Can Humans Compete With AI At Work with Rob Garlick

Speaker A: Welcome to the Future of Less Work, where we explore how work is transforming one conversation at a time. I'm Nurit Cohen. In today's episode, we'll take another look at the competition between people and technology over jobs and wages. We already understand that AI agents and robotics are not just productivity tools. They're essentially non human labor. Economically they behave like workers, which means they're competing with human labor on costs, that and availability. If we leave this to pure market logic, we're likely to destabilize wages, employment, tax systems and maybe even political stability. Alternatively, we can choose to actively shape how we build this new economy around abundance and maybe even better work. More of what matters, less of what doesn't. Which means we have a decision to make. Do we as a society and as organizations intentionally rebalance the system, or do we allow market forces to destabilize and widen inequality and uh, destabilize institutions? My guest today is Rob Garlick, author of AI Anarchy or Abundance and visiting professor at the University of Surrey. He spent almost three decades at Citigroup, most recently as head of Innovation Technology, looking at automation, productivity, labor markets and the macro implications of technology adoption. Rob, welcome to Future of Less Work.

Speaker B: Delighted to be with you.

Speaker A: You know, I have a, uh, master's in economics and I actually did my master's in economics of technology, uh, right before the Internet became a thing. Right. So this idea that if we go back to the basics of economics, if organizations can create more value with fewer people, why wouldn't they?

Speaker B: Well, the answer is I think they will. I mean, I've, um, you know, I was a fund manager back in the 90s, um, and then as you said, moved to Citigroup almost 30 years ago. Uh, so I've really had a front row seat at sort of capitalism. And, and the reality is I think this is the biggest trade in history. Uh, the biggest cost of good, uh, sold line item is labor. And um, and what these new technologies can do, AI, but also robotics, you know, can be substituting and it can increase margins exceptionally. And that can be great news for returns, uh, not necessarily good for humans or good for society necessarily. And that's one of the things that I try and explore in the book because my view is we have to bring enough humans along with us, but actually we have an economic misalignment because the way that the capitalist system works is it's very pro profitability, not necessarily pro humanity.

Speaker A: So I have an opinion on whether we can replace people with technology. But I'm going to bin that for a second because a lot of people will argue that we can. And if we can, even if you step in from a pro human perspective as uh, businesses, can you survive the market pressure?

Speaker B: Can you survive the market pressure if you just step in with pro humans and everyone else goes with an automated system? I think it really depends on the market that you're talking about. And again I'm happy to explore with you because obviously there are different markets which have different situations. But just take the capital markets for example. And again I've lived in this for so many years. The biggest trend in finance in the last 30 years is basically we've been pushing more and more to algorithmic trading, pushing more and more to the machines, uh, in terms of passive management, ETFs, quants, etc, making the decisions. So more than 50% of the market is now controlled not by humans but by machines who are already doing that. And that has downscaled down downstream, um, implications for everyone else. So just as an example, one of the roles that I did, uh, we had 43 salespeople just doing US equities in London. Now there's basically one different version. We had a whole bunch of people doing um, trading of equities or fixed income. That number's gone down 80% since there. So if your competitors are all doing that, then back to your original question. Unfortunately you can end up being forced, if you want to be a low cost provider rather than a high cost service provider basically to follow that trend.

Speaker A: So if you think of this as if we have a choice right now, I'm not sure. I think the examples you gave, there are a lot of examples where technology replaced people. Right. Um, but if you take this very broadly, and you are taking this very broadly. Right. Um, then I go back to then how can you have a choice to do something different?

Speaker B: Well, okay, and there are different choices that we can make. I mean humans can make a choice where we can go and work with the company that we think looks after people the most. Um, alternatively, business leaders can make a choice that they decide to be kind of, I don't know, high end service provider rather than a low end cost provider. Uh, but societies can also make a choice. I mean just as an example, there were a couple of years ago in Germany, the equivalent of Amazon go the automated store. People just walk in and walk out without seeing anybody. Uh, they banned it on a Sunday because humans weren't allowed to work on a Sunday. So why should the automated store be allowed to work on a Sunday? So if we Decide to society could say, well actually we want uh, for example all financial advisors to um, be people rather than robots or robo advisors. We want all medical providers to be, you know, licensed, uh, and to go through that intermediary. Now that's a choice because it might be that the robo advisor might be cheaper, might be better, might be on 24 7. So these are choices that we have to make. Um, but my original premise on the book, which we might get to, is that we're about to go through this enormous, enormous wave of non human workers that are going to be new competitors, but also providing good new services for people. And there's that balance that we have to kind of work through.

Speaker A: And one of the examples that I think I read, um, that I really liked was I think you were alluding to this, right? The unlike the horses displaced by the engine, right. Humans vote. So if the displacement is abundance, as in we can do whatever we like and we have everything we need, right? That's one scenario. But if the displacement is, um, capital markets, uh, gain um, all the value from this and people don't have money to buy the product, there's going to be issues both for the organizations as well as for the politics side of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's, there's already a backlash that's building in different forms. Um, and we can talk about what that might look like. I think though that really you only get to those decisions in terms of what society wants when things start breaking. The point on the horses is that, you know, people talk about the fact that, you know, horses were displaced by tractors and by cars, um, and the ones that survived got these amazing life of leisure, abundance in fields, nothing else. But um, um, unfortunately 88% of them were uneconomic and they basically were taken to the knacker's yard and put out. So, so yes, the remaining few 12% might have a better lifestyle, but the other people were just not needed. And the difference again which you pointed out, is that, you know, horses didn't have a say in that. The most important thing that we have to make sure is that the humans have a say in. This is a type of society that we want to try and create, the type of companies that we want to try and create. Uh, and my guess is they will get that say. But as I go back to what I said originally, we have a misalignment because at the moment we have an economic system that doesn't allow them to have a say in terms of what actually happens for shareholders. Uh, and we have A political society that's democratic and a corporate society that's plutocracy. Uh, and so there's a problem brewing there which we will resolve, but we might not resolve it in a clean way, unfortunately. Unfortunately.

Speaker A: So play that out for me. Right? Uh, how do you see this, uh, evolving?

Speaker B: So going back to what I said originally, I think this is potentially one of the biggest trades in history. One of the reasons why all this investment is going in, in the first stage of this industrial revolution, this cognitive industrial revolution, is very often to do the existing roles cheaper, faster, quicker. Um, in future generations of this, there will be absolutely new revenue streams, new things that we can't even imagine that will come. But usually industrial revolutions sort of start with the, um, substitution phases of those. Firstly. Now, this is very similar to what happened in the first industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was a substituting, uh, industrial technology that went on. And what you found is there were entire generations of people that were basically pushed out of the labor force. And what people talk about as Luddites, and it's very often used as a prerogative term that's sort of like, you know, anti technology. We don't necessarily anti technology. They were basically just fighting for their survival. Now, The Luddites were 1811. What happened is over the next 20 years, a series of backlashes that went on, including a revolution in France which overthrew the monarchy. And eventually in the uk you got democracy because basically people were given a vote. In 1832, the Reform act was the first form of democracy in this country, in the uk, where I'm speaking from, but it wasn't given away lightly. It didn't. The Landos didn't say, well, we just want you to have a vote and it'll all be fine.

Speaker A: It's.

Speaker B: It came because of enormous amounts of frustration. And I fear, uh, that if we have a lot of substitution, then we'll go through similar versions of backlash. So just as an example, you obviously had in 2023, Hollywood striking so some resemblements, the Luddites and basically saying pushing back AI. The big one was actually in 2024 with a longshoreman. The longshoreman. The port authorities in the States, they negotiated, uh, not just less automation, but negotiated a pay increase of 62%. Not 6.2%, 62%. Now they, they had a particular amount of power that they could use. They had switched off the US economy because they stopped things coming in the ports. But these are just examples of mini backlashes that start to take place if people feel that it's not equitable. And so how do we manage an equitable transition? Here is the question I'm trying to ask in the book, because I think it can happen, but I fear that it might not happen.

Speaker A: So actually, let's talk about that, because here's. So I'm going to put my, um, human resources hat on and some of my agenda, right? I called this podcast the Future of Less Work because I believe that it needs to go not necessarily down the route of technology will take our jobs, but also that we could be able to do more of what matters and less of what doesn't. Right. And you actually, in the book, call that better work, right? You basically say, okay, we can hand off the work that we do as machines to the machines, then we can go do other stuff historically, um, and even the revolution, the industrial revolution you talked about, right? I mean, we had, um, technology or machines come into the industry, but then we created things that we didn't have, right? We created clothing for everyone. We created fashion, we created washing machines. Right? So that's one way this could go, and that's still through the economic system. Not necessarily because people have to negotiate their salary. I mean, I get that in the middle there's chaos. But do you see a way where the economic system would actually say the technology opens up possibilities, where what we're doing now is not replacing someone, but actually doing things we never could do before and therefore enable, uh, um, employment in ways that didn't exist?

Speaker B: So on the employment side, yes, it's very possible, uh, you can make jobs up. I mean, you know, the US decided in the 1930s for a work program to make up jobs for millions of people. I mean, Keynes, uh, talked, uh, about, uh, the fact you could dig holes and then get other people to dig holes in. So, you know, we could. Germany, uh, went through a different phase. It basically conscripted lots of people into the military in the 1930s. There's lots of ways of making jobs. And actually, back to your point podcast, one of the things I think will become an outcome is that I actually, I think like the transition to the weekend that, you know, gave birth to 100 years ago, that we will eventually scale back to kind of four and a half, four, three and a half, three type days. If there's not enough to work to go around then we could be more democratized around that now. But I'm not sure that's a. Something society has to vote for on, on the point, on better jobs. I mean, one of the things I care very deeply about is how do we use this time to reimagine the opportunity to do things better? And it is absolutely very possible to do that. Uh, I mean, I ended up doing a master's in behavioral change a few years ago, um, and helping coach people because candidly, I got really frustrated with laying people off and I wanted to sort of help development and improve them. But what I would say though is that the history of several decades of digitization where that same statement could be made, we automate certain mundane tasks, free people up to do higher value added tasks, et cetera, has not yet resulted in better work for the majority of people. And there are different surveys. I mean, the one I personally like to use because I think it's the best one over a longitudinal basis is the Gallup, uh, study. And in the Gallup study, only 20% of people are positively engaged at work. More people are actively not engaged or disengaged. And so the data suggests that's not true. And what we know is true is that rather than. And again, I've unfortunately had to do this rather than, okay, well, we just freed up 20% of your time for you to have more leisure, go to the gym, see your kids, whatever else it might be, do higher value. What happens is we then get rid of 20% of the people and the rest of the people have to do more work. And so this overwhelm that's been going on because of the pace of change, but also the intensification of job means that that's not the reality. Now, we absolutely can change that. But whether we change it because the economic system allows us to change it, or whether we change it because society gets to change it, they're two different debates.

Speaker A: Yeah, So I totally agree with you. Here's a different perspective, though. I don't think it's about jobs. I think part of the big question is because you described, uh, when I do job, kind of my, my keynote on scenarios. Right. I call that the, the billion dollar company with no people. Right. It's like let, let's, like you said, get, get rid of 23% if we've improved 23%. Right. Um, there's also the scenario where you have the billion dollar person with no company, which is different than where we were in the past, because suddenly a person has access to, to capabilities, tools. That wasn't the case when you had the Industrial revolution or even the Internet revolution, not at the same scale. And so the interesting question is we keep referring to work as jobs. And I think I saw a LinkedIn, um, map recently that showed that younger generations are now more active in starting up their own um, innovative companies or entities. I don't know what to call them. Right. We don't have the right words around that independent economy. But uh, that might actually be an interesting way to get better work because you design your own work, you're doing what matters to you, you have the tools at your disposal and it might actually economically make sense.

Speaker B: Yes, um, I think that you're right and I think that's the direction of travel. But one of the things, even if, even if you don't believe there'll be joblessness, you said it yourself, you use the word chaos. The transition process into that from what we have existing today could be quite difficult for quite a lot of people. And so how do we put the safety nets in place for something? So this is an example. I mean, you know again in the book what I try to do is the first section is really looking at the problems, majority is looking for solutions and I tried to surface over 130 different solutions to this to make sure we, because we have lots of options, which is great. And I'm really keen on finding solutions that are working somewhere that could be transported. So flex security in Denmark and the Nordic countries is a way where they allow people to give themselves the scope to be able to retrain and retool for new opportunities. And I think what you're talking about there from a sort of, I don't know, portfolio career or different um, I don't say side hustles, that sounds wrong. But different opportunities as people are transitioning. I think, I think absolutely society should try and give them the support for that. But what I will say again, I mean there's a recent study, I think it was by Goldman Sachs that 46% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck now. They don't have, they don't have the scope to be able to go uh, necessary to this. And I think a lot of self employment, candidly a lot of self employment is that people still want to keep that optionality. But actually a lot of it is people living on the edge, not living in a kind of a vast abundance.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you know it's really interesting because you and I are not talking in the US right now and many of my listeners are, um, and the whole idea of safety nets built around employers versus around um, national infrastructure. Right. So if you go back to the countries where there's national infrastructure for m. Healthcare and uh, kind of like schools, right. We all get to go to school regardless of, or like basic education. Right. Regardless of um, of what your parents are doing as kids. Um, but we don't extend it to, for example health care or some countries extend it to higher education and others don't. Some countries have started extending it to um, training, retraining, this whole uh, ability to kind of stay relevant during your life cycle, even pension.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Is it yours? Does it move with you regardless of where you work or how you work? If you thought of safety nets that way, where we create the abundance and it could be taxing AI or you know, something like that, but basically create the ability to pay for this at a national level, maybe people won't care anymore if they get a job as an employer. They, they uh, they participate in the independent economy.

Speaker B: Yes, I, I, I largely, largely agree with that. I mean, when you say if, I mean, you know, obviously the school education system was born out of the industrial revolution actually to try and get people into, you know, be more efficient in factories. But I again, you know, I find it um, remarkable. I mean when I'm not, I'm not pretending it's right, but the fact that in the uk, you know, the National Health Service was sort of born out of um, kind of the war period that we had where Bevin said, you know, it's shortly a mark of a civilized, uh, society that we provide healthcare for people. And here we are 100 years later we'll say, but you know, kind of like still in some countries where healthcare is not there and it's actually tied to employment. So not only is your job really critical because for lots of different reasons, but it's also critical because if you lose your job, you lose your healthcare. And so these are the type of safety nets that are there. But I won't say it's bigger than that. And I know some of the work that you've done sort of res. This hopefully will resonate, which is I think things like universal basic income as a safety net, for example, that puts that, that cushion. A, I don't think we could afford it, but B, I don't think that's what people want. They don't want to be put on benefits and have to sort of like, you know, just, just, just hope for something. What they want is actually to be able to contribute, do meaningful, important work that's going to help provide for, you know, uh, uh, contributor to people in society and to others, et cetera. So I think that we can redesign work and safety nets is part of it. But also, let's not take away work from a whole bunch of people. Let's make. Give them opportunities, opportunity to do really meaningful, important things.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's why I kind of liked your concept, um, of horses didn't vote. People do. Because ultimately the safety nets are required so that people aren't necessarily dependent on the gatekeepers to give them work versus go out and do something wonderful because you have the tools and you've got the education, um, and maybe the backlash, the social backlash and the chaos in the middle will force governments to figure out the way to actually design those safety nets. It's kind of my, my hope.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And look, I hope in the book, I mean that people, if they can at least see the options, they can decide what they want to do about it. But that includes, you know, voting or socializing the, the, the topic with other people to discuss these things. And you know, I think if there was, I mean, I, when you surface, when I surface 100 plus 30, um, plus different options, I then tried to put them in a framework. And you just mentioned kind of better jobs being one enough, you know, you can't have a better job. You don't have a job. So enough jobs. But probably the most important of those five factors in the best framework is, is this idea of say, how do we give people say. And you mentioned it and I know you, obviously you were a very successful career in a number of areas of hr. But one of the things just I was talking to some board members the other day and in an event, um, and in one of the pieces of data that I have, 99% of boards have an ex CFO on them, only 2% have an ex head of HR on them. So if we care about the money a lot more than we care about the people, how do we make sure that the people have got enough say in this process? That's one of the things that I think is this, um, potential, uh, misalignment and potential thing we need to try and solve for.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, from, from your framework and you, you know, you have that best framework. Right. So the better work, the enough opportunity, um, you have the uh, say in outcomes. And I was actually. And we talked about the safety nets, um, and the system shifts. But I was actually, I paused on the say because I was wondering, does it circle back to we need to have unions. Right. Like you mentioned the examples. Um, because the economic system. Right. Will they slow something down because of somebody wanting to think about the people, even if you had an HR on the board or does it really require that national level?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good question. Obviously all companies are different. One of the things that's happening at the moment, which could be a self correcting mechanism, to be honest with you, is there's a lot of um, experimentation, POCs now implementation of AI and AI tools. And that's only going to go more and more as you kind of go into agents and you go into moving robots, et cetera. But one of the things I think a lot of companies are finding is they're putting this technology in and it's not being adopted at the pace and the scale that they wanted to. So I've actually had quite a lot of people come to me and say, how do we speed up adoption? And you'll know if you decompose, change management, which unfortunately hasn't got a good history of success. But the biggest limiter, the biggest bottlenecks happen to be people and process and the people aspect of it. It might be that actually companies have a sort of more symbiotic relationship with uh, their staff to make sure that the tools are being used and adopted and everything else. Now clearly it's different this time because there is a fear that as you adopt those tools that you're training something, say an agent that might take over what you were doing before. Um, and I would also say, I mean those safety nets, one of the things that, that we talk about is this idea of reskilling. Everyone says that reskilling and upskilling is sort of part of the solution and. Absolutely, of course it is. But the history in the last two decades has been that companies haven't been putting in that. I mean I was at an event yesterday and one of the people from the TUC who was speaking on a panel said that in the uk learning and development by companies is down by half in the last decade. Now I'm not sure that's her number, not mine, but um, the point is that you could argue that this reskilling and upskilling that will happen will be even more for the non human workers than the human workers. That's where the budget could go to. So.

Speaker A: So because you're also saying reskilling and upskilling to what? Right? I mean that's part of what we don't understand. When you hand over, um, and I've written extensively a lot of Forbes articles on this, um, AI implementation is not about the technology, it's about the people and it's not because of, um, the social aspect of it, but just purely. It's the people that are not changing the way that we would allow for the potential to actually show up. And it's interesting because I'm not sure change management, definitely not the way we used to think about it is the solution. But part of it is what is the human role? What are the nuances of the human skills and capabilities that we've built into the way we did things that we didn't even notice were there? Now, when you're automating things, they're falling, you know, um, nobody's picking them up because we, we didn't even know they existed.

Speaker B: Do, do you, do you think the humans will become more valuable in that process? In, in this process or the humans?

Speaker A: I don't, I don't know that I would think about it this way. But what I am very sure is that there are nuances of human value add into the processes, because ultimately AI tools are AI tools, right? So if your company and my company and our competitors and our suppliers and our customers all have access to the same AI, what makes us different, what makes us unique? Um, today we're still building on who we were and the people we used to have in our culture and the way we did things. But if you speed this up and ultimately you bring in people who deploy tools and have never had the history, I think I call it a white T shirt. We'll all end up making a white T shirt, and then somebody will figure out to make a pink one, and we'll all look at them and say, wow, how'd you do that? Right. And that would be adding that value back in. So I actually think the people, uh, economic. My version of the economy will not let this happen, is not the social version. It's that the organizations that will replace people with tools are going to lose their edge. They're going to lose what makes them unique. It will take a while before that disappears. But if you think about things like you're building a PowerPoint presentation, and I know after the session, right, you have a presentation, the PowerPoint presentation is not about, um, colorful letters on a screen. It's about building a story. And when you ask the tools to build the story for you, they're not quite doing it the way you have it in your head. And sometimes you wouldn't even know how to tell them the story you want until you go through the process. Right? So there's all these, these little things that we do as we go through our Activities that I think we're going to learn to be, to, to, to uh, to turn into the real work.

Speaker B: And everything you said makes sense there. I, I really desperately hope that the human value, all those little nuances that you're talking about become recognized and valued. I, I think there's a couple of different issues that I wrestle with with this. One is that if we start pushing people out, say knowledge economy, but I mean it's also, this is a blue collar revolution as well. But if we start pushing all out of jobs, what you're going to have is you're going to have a surplus of people coming into those roles where everyone's competing for that. It's a bit like the overpopulation of graduates that we have at the M moment. 42% of graduates are underemployed. So I worry a little bit. But more importantly, and this is a question, but how do we make sure we value those human roles? And so because in quite a lot of the areas where humans are very valuable, I mean my in laws are in a nursing home for example. But there are other examples, my son's a trainee doctor. But we don't actually value those roles particularly well historically and I was co presenting actually um, last week with a gentleman who's from Japan and I was really intrigued by the fact that he was saying to me, and I don't know this firsthand but that for example the people who are the garbage people in Japan put on uniforms and take a lot of pride in their jobs. How does society revalue some of these innately human qualities and skills and jobs and everything else that's there? Uh, rather than this, what's happened in society is we've had basically a uh, valuation going to fewer and fewer people. And you use the example of the, you know, the company that can be, I don't know, a billion dollar company, unicorn company with very few people. Unfortunately we're getting more of that and not more of people valuing in society some of these human roles. And so anyway we'll get there. But I think it might be a.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree and I agree and I think part of the way we will get there circles back to we'll get there through the individuals creating value that's based on what they know how to do and are now able to do versus organizations opening the door to these human roles. But you know, it's definitely very interesting times. Um, Rob, just as we wrap up, I'm curious, um, what do you think is the question we should all be asking ourselves about the future of work.

Speaker B: Well, I think it's relatively simple and I deliberately try to make it simple in the book. The question's simple, the answer's more tricky. We have a very, the technology is even more progressive, I think, than most people realize. So we have a very pro machine technology. We have an economic system that is Pro profitability. Since 1917. Milton Freeman's you know, shareholder essay, primacy essay. How do we make sure we are also pro human enough in this next phase of AI? So it's a balance between pro machine, pro profitability and pro human. And that's easy to say. And I try and talk about that, uh, in the, in the book about different ways of getting to that because we actually kind of know some of the answers. If you wanted to sort of like a second question to that is how do we get more alignment between that? Because as said, we have a democratic society but a plutocratic economy based on incentives that are driving towards shareholders. My old world, that I know, and I'm not sure the two meet naturally. Um, so I'd love us to find out how that works. Um, and there are different solutions, but that's the thing that I'm really wrestling with.

Speaker A: So if we have um, a leader or CEO listening to us now, thinking, okay, I can't take ah, care of big social problems, um, and given my board and my expectations, what's the one thing I can do?

Speaker B: Well, I think that if we drive to also make sure that we have pro human outcomes and you know, one measure of that, for example, is this positive engagement, how do we reimagine work so that it is better work for enough people, that is where I would go. And actually what I mentioned about, you know, uh, presenting with this Japanese gent from the other day, the company that brought us in is already really, really pro human. I mean they, they, they brought us in not because they have a problem, but because they just want to be better at it. So this is not, this is, this is something that won't happen necessarily all in one go. Across society there'll be different CEOs that kind of. Now one person criticized my book and I appreciate, uh, he's a wise man and I appreciate it. He said that this is not just going to come from enlightened leadership. He said you can't just ask leaders to suddenly just sort of go. Because most leaders, you know, they're good human beings, they want the most for their work. What has happened though is that, you know, 1965 the average CEO pay to worker pay was 20 to 1. Now it's 400 to 1 in the state. So what's happened is that the system has skewed it. So if the, if the capitalist system says Mr. CEO, who wants to do all the right thing for the humans, but actually you're not doing right for the shareholders, they basically move them on. So that's, that's where the tension is. But I, I, I, I hope that we will get some leaders who find the right balance between those two things. And we have to get the right balance. Um, because otherwise the system, a bit like that Luddite thing I talked about earlier on, it will, and I hope we don't get there, but it will, it will force change to get there. And better to better to go there in a straight line rather than down and up.

Speaker A: Yeah. Somewhere in the system. Wow, Rob, that was really interesting. Thank you for joining me today. For more about Rob Garlic and his new book, AI Anarchy or Abundance? Check out the links in the podcast description. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to follow us. Um, wherever you take, Take your podcasts. And remember your best. People do not work because they have to. They do not work because you tell them to. They do not work because you measure them on it. They work because they want to. Because by working for you, they're doing what's important to them in life. Till next time,