Hi {{crm___first_name}}
At a recent roundtable, surrounded by the plumpest pain au chocolat I had ever laid eyes on, I got into a debate about AI's impact on jobs.
"It'll be like the Industrial Revolution", said some. "Will create as many jobs as it removes", said others. "People said the same thing about the web", said another.
Hyperbole has been a longtime acquaintance of mine but I tell you this now with it stood miles away: those people were as wrong as they could possibly be.
It's happening now. And as I said to the current Prime Minister and a former one: this is a national emergency. What the internet did to our high street, it will do to our services.
Design companies, SEO agencies, accountancies, videographers, copywriters, developers… all in the crosshairs of AI. And we're not anywhere near tech maturity yet – let alone when robotics snatches our clothes, boots, and motorcycles.
The worry
Barclays is grabbing the headlines this week, with AI reported to be the reason behind 5,000 jobs on the slide. Reed published a survey stating that 52% of UK hiring managers say that AI is reducing job opportunities. Its CEO, James Reed, is openly worried about "making a generation redundant", asking that we "back humans and tax robots". The drop from 180,000 graduate vacancies to 50,000 in four years on reed.co.uk only lends credence to the claims.
We have had more than three years of falling vacancies, and a year ago 15% of employers were already saying AI had cut their recruitment. Indeed UK has postings down 11% YTD, with graduate slots at their lowest since 2020. The smart alecs at McKinsey, too, are saying that while AI isn't yet productive, it's certainly disruptive. And the Bank of England's Andrew Bailey has also chimed in, saying that AI is likely to replace jobs with younger workers finding entry-level roles harder.
Just this week Reuters machine-gunned some troubling stats around AI-linked job cuts: HSBC weighing ~20,000, Amazon 16,000, Standard Chartered >7,000, BAT 5,500, Mizuho up to 5,000, Dow 4,500, Block >4,000 (nearly half its staff), Intuit ~3,000, Kroger ~3,000, Atlassian 1,600, Cloudflare >1,100.
Even Bill Gates, who some might have expected to be waving pom-poms for the AI revolution, gave a damning verdict, stating that coding has truly crossed over, and that accounting, legal, telesales and telesupport will follow "in the next few years". When pushed by NYT's Ezra Klein on the "cheaper output creates more demand" argument, Gates was clear that once a task is automated the spend "goes into the token budget", not salaries. And most chillingly, on optimists predicting net new jobs, Gates said "I don't understand what they're thinking."
What this means
So why am I telling you this?
Well, a few reasons. But first and foremost to really be clear that the world your business is operating in today will not be here tomorrow. And not just because your particular trade might be under direct threat – but because you need to understand that the economy is going to be disrupted in ways we can't yet fathom and certainly aren't legislating for.
Fewer jobs means less money in pockets, which means fewer customers for you. And despite what my fellow roundtablers might have thought, it is already happening.
Obviously there are many other things to worry about already – energy bills, tax burdens, business rates are all still here – but the impact AI will have on the economy is a different scale altogether.
And it isn't like the web. The web fundamentally swapped analogue communication for digital. But at either end there was still a human seller and a human buyer. At its base form, it was still peer to peer. AI replaces a peer. That's its raison d'être. It isn't here to change how we communicate – it's here to be a communicator.
So as you continue to take your heavy steps into 2027 and beyond, just be aware that these unprecedented times are about to get a whole lot more unprecedented.
What you can do
Another reason I am sharing this anxiety with you: our research shows that many of you aren't yet using AI regularly. You need to.
Despite what the above might imply, AI is not the villain. It is not the hero. It just is. It now exists, there is no turning back, and we cannot get this Robin Williams back into the lamp. We have no more control over it than we do the weather. So we have to make the best of it.
The UK was slower than it should have been with the web but data suggests we're even more tardy with AI. We can't afford to be. You can't afford to be. The rest of the world is going to move faster and do more with it than we are without it. Romantic notions of doing things in tried-and-trusted fashion are unhelpful. Business is a competition. It's an egg-and-spoon sack race on the way to a scrap. AI will make your business stronger than it would be otherwise.
Which is to say that because of what AI is doing, you're going to need to use AI.
Let me go further: please, please, please start using it. Learn it well. I know it's mad. I know we have lots of other problems and challenges. I know no one voted for AI to be a thing. But here we are. So please use it.
And another thing: with fewer graduate jobs available, with NEETs on the rise, unemployment as stubborn as ever, how else are people going to earn money? They're going to have little choice but to start a business of their own.
There are millions of UK SMEs already. That number is only going to increase with more pressure placed on the jobs market. Which means even more competition for you.
Now we of course welcome all small businesses to Enterprise Nation. The more of us in our community, the louder our voice. But it likely means an even bigger challenge for you. And how are you going to take on that challenge? Well you're going to have to find ways to be more productive, to be even faster, and to automate wherever you can. AI might be part of the problem, but it's undeniably part of the solution.
Our promise to you
We're going to do our best to help you too. Today you can go to our AI Together page and get the latest guidance, tips, and tricks. You can join the AI Together community too and learn from each other as well as us. But as the challenge grows, we'll be offering even more – January will see the launch of our free-to-use AI learning platform, where you'll get personalised training on the problems your business faces today.
And to be honest, making it completely free is probably not the best business decision I've ever made. But we have to match the size of the change with radical support. So that's what we're going to do.
For anyone wanting to join the waitlist for beta trials of the platform, you can either sign up to AI, Together now or reply to this email directly.
Part of the problem. Part of the solution. Let's get on with it.
Aaron
CEO, Enterprise Nation