AI Is Reshaping Work for Everyone - From Wall Street to the Electrician Next Door

AI and jobs. It’s the conversation nobody wanted to have — and now everybody is having. In this episode of aiGED, host Ginny Deerin digs into what’s really happening to the job market: the layoffs, the industries being transformed, and the jobs we thought were safe that aren’t. From Wall Street banks shedding 15,000 employees while posting record profits, to a French factory that just made electricians optional, the examples are real and they’re everywhere.

But there’s a hopeful side to this story too. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson argues that companies using AI to make workers more productive — rather than just replacing them — actually get bigger gains. We look at a real company doing exactly that, and what it means for the rest of us. Plus: a line that stopped Ginny cold — “You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.”

Also in this episode: Pope Leo XIV weighs in on AI and human dignity in his first encyclical. A delightful piece on how to be old (and grab the chicken leg). Two AI for Good stories — one about a potential one-shot cholesterol treatment, and one about blind riders experiencing independence through Waymo. And Ginny’s recommendation: put down the screen and get crafty.

It’s never too late to learn something new — especially something that might make life easier, and especially more fun.

SHOW LINKS:

NYT: Main Takeaways From Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/us/pope-leo-encyclical-highlights.html

NYT: How to Be Old — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/opinion/aging-advice.html

NYT: A.I. Doesn’t Have to Mean Layoffs — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/economy/ai-jobs-productivity.html

Chapters

00:00 Welcome Back From Italy

01:07 AI Commencement Surprise

02:31 Pope On AI And Dignity

05:21 How To Be Old

06:46 AI For Good Highlights

08:46 Jobs Reality Check

09:55 Banking Job Cuts

11:56 Beyond Banks And Hiring Freeze

13:39 Trades Aren't Immune

15:08 Hopeful Path Forward

18:44 Chief Question Officer Future

21:41 Get Crafty Recommendation

23:08 New Bitsy And Signoff

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd

Transcript

0:00

Well, hello everybody. Welcome to Aged, the one, the only podcast that is all about AI for the 65 Plus crowd. I'm your host, Jenny Dearan. And if you are a regular listener, you know I've been traveling in Italy for about a month, but I'm back. And it's nice to be home. This episode has a little bit of everything. The Pope weighed in on AI last week, which you probably know. But honestly, what he said is worth your time, so I wanted to talk about it a bit. We've got a piece about aging that honestly made me laugh out loud, and I think will make you feel good about where you are in life right now. And our main topic, jobs. It's one I've been wanting to dip back into and tackle for a while. I think it's time to check in on that. And there's a lot that's unsettling, but there's also a genuinely hopeful side to this story about jobs, and I don't want you to miss it. Plus, I have a little surprise in the wrap that longtime listeners will want to hear. I was lucky to fly home through Newark, New Jersey. The date of my flight and location ended up being adjacent to a very important event. My grandson graduated from height school, Hotchkiss, which is in Connecticut. It seemed fitting for me that the commencement speaker was Hotchkiss alumna Abby Fanlow Susk. She serves on the product policy team at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. I wondered if she was going to get booed. You may have read about several AI commencement speakers who have gotten very negative receptions from grads, but there was no booing at Hotchkiss. Abby did touch on AI, but her main message was about how to hold on to yourself and your values. Obviously, a very important message. Anyway, my time away was super fantastic. And as I bet you all can all understand, I'm really happy to be home. And I'm back to paying attention to the news, good news, bad news, especially AI news. So let's go directly there. Okay, so my first story is about the Pope and AI. Pope Leo XIV, who, as you may know, is the first American Pope, just released his first major teaching document. It's called an encyclical, which is basically an open letter to the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. I was raised a Catholic, not a particularly good practicing Catholic today. But at any rate, the Pope chose to make his talk all about artificial intelligence, which seems very timely. Now the story's been out for about a week, so as I said, many of you all have already heard about it, maybe read it, but I think it's worth talking about anyway, especially given what we're covering today. He titled the piece Magnifica Humanitas, which is Latin for magnificent humanity. And I think that title tells you everything about where he's coming from. The Pope, I'm happy to say, is not anti-AI. He actually calls it a valuable tool. But he draws a very clear line. AI is not human. It can process data faster than any of us, it can imitate the way we think, but it doesn't feel joy, it doesn't feel pain. It has never loved anyone or been responsible for anyone, and that matters. The Pope also takes on the job question, which, not coincidentally, is the main topic of this episode. He says that when we think about automation and job loss, we can't only ask, is this efficient? We have to ask, is this dignified? Workers deserve fair wages and a real place in society. Full stop for the Pope. And here's the part that really got me. He writes about the people observing from afar, meaning most of us, who aren't in the room where AI decisions are being made, but who will absolutely live with the consequences. He says those people matter just as much as the tech leaders. The document uses the word dignity 100 times. One more thing worth noting: the Vatican invited people from Silicon Valley to the official presentation of this encyclical. And among them was Christopher Ola, a co-founder of Anthropic. That's the company that makes Claude, the AI I use every day. So that felt a little close to home. Glad he was there. My second news story is also from the New York Times. But I'll be honest with you, it has nothing to do with AI. I just loved it, and I think you will too. It's an opinion piece called How to Be Old by a writer named Roger Rosenblad. He's adapted it from his book, More Rules for Aging. And it is, I don't know, funny and wise and a little cheeky all at the same time. He offers 11 rules, things like don't share to spare, don't compromise, especially a little, screwed up royally, and my personal favorite, grab the chicken leg, which is about a little boy who walked up at a picnic, took a chicken leg right out of Rosenblatt's hand, and kept walking, no hesitation. And his friend, also named Ginny, by the way, said, He must think life is a chicken leg, waiting to be snatched. I thought, yes, exactly. At any age. His last rule, do not seek immortality. And he closes with a line from the poet Philip Larkin. Quote, What will survive of us is love. This piece is worth a slow read and enjoy it. I'll put links to both stories in the show notes. Now, I want to introduce a new section for this Aged podcast. I'm calling it AI for good. It gives me a chance to highlight a few examples of how AI is being used for good. As you know, if you're a listener, the podcast, Aged, is focused on the good side of AI. That doesn't mean we ignore the dangers and hazards, but for the most part, I'll leave that side of AI to others. Here are my two AI for good examples for this episode. I read a piece in Time magazine. It's about a new experimental drug that might provide a one-and-done shot to do the job of those daily darn cholesterol drugs. Having just started to take a statin pill every day, which I often forget, I hope this experimental drug makes it to market. How great would that be? And the possibility is driven by AI-powered gene editing programs. This is a great example of AI for good, for sure. Here's another example. A great feature in the New York Times titled Blind Waymo Users Revel in the Joy of Riding Alone, subtitled Waymo has been an object of frustration to some in California. For visually impaired people, it can also bring a rare feeling of independence. It was written by Sonia A. Ra'O. I can really imagine how great it must feel to a blind person to be able to just call up a Waymo and go without human help. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for human help, but not having to have it 24-7. Highly recommend a read. And I'll put the links in the show notes. So let's get into the main topic: jobs. What is AI doing to the job market and what might it do in the years ahead? I want to start by acknowledging something. For a while, a lot of corporate leaders, and frankly, a lot of people in the AI world were dancing around this question, saying things like, oh, AI will create new jobs, or AI will free up workers to do more meaningful things. And maybe that's true to a point. But the dancing is stopping. Here's a quote from the CEO of Wells Fargo, Charlie Sharf. It pretty much sums up where we are right now. He said, and I quote, these are all opportunities to do things much, much more efficiently with AI than humans have been doing. And then he added, most other bank chieftains are afraid to say it because no one wants to stand up and say that we are going to have lower headcount in the future. It's a difficult thing to say. Well, he said it. Let's start with banking. Let's start to talk about this update on jobs with a focus on banking because it's one of the clearest examples we have right now of what AI-driven job loss actually might look like. The New York Times reported this past quarter that JP Morgan, City, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18% from the year before. So they're doing pretty well. And at the same time, they shed 15,000 employees. All of them credited AI to some degree. From back offices where people fill out regulatory paperwork all the way to the front office where highly paid professionals put together complex financial deals. Let me give you some specifics because I think specifics matter. At Wells Fargo, AI is now generating instant memos on the credit worthiness of borrowers. It is creating the pitch books. Those are the presentations banks use to pitch merger deals to companies. It is answering and rerouting phone calls from credit card customers. At City, AI software is reading legal documents. It is approving account openings, sending invoices for trades, organizing sensitive customer data automatically. And at Bank of America, the CEO said the banks' record profits were helped by eliminating a thousand jobs through what he called, and I quote, eliminating work and applying technology. He then predicted more of the same in the months and years ahead. And of course, it's not just banking. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, laid off 8,000 workers and reassigned another 7,000 to AI-focused positions. Graduates leaving college right now are having a genuinely tough time finding work. It's really hard to watch. And workers who thought they were set for life, particularly in the computer field, coding, I mean, that was like if you're a coder, wow, no worries for the rest of your life. All of a sudden they're updating their resumes. One more thing about these job losses that I think is important. This is not just a big city story. These layoffs are hitting employees in San Antonio, Tucson, Arizona, Tampa. And but it'll keep going. In recent years, banks and other companies moved a lot of jobs to low-cost cities around the country, i.e., smaller cities in rural areas, and now AI is following them there. And here's something that doesn't get talked about enough. It's not only that AI is doing jobs, it's that companies are hesitating to hire for jobs they think AI might handle soon. A commentary I read in Charleston's Post and Courier put it plainly quote, better to hold on and see is a common attitude right now. Companies aren't sure yet what AI will be able to do, so they're waiting before they bring on new people. And that hesitation is itself a form of job loss and is largely invisible. Now, here's a story that got my attention. There's been a lot of advice in recent years for people to go into the trades, become an electrician, become a plumber, because those are hands-on in-person jobs that AI supposedly can't touch. One of my sources this week is the New York Times, which profiled a French company called Schneider Electric that makes electrical components, the little switches used in elevators, motors, electric vehicles, heating systems. And they just developed a new plug-and-play electrical connector, one that no longer requires an electrician to install. As their plant manager put it, now a robot can install it. You don't need a human. Well, so much for my advice that folks consider a career change to become electricians. Who knows? And that brings me to a line I read this week that stuck with me. It comes from a commentary by Llewellyn King, who hosts a show on PBS called White House Chronicle. He writes, you may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you. I think that's exactly right, and I think it's especially true for our generation. People who maybe figured this was someone else's problem to worry about. Now, let me tell you about something more hopeful because it's real and it's important. There's a Stanford economist named Eric Burnjolfsen. He directs the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and he published a piece in Time magazine at the start of this year making a case that a lot of companies are getting this wrong. He says, and I'm paraphrasing, a lot of people are under the mistaken idea that the only way to get productivity from AI is by removing labor costs. He calls that a very narrow understanding. His argument is that companies can actually get bigger gains by using AI to make workers more productive rather than replacing them. And there's a real-world example of this that I love. Schneider Electric, yes, the same company, is doing something completely different in their call centers. Before AI, their customer service agents had to hunt through millions of pages of documentation to answer customer questions. Customers weren't happy, agents were frustrated. Now AI does the hunting. It finds the answers, explains how it got there, and shows the source. The agent, the human, reviews it, refines it if needed, and talks to the customer. In just the last three months of 2025, their call centers handled 150,000 questions. Three-quarters of the time, the AI gave the right answer outright. The other quarter, the harder, more complex questions, the human agent took the lead. Faster response times, happier customers, and the callers were less likely to say the words every customer service agent dreads. I want to speak to the manager. And the employees? They say in this study, happier too, because the tedious part of their job, the hunting and the searching, was gone. On the factory floor at Schneider, AI cameras now assess the quality of finished products within seconds. Work that used to require manual inspection. In their manufacturing process, they produced 74 million tiny silver components every year. Figuring out how many washing cycles those parts needed was always a guessing game. Now AI monitors the process in real time and tells the operators exactly when to stop. In one year, the company reduced manufacturing waste by 73%. Water use cut drastically, lab testing costs down by thousands of euros, truck trips to an off-site lab down 22%. All good. Meaning AI was acting as a kind of equalizer, lifting up newer folks and working faster. Now, let's look at the bigger picture. Back to Eric Brinjolfsson's piece in Time magazine. He makes an argument about the nature of work itself that I think is worth sitting with. He says that almost every valuable work task breaks down into three phases. One, asking the right question, defining the problem and the goal. Two, execution, carrying out the steps. Three, evaluation, checking the results. Now for most of human history, workers did all three. But right now, AI is getting extraordinarily good at number two, execution. It can navigate systems, write code, analyze data, run processes, often faster and better than humans. And here's the key insight. When execution becomes cheap and abundant, because an AI can do it, when it's essentially a commodity, the value shifts to the things AI can't do as well. Asking the right questions, evaluating whether the answers are any good, exercising judgment, caring about outcomes. He calls this becoming a chief question officer. We will be the architects, he writes. The AI will be the builders. Well, it's an interesting way to look at it. The post and courier commentary I mentioned earlier has a similar take on where this might lead. The author suggests that rather than mass unemployment, we may see a boom in the gig economy. Individual entrepreneurs, freelancers, creative workers, people doing things that can't easily be automated. New kinds of work we haven't even imagined yet. He also makes the point that even the leaders of major AI companies, including Dario Amade at Anthropic and Sam Altman at OpenAI, have warned publicly about significant job losses ahead. They're not pretending this isn't happening. The question is, what comes after? And the author of that piece offers a thought I'll leave you with. He quotes an AI expert named Omar Hatumla, who says that the challenge of AI is that it is exponential and we are thinking linearly. We tend to project the future in a straight line from where we are now, but AI isn't moving in a straight line. It's accelerating at a pace most of us struggle to imagine. The author's hope and mine is that the disruption itself eventually forces us to start thinking bigger, more creatively, more boldly. Brynjolfsen ends his timepiece with this quote By 2050, the most important question about AI will not be what it can do, but who gets to decide what it does. I don't know about you, but I think that's a question worth asking right now, not in 2050. Now, let's move to a lighter topic. My recommendations. This week I've got one. Get crafty. Move away from AI and screens. Find a local craft store, visit, and get inspired. I promise you will be. Whether you stumble upon beautiful beads and decide to make something for yourself or another person, or you see a little watercolor set and you decide to give it a go, or you find supplies to make potholders, remember those? Or maybe your eyes are drawn to amazing feathers, and you ask the almost always helpful folks at craft stores what craft project would be fun to do with these feathers. If you live in Charleston, I highly recommend Artist and Craftsman Supply. It's in an old four-story building on Upper King Street. It's a blast to visit, whether you buy something or not. Although I'll dare you not to. I'll put a link to the store in the show notes. So before I sign off, for longtime listeners, you remember Bitsy? My sidekick? When ChatGPT was my primary AI. Now that I've switched to Claude as my primary AI, I want to create a new version of Bitsy. I do need a sidekick. So be sure to listen to our next episode of Aged, episode 40, to meet the new Bitsy. I'll go ahead and do my clarifying statement. That is that at Aged, we live on the helpful side of AI. But we know that AI can be hazardous. So please be sure to protect your info, double check advice, and trust your judgment. Thanks for listening. And remember, it is never too late to learn something new, especially something that might make life easier and especially more fun. Cheers.