynet scenario you might think.

Like this Goldman Sachs report that we talked about that referenced the figure is talking about the economy as a whole. Right. So it's huge. It's not like necessarily, you know, sort of like world crushing. Having said that, you know, I think there are a lot of people who point to some of this data and just point to these rapid innovations in AI and say, okay.

We really need to figure out policy level, some sort of guarantee. So whether that means universal basic income or legislation that guarantees job security or job retraining programs like we've seen with coal miners who are then retrained to go into different sectors. I think the Obama administration was big on that.

Yeah, there's like, you know, kind of a million different prescriptions here. So we got a Yang gang member in the house. UBI. Everybody, everybody loves it. So what does universal basic income actually mean? And what does it have to do with AI? So universal basic income is the idea of unconditional guaranteed payment from the government. It's been around for a while. Andrew Yang was a...

big proponent of it during his 2020 primary run. But it's been around long before that. The idea, as it sort of pertains to AI, is that if we have this technology that's taking so many jobs, we need a sort of social safety net from the government.

And it's an idea that actually OpenAI's own CEO, Sam Altman, has talked about before. So according to Altman's own analysis, we could implement a tax structure that guarantees about $13,000 per year per person via a universal basic income delivery mechanism. This almost seems worth it, to be honest.

Well, if we get UBI over this, but I forget exactly who it was, who said because of these innovations, the average work week could go down to 15 hours a week while still maintaining the same income. Again, this could be hypocritical. Yeah, but you know it won't because there's always somebody who's like organizing a meeting for no reason. Yeah.

You know what I mean? If you can have an AI tool that can do meeting audits and eliminate my calendar, that would be amazing. That would be worth. That does get to like a larger point, though. It's not just job elimination that we're talking about. It's the culture of work broadly. Like so many things that we include in our day to day at work could be replaced or assisted by different AI tools. So meetings, as an example, if we could figure out a way and we can to automate some of this stuff, we could do it.

That might free up, you know, three hours a day or something like that. Do you have to sit at your desk for those three hours? Or, you know, as Josh was saying, like, can that work week cut down by three hours a day? What do you think you would do with an extra day on the weekend? Now we're into four-day work week, Len, which I'm a huge proponent of. A big, big believer in the four-day work week. Extra day on the weekend? I think I'm, you know, probably taking out the stand-up paddleboard and just letting loose. Your answer is so healthy. Yeah.

I was going to say I'd play the new Zelda game for her. I would play the new Zelda game. That's true. Mine is like dread things more. Oh, you know what? I'd finally watch the last dance that Michael Jordan documented. It's so good. It's really good. Well, this is.

This is amazing. If AI can create four day work weeks, less calendar things so we can all watch Michael Jordan. Bro, you have to watch The Last Dance. Not such a bad, I know. I've heard it's so good. It's also less sad than the Tiger Woods documentary. Oh, that checks out. Mostly upsetting.

So basically what you're saying is AI is coming for our jobs, but maybe it's not all bad. Yeah. All right. I'll take it. All right. We're going to take a quick break. Max is going to stick around. But first, here's my interview with Loom CEO Joe Thomas. ♪

Hi everyone, welcome to our panel about innovating in times of uncertainty. I'm Yasmin Gagne, an associate editor at Fast Company, primarily working on the print edition, and I'm here with two panelists who I'm going to let introduce themselves. Well it's good to be on with you. I'm Brett House, I am professor of professional practice in economics at Columbia Business School, and

and a fellow with the Public Policy Forum, the Munk School in Massey College at the University of Toronto. And I am Joe Thomas. I was an undergrad in economics, so I'm going to let Brett handle all of those related questions. But I'm founder and CEO of a company called Loom, which brings video messages to the workplace as a day-to-day form of communication.

Products like Zoom and Google Meet became really popular during the pandemic as so many of us started to work remotely. Loom also became popular. It does something a little bit different than those two. I kind of think of it as like Vine, but for business. So this question has two parts. First, I'd love to hear about Loom and how it works. And second, I want to talk about remote work more generally. What trends are you seeing in that area? Are workers coming back to the office? Are more people working hybrid schedules? What does that look like?

So our big thesis going into building Loom is that if we reduce friction enough and we make it consumer grade usability, that day to day video recording and sharing for the workplace would be a meaningful form of communication. And so for us, that was what we started about seven years ago. And I think that that thesis was phenomenal.

playing out to be true in advance of the pandemic. Now, COVID certainly accelerated that in terms of looking for ways to communicate in a purely remote context. And now we're going back to what I would say kind of bridging to your next question, which is around remote versus hybrid. Our thesis has always been that organizations are going to adopt whatever principle and practice

from employee attending the office or fully remote that is best for them. And that every company is to some degree hybrid, or at least 99.9% of them will fit into that hybrid criteria, which means that you could have the one extreme, one singular office

that everybody shows up to, except maybe one person is a little bit sick and has a cold and works from home that day. That is technically hybrid. And then the other end of the spectrum is that everybody is remote. And maybe you actually have a handful of employees that like to get together in a coworking space and work side by side with one another. And that is hybrid as well. So a vast majority of companies will fit into this hybrid dynamic.

And I think that what we've really seen after the last three years of folks working remote is that we've proven that at least for knowledge workers, that you can do your job remote and that there should be more flexible policies associated with when are individual employees empowered to work from home versus not. Now there's the other side of it, which I think that companies and organizations are saying what is potentially best for the business.

And so you see more and more policies that are coming out where maybe you have to come back into the office for two to three days per week. And I think that employees are also potentially happy to accommodate that where they do wanna see their peers, they do wanna see their coworkers. There's a human component to community and collaboration that getting together in person that we still haven't cracked from a digital perspective.

And so ultimately, I think that there's a lot of change that has happened over the last three years. There's a lot of normalization that will continue to happen over the next seven years. This is a decade long change that will take time to normalize. But I think that individuals and companies will make the decisions that are best for them. And then we'll kind of normalize and you'll understand what companies have which remote and hybrid policies and which employees map to those best.

- So actually I wanna ask you a little bit more about that. What is some of that meaningful progress that maybe in the last two to three years you wouldn't have been recognized for? - There's three metrics that we are primarily looking at. Of course it's revenue growth, right? But now we're looking at rule of 40, which is a metric that looks into how much revenue growth are you generating and how much cost does it take you in order to generate that. We're looking at burn multiple,

which is essentially how much free cashflow are you generating based off of how many dollars is it taking cost on the business side? And the last one is again, like gross margins, which for a B2B software company, this is something that when you do potentially go public in the future is one of the most important metrics that they look at in terms of

How much does it cost you to offer the software that you are providing and how much revenue are you generating as a result of that? I think that for us, those last three metrics around rule of 40, that's always been important to be clear. But in terms of burn multiple and gross margin, maybe in the previous two to three years, at least for a private company, to be clear, Loom is a growth stage private company.

So when we were raising our Series B and Series C, how much was that drilled into and how important was that relative to the valuation that Loom was getting as a result of the growth that we were seeing in the top line? I'm curious what sectors of the business you've continued investing in and what sectors you've cut costs in at Loom. It's interesting about where

where we've continued to innovate and where we've cut costs, like the framing up of the question, because I think some of the changes that we started to make in early 2022, the previous year, you could call it, was that because there was...

this incentive to grow, grow, grow, we actually built product strategy things that were tangential to the core product offering that we had that would be asymmetric upside bets. And so I'd give a couple examples of this. We built something called

a Loom SDK, which would allow other platforms to put Loom recording experience directly in their product such that users and users didn't have to download a recorder. And our thesis here was that other platforms could create recording and sharing behavior as well as Loom could. And if we could get a Loom button all over the internet, that that would be incredibly valuable for the growth of the business. And then we also built something called

Loom HQ, which is that you can tag an index and there's a home feed that kind of provides a trending view of looms that are across your business. And both of these I don't think are necessarily wrong. They were just mistimed or early relative to the opportunity cost of what we could have invested in, which is fantastic.

core video recording and sharing infrastructure for the recorders that we already offer. So making those more performant and make it like building core feature sets into that. We could also build directly into the edit and share flows such that individuals who are already recording and sharing in the loom platform, make the beer tastes better and like focus on that specifically. And for about a year, I think that we hired a bunch of folks across

strategy vectors of the business, but again, weren't necessarily wrong. They were just early. Maybe it was something that we should have focused three to five years later. When you take on more initiatives concurrently, there is a tax that is paid by the business in terms of do you make slower progress if you're working on five to seven things concurrently versus focusing on two to three and aligning the entire company to those.

And so I think that that's been the principled strategy and execution that we've really shifted back to in starting in early 2022 relative to when we were early stage at Loom, call it 2016 to 2019. We just had very limited resources, right? We were a 25 or 50 person team. So there's real power in constraint.

And we had taken a lot of the constraints off the business and we paid a tax as a result of that. So now I think that over the past year, we really focused on the core product experience that we know is delivering value for our customers. We've constrained the number of things that we've been working on. And as a result, we've actually gotten better business growth over the last 12 months than we had in the previous call it like 12 to 18 months.

All right, we're back with Max, and it's time to wrap up the show with a segment we are calling Keeping Tabs. And this is basically where each of us shares a story that we are following right now. So, Max, I want to kick it off with you. What are you keeping tabs on? I've been following, you know, the ongoing federal efforts to regulate AI. You can't get enough of this subject, can you? Yeah.

Loser. You know, guilty as charged, but it's paying the bills. Well, maybe not for 300 million people. I can't get out of this.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had announced last month that his office was launching this new effort to create a sort of legislative framework around AI. Now, one month later, we still haven't really seen anything materialize. But that news, you know, coupled with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's recent testimony before Congress,

speaks to this larger conversation in Washington around regulating AI. It's a topic that's obviously not going away anytime soon, despite however much you guys make fun of me for it.

Okay, you've convinced me that AI does matter. Now, Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? I'm keeping tabs on the writer's strike that's been going on since the beginning of May. For our listeners who don't know, Josh is a really big theater kid. I am a huge theater nerd. So I'm mostly just concerned about the Tony Awards being canceled, really. No, I am in full support of the writer's strike. I should say that Fast Company's union is represented by WGA, who does represent the writers in the writer's strike.

The big thing, just speaking about AI, that's interesting is one of like the provisions that they are fighting for, the union, is they want to have regulations around AI being used to like write or like being used as the source material for like scripting and work in AI.

essentially like guard against this kind of coming AI storm taking away these jobs, which is really fascinating and obviously something that wasn't a big deal in the last writer's strike in 2007. So I'm like really interested to see what happens with that. I mean, I also feel like I've watched some stuff on Netflix lately. Like I watched The Recruit and The Night Agent back to back, which are like the same show and clearly written by AI and clearly the main actor is AI generated because there's like...

Nothing to distinguish these shows from anything. Well, there's so much stuff that's so formulaic. It actually seems like a really big concern. Max, am I overpanicking about this? If I can make another plug for AI here. Okay.

We had a really good story like last week by this writer, A.S. Hamra. You know, he made this point that if you don't think it's a threat, consider that Hollywood has in some way been moving toward automation for many, many years. And he brings up as example, you know, Marvel has a writer's boot camp where they send everybody to learn how to produce, how to sort of churn out screenplays for Ant-Man 15 and all these things. It's obviously not AI, but

like it does suggest that the underlying sort of principle in Hollywood is moving more toward just like factory churned product.

product. I feel like you're like an AI prepper, Max. You have your backup stonemasonry career ready. Yaz, what are you keeping tabs on? I'm keeping tabs on the biggest debate on the internet right now, which is who's hotter, young Al Pacino or young Robert De Niro? Oh, good. Surrendering on a very serious note. So I want to know where you both stand on this debate and what is their hottest movie? Oh,

Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman. No, dude. What? So weird. No, the Godfather. I mean, Al Pacino and the Godfather, part one and two. It's just, I just, is a beautiful man. No, I like Panic in Needle Park. He's like a goofy heroin addict. Oh, yeah, just your lovable neighborhood heroin addict. As Max knows, I have like a sort of like all-time historically bad taste in men, and I feel like it all started with that movie. What?

I feel like that movie is like the original Indie Sleaze. It is. You're so right. He wears a bandana for half of it. Oh, that's great. I don't think I've ever seen that movie, actually. So I have something to do after this recording. I'm going to throw a curveball and say Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents is the hottest. That's such a bad take. Absolutely terrible. Because nothing is hotter than a committed father. Okay? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Yeah, you need to break the tie. If you haven't already with your Al Pacino Needles movie or whatever the name of it was. Panic and Needle? I forgot the name of it already. Panic and Needle Park. What I would say is I think Al Pacino was a more beautiful man, but I think Robert De Niro is more hot. Okay. That's fair. Team both. I wouldn't say no to either of them. Okay, sure.

Anyway, that's it for most innovative companies and hottest Italian actor of the late 20th century. Thank you for joining us. Our show is produced by Avery Miles, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.