Is AI taking all the entry level jobs?

Hello, and welcome to Raising Generation AI, with me, mum of two, Holly Green.

And me, AI expert, Fiona Morgan.

This podcast is all about the complicated world of AI and parenting, because I’m a parent, and I’m a bit worried about it all.

And this week, we’re asking the question, is AI taking all the entry-level jobs? Later on, we’ll be chatting to Julia Druck. She’s a mum who’s taken some quite big steps to make sure her son will always have a job.

But first, how’s parenting going this week, Holly?

Yeah, we had a really nice moment on Sunday where my husband and I were enjoying a coffee together, and the kids were playing upstairs really quietly. We were like, oh, this is lovely.

We’ve reached a new level of parenting where we just get to enjoy some quiet time together.

And 10 minutes later, we went upstairs, we discovered they’d gone up to the attic room, and they found the Christmas decorations, and they’d unpacked every single one. And the whole top floor looked like it was Christmas Eve.

And I wrapped up my baubles really, really carefully. They were all like carefully wrapped. So every single one is unwrapped everywhere.

So we exchanged our 10 minutes of quiet coffee time for an hour of rewrapping all the Christmas decorations. So that was fun.

Were they very pleased with themselves?

Yeah, they were wearing bits of tinsel. They had on little Christmas antlers. They were delus-

And I couldn’t be mad because they were so pleased. I just had to-

Why did they do it? Why? Because they could, because they found them.

And because they could.

And they weren’t at that minute was up there telling them not to. So I don’t know if I just don’t think in their heads, they probably didn’t see a problem with it. They were just like, oh, look what we found.

Let’s unwrap them all.

I miss them. I miss them.

I miss you too. I miss you too.

I’ll bless them.

So we’re chatting today about entry-level jobs. What sort of jobs did you do when you were growing up?

The main job I remember really was working in a cinema. My job was just taking tickets, going in.

And if I’m honest, it was sitting, just watching the films with people, because you used to have a whole bunch of teenagers come in, and they needed a staff member in there just to make sure that they weren’t causing problems.

Did you have to get involved and go and, like, pull the teenagers off?

Normally, my presence was enough, really. You’re that intimidating.

I’m a really big, burly woman that just sat there. No, I don’t know. They just tended.

They were all right. I think they just opportunistic 12, 13-year-olds taking the chance.

That sounds so much more fun than my first job, which was I worked in a big clothing store, and I just had to take the rails of clothes out from the dressing room and put them back on the shelves and on the hangers.

But I only worked there once a week. I worked there every Saturday for about four hours, and it was a huge store, and I just had no idea where everything went.

So I ended up just spending four hours aimlessly wandering around with bits of clothing, not able to find anything. And then members of the public, the customers would ask me questions obviously, but I didn’t know the answers to any of them.

So I just was terrified about anyone coming to talk to me.

And then the worst thing was sometimes you had to have the phone, and the phone could be a call from other stores anywhere in the country, and you would be like, they’d ask you random questions about bits of stock, and oh my goodness, that was

terrifying. So I used to just pretend that I couldn’t hear them, and it was a really bad line. And then hang up. I was honestly the worst employee ever.

But I think jobs like that will still exist in the future, won’t they? There will still be that poor kid who doesn’t know what they’re doing in a large clothing store.

I think so. I think anything physical presence will need to always be there. There’s probably some bits of it that don’t exist anymore.

I mean, maybe stock checking and stuff like that. Maybe you just type it into a computer and it tells you where on the floor it is.

The one day robots will be doing it as well, so there’s that.

We were in the airport relatively recently and there’s an actual robot in Bangkok airport that just goes around and kind of cleans things up and stuff like that. So they’re already here. They’re already here.

They’re robots. Does it look like a person? It kind of looks like a person.

It’s got a face and things like that, but it’s on wheels and it just moves around. A bit like, what’s that robot thing from Star Wars? Wally.

Wally.

Wally.

Yeah, kind of like that. So it’s sort of half robot, half person. It didn’t have arms and legs like the ones that we’ve seen doing the Japanese or Chinese marathon recently.

I don’t know if you saw the videos of those. Hilarious. But they are already there.

Robots already do exist, although I don’t know how good they are at putting close together. Back on rails, yeah. I think that job is pretty safe.

But yet today we’re talking all about these entry level early jobs for everyone.

It’s a bit of a rite of passage, I think, when you hit 16, you go and get your Saturday job and make a bit of money so you can go to the cinema, or in my case, not go to the cinema. And I think surely they’re still going to exist.

I think they will to an extent, but it will be interesting to see how they’re going to change. So who have we got on the podcast today then?

We are talking to Julia Druck. She works in AI and already has a bit of an idea of some of the things that are happening to jobs and how AI is impacting what that world of jobs looks like. And we’ll chat to her next.

On the podcast today, we’re chatting to the lovely Julia Druck. Now, Holly, you’ve been worrying about what the world of work will look like when your three and five-year-old grow up.

But for Julia, that is now, because she has a 15-year-old son leaving school next summer. She has the same concerns that we’ve just been talking about, about first rungs on the career ladder.

But I’m really impressed by what she’s decided to do about it. She’s actually walked away from her corporate career to dive headfirst into AI.

She’s got stuck in by building her own little AI helper to sort out those mum brain to do lists, just to see how the tech really works. She’s also co-founded her own AI company Serpin.

And while I know we can’t all just pack in the day job and start our own tech firm, it’s really inspiring to see how she’s essentially future-proofing her family and building a world where her son is guaranteed an opportunity.

Julia Druck, welcome to Raising Generation AI.

Great to be here. Nice to see you, Fiona and Holly.

Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. I am so impressed by the idea of an AI helper, and we will have to dig more into that in a little bit.

But first of all, can I just say, so you effectively left your job and you started up an AI business, effectively just to, well, I suppose give your son a step into the world to guarantee that he’s going to have entry to the job market, is that

It’s a little bit more nuanced than that, but yes, that was part, a big part of it.

But other, another part of it was, you know, my husband and I were at a sort of point in our lives where we were ready for something different and AI was screaming at us, and we were both really passionate about it.

And I sort of got this new excitement in my life, and I was like, I’m really enjoying this, and I want to do something with it. I don’t want to miss this one either.

And so we both decided to do it, and we knew it would help us as parents doing something we enjoy, and then that benefits Alex in so many ways.

And also that we’re building something potentially, not just financial stability, which gives him more choice, but also the fact that it’s in AI, that we can help him with it, or there’s always a job with us, or the fact that we can help him with the

skills and the networks, et cetera. So yeah, it’s multi-pronged, and hopefully it’ll pay off.

What do you think genuinely about the job market that kids are entering in the next few years? Do you think all these sort of entry-level jobs, as we traditionally think about them, are going to disappear? And if so, how quickly?

Things are shifting at the moment.

They know that. There’s quite a lot of negative press out there that’s saying that these shifts are happening, and they are. But I think it’s because companies are not quite knowing what to do.

AI is very good at the repetitive, sort of boring work, the filing, the data entry, those sort of things. And so I think companies are responding and thinking, well, let’s get rid of entry-level jobs, because we don’t need them.

But entry-level jobs weren’t necessarily about that. It was about how you progress through. So I think companies are making poor decisions at the moment, and some of them, but some of other companies are making different decisions.

So, you know, I read about CloudFair, I’ve got over 1,000 interns, because they recognize they need young, bright, you know, kids in, young adults in, because this is going to create new jobs. And that’s my view. I think there’s a bit of a backlash.

I think we’ll see this come back up with new opportunities and shifts. But we’re just going through that transition period. And I think that’s what we’re seeing, and companies are just wrestling with it.

But I do think that is a great future for our kids. I’m hitting it a little bit sooner than you are, Holly, though, with my-

You are, that’s for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But I thought you meant in terms of our children’s ages.

I just meant in terms of how prepared you are. But no, yeah, it must- it is very different.

I mean, yeah, my two are still really, really young. And that’s part of the hard thing in a way, because I’m trying to prepare them for worlds that, they’ll be entering the job market in what I don’t know, 15 years.

What on earth does the world look like in 15 years? What skills, for example, should I be prioritizing for them and helping them to learn? Is it all about becoming tech savvy?

Is that the key? Or actually, is it about developing soft skills? Is it about working on communication and empathy and teamwork and those things?

It’s just so hard to know what will become valued. What will AI be doing? What will people still be doing?

How should I be setting them up? What should I be doing that’s going to be best for them in the future?

There are some changes coming into education in GCSE and stuff like that. Well, which will start to embed a bit more about AI. So it’s a bit better for the kids in a few years.

I think 2028, some of these things are going to hit. But I’m totally with you and Holly, that I believe us being human needs to be brought out even more so. It’s the strengths of being human.

So it is the empathy, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, as in the nuances of communication. We’re so good at being able to read people, and the body language, the we understand sarcasm and all these things.

Whereas AI is not very good at that stuff. And so actually it will still be, it will be those human qualities, dealing with uncertainty, things just completely changing all over the place. AI is not very good at that either.

So I think absolutely the best thing with your kids and even mine, which I’m glad to say we’ve been investing in anyway, because these things have always been valued in business anyway.

It’s always been this, especially for the more senior as you go through companies, the ability to communicate and critically evaluate, etc, assess options, all those sort of things have always been valued. So yeah, investing in those.

And I do think we still should, I’m a little bit controversial, not controversial, I’m a sort of not where some people are saying. But I do believe you should still invest in people’s, in the kids’ passions.

I do think you should still love learning and enjoy something. And if you’re interested in something, you want your kid to just go with it. We’ll figure out this, the other stuff later.

Because keeping kids engaged in learning is hard, especially with what’s going on, some of the struggles in schools and everything. And so you want to keep the love of learning. They are so adaptable kids.

If anybody’s going to learn AI and respond to AI, it is them. Because I am learning this stuff. It’s like, this is heavy and hard.

But they’re the ones that pick it up so quickly. And AI literacy will be the new thing. This will be their bread and butter.

They will need to know how to work alongside AI. And that’s what we expected in jobs, that they are AI literate. And they won’t be doing the filing.

They won’t be doing the photocopying. They won’t be doing the researching, the basic researching. They’ll be sat alongside AI, judging it.

And they’ll have a job with AI in many different jobs. And even trades jobs are not totally AI. You know, they can’t avoid it because it will come in everywhere.

You know, robots aren’t here yet, but they don’t have to worry just yet about the robots.

Although I must say, I saw something from China the other day, and the robots were looking, they were looking pretty darn good, weren’t they?

We don’t have to worry about them in the next few years.

It all sounds a bit dystopian to me, the whole robot thing. Anyway, it’s interesting you’re talking there about all these stuff as well.

And you might not be the person to answer this question, but it just occurred to me that it might be even more challenging for neurodiverse children because maybe they don’t have those soft skills in the same way that other people might have.

And if AI is bringing so many things to the market, what do maybe neurodiverse children struggle even more to offer those skills that might become even more prized?

Yes. Well, actually, do you have a view on this? Because just of who I work with and what I see around me as well, because obviously it’s a lot more common now to see this.

I see posts from friends who are new or are a virgin. And I think AI can help here, believe it or not. Maybe not so with some of those human skills, because some of those are more challenging.

But barriers to entry and powering people up. AI can help people communicate. It can help them write reports, write emails, do those things.

It can give people, it can kind of level the playing field for some jobs and some aspects of those jobs.

I mean, here’s you and I worrying about the future of the world. It sounds to me like your son isn’t particularly worried about these things. He’s not worried about the job market.

No, but I mean, he’s the one that’s going to be heading into it in, you know, a toughie years time.

Yeah, but when you’re a teenager, you didn’t talk, you know, the same way. It’s like, what do you want to be when you grow up? But a lot of kids don’t know.

And that’s why, as parents, normally you want them to go to college. You want them to go to university, just so you can buy some space for them to start to figure out what it is they enjoy in that. Because not every kid has got a calling.

Some kids do. They have a passion and they do it early on. I mean, there’s some kids now doing stuff with AI, building businesses.

You know, there’s a 16-year-old, a 12-year-old. Some are building now with it, but that’s because they’re interested in it, but other kids aren’t.

That makes me feel so obsolete. A 12-year-old is using AI to build a business. Makes me feel very old.

Well, as I said, AI is lowering the barriers to entry for a lot of things, and you can build a lot with AI now.

It is crazy what you can do. So one of the things you can encourage, and I would encourage my son with, if he’s got a problem or he sees an opportunity, have a go and build something.

You could build a website, an app, videos, all sorts of things, because it’s accessible now.

And so I would be encouraging kids to build, because if you’re going into the job market against all these other students, et cetera, you know, graduates, you having done something and built something is going to differentiate you.

Now, Julia, you mentioned earlier, or Fiona did, this AI agent that you’ve built to help you with tasks around the house and parenting. Is that right? How on earth does that work?

Well, I built something called the Family Command Center, an AI agent, a very fancy term for lots of workflows of things you do, that you do in your head and you do on your computer.

And I got this Family Command Center to help out, and it was reading your emails, but looking for the ones from schools, from your clubs. And I was assuming you got multiple kids, although I’ve only got one, so it was quite funny.

But I do empathize with the multiple kids situation, that they’ve all got different clubs and they’re all over laughing. And it was hulking back to the whole fancy dress days. Oh my gosh.

You get that email and you’d like make a note to get that costume.

And forget about it until the night before and then have to dress them up as an oompa loompa or something.

Yeah. So part of the agent was to get all of those things, put them into the calendar automatically, color code for your different children, call out conflicts, but it was to get it automatically into your calendar. So you could see that.

It would also give you a weekly briefing of what was coming next week, so you didn’t forget and all that. And then it was things like birthdays, birthdays.

We all know the kids’ parties, getting the presents, getting the cards, which friend was it of which child, that sort of thing.

And I also had a little chat bot as well, so you could access it from your phone, because you go to the school gate, you drop off, you know, number one kid, bump into a friend’s mom, and they’re telling you, oh, don’t forget, we’re having a charity

event and we want all the kids there, and they need to bring a basket of goodies or something. And you’re like, oh, you know, and yeah, you could write a task, but I would put it into my chat bot, and then it would then put it in automatically, but

also recognize any conflicts or anything, and also figure out any prep that needed to be done. Identify a suitable card and potentially a suitable present, and put it onto a spreadsheet.

And suggest options to you, be like, get this card, get this present, get this free submission set.

I did try and get it to actually do the shopping, but that was a bit too far at the time.

One day, one day. So it’s tackling a lot of that sort of unseen labor that a lot of us moms and dads as well are doing in our heads, which takes up so much brain space.

And having that being taken care of by a little AI PA just helps free up your brain, I guess, for doing all those other things that you want to do.

We all need a PA, don’t we? I remember working in certain businesses, and the more senior you got, the more chance you had a PA. And I remember seeing those PA’s and what they did.

And it was amazing. And the freedom it gave the people. It was just, but now we can, in theory, we’re not far from all having our own personal PA’s to help us.

And I think the more you give, but we’re all caveats. This is still developing. But it’s on the horizon.

And I get very excited about that, because my, especially as a more mature woman, my brain, the ability to deal with so many things, and you’re just buzzing, multitasking, doing all these things.

And to have the ability to be able to just dump it somewhere and say, don’t forget about this or put this in. And I think it’s just great.

And I think it will help especially young, well, parents with young children, because I think that’s where it hits the most, because you’re tired, exhausted, you’ve got so many things going on with all.

I don’t know how many kids parties I got invited to when my son was little. It was just every, you know, I can’t keep up with them. Never mind if you got two kids or three.

I did have another question for you actually, Julia.

You have been really quite positive about AI and your son’s future, about jobs and where he’s going to go, and what impact this is going to have on him. Holly is quite concerned about that for her kids. Do you have any concerns really for your son?

Obviously, you’ve set up your business and tried to set this up so he has a sort of guaranteed or as near guaranteed as you can make it future. But do you have concerns? Is it something you’re worried about?

The one concern I do have, because it just reminded me, is the relationships and what kids forming.

It’s bad enough that he’s online all the time and gaming, and you know, but he’s got friends online. But the face-to-face interactions are slightly different. He doesn’t have as many of those.

It kind of feels like he’s always chatting to his friends online. Now, what happens when your friends or the people you talk to become AI?

So you have an AI friend, because some kids are challenged, you know, they find it difficult to make friends at school. There might be issues at school.

What happens when they turn to AI as that friend, or as the council, and they’re not coming to the parents, and they’re going to, and you can’t see it. So social media was its own thing, and really could be really bad.

I think we’re going to have that element hit us. That’s the one. But other than that, I am very optimistic.

I feel another episode there, Holly.

I feel like that’s another topic.

This feels like a whole conversation, doesn’t it? Yes. Yeah, I can see all sorts of potential issues there.

And yes, social media, obviously, a big worry as well. But again, maybe the scope of that is quite large.

Holly, are you feeling any better about this?

Do you know? I actually am, because your son is now at that stage, and it’s the stage that I’m dreading in a way. And you are approaching it with a really positive attitude.

And when my kids get there as well, things will be different, and maybe we will have a better understanding of what AI means, and what it means for jobs, and so forth.

So yes, I absolutely am feeling more positive, and I really appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion with us. So thank you very much.

Let us know where we can hear, or find out more about you. If anyone’s listening and wants to see what it is that you do, where can they find you?

Yes. So my company is called Serpin, and the website is serpin.ai. Got to have an AI in there.

Very appropriate.

There we go. Well, thank you so, so much, Julia. You’ve been amazing, and I think it sounds like you’ve even managed to calm some of Holly’s fears, and I didn’t think that was that possible.

So, well done.

So, Holly, after talking to Julia, do we need to call up ITV and let them know you’re leaving to start your own AI tech company?

Yeah, can you imagine?

I love that interview. It was great. But I mean, there were bits that I didn’t fully follow.

Like, she talked about this AI agent. I don’t even really understand what an AI agent is.

So, it sits in your computer and just has access to the things that you give it access to. In Julia’s case, it doesn’t really surface in any way. It just adds things to calendars.

It moves calendar invites around and updates on those sorts of things. She did actually mention that it gives her a little weekly update. I don’t know if you recall that.

She said it gives her a little weekly update on what she’s got coming up on the next week. What you can do is you can plug these things in to WhatsApp or text messages and things like that, and get it to send you a message or an email.

So in her inbox on a Monday morning, I don’t know exactly when, but on a Monday morning, let’s say she gets a little update that says, okay, this week, football practice has been moved by an hour. You’ve got World Book Day on Thursday.

Give a little bit of an overview. So the agent itself, there’s no one way to interact with this thing.

You choose as part of designing, as part of building it, how the user interacts with it, whether or not that’s through text messages, emails, or you can also make it so that it has a chatbot interface, so you can chat to it.

Okay. And then it’s accessing your various bits of data, whether that be your emails or your calendar, and then it’s making decisions and it’s returning the information that you need to know.

Yes. And the key difference between it just being a chatbot that’s telling you information and an AI agent is that an AI agent has what we call agency to make changes to things.

It doesn’t just tell you what’s going on, it makes changes to your calendar or it adds things to your calendar, or it sends emails for you, or it can actually action these things rather than it just being this chat.

And if someone wanted to get their own one of these, how would they do that?

Some people would argue that you can go and play around, and Julia is an example of that. You can go into some of the software where you can build your own, like Lindy. But my personal view on it is that it’s not that straightforward yet.

You can do these things, but it does still take a level of really getting your head around how it works to connect it up to things like your WhatsApp and stuff like that.

And you do need to be a little bit careful giving access to all of your emails and WhatsApps to AI. So I think it is something if you’re particularly interested and want to go and have a look and have a play, you can, and I recommend that you do.

But it’s not going to be something you can just dip into for 20 minutes and have a go.

So this might be coming for many of us, but probably not just yet.

I think it’s more likely that people will build commercial solutions that will be coming for you, rather than people building their own solutions.

Yeah. Okay, great. That’s really interesting.

I’m so glad you explained all of that. Thank you.

Ask me any questions that goes for you, Holly, or anyone that’s listening. Just send questions in and I can answer them. I do think there’s also this thing of, you don’t know AI, attitude, which I think is really bad.

We want to try and get rid of that a little bit. So, always good to answer questions. Exactly.

Anyway, thanks for listening. We’ll be back again next week. Don’t forget to hit subscribe and leave a little review if you’re enjoying it.

So, see you then. See you next week.