EP7: Will AI Take Your Job? The New Career Paradigm

More than a million people a month type the same five words into Google. Most of what they find is either panic or false comfort. This episode is neither. Brett pulls the actual data not the headlines and shows why the numbers are being read backwards. AI-attributed layoffs rank fifth among the real reasons companies cut jobs in 2026. Layoff announcements are running 43% below this time last year. Unemployment is sitting in the low 4s. That is not a collapsing labor market. But something real is happening, and Brett names it precisely: AI is not eliminating jobs. It is unbundling two things that have always traveled together doing the work and owning the outcome. The price of doing the work is collapsing to near zero. The price of owning the outcome is not. That one shift changes everything about how you should be positioning yourself in the next 18 months whether you are a BDR, a mid-career VP, or an executive trying to figure out which of your people will still be standing. In this episode: [00:00] Cold open: the five words a million people search every month and why they're asking the wrong question [01:30] The Oracle layoffs, the AI excuse, and why Brett has personal history with this one [04:00] The Stanford data: why AI hit workers aged 22–25 hardest and what it actually means for entry-level roles [07:00] The real layoff numbers: what the media won't tell you about 2026 [09:30] Jevons Paradox, the World Economic Forum's 2030 forecast, and why the CEO who gave us the scariest number quietly walked it back [12:00] The unbundling: doing the work vs. owning the outcome, and why that single distinction is the most important sentence in this episode [16:00] Why AI-generated LinkedIn outreach is embarrassing your sales team and what it should be doing instead [19:00] Entry-level jobs were never careers. They were rungs. And the rungs are being sawed off. [22:30] The three moves that make you sticky in this market right now [26:00] Why Brett built BUILD and what it is for [28:00] The only question that actually matters: are you willing to own something AI cannot? If this changes how you think about your role or your team in the next cycle, send it to one person who is still trying to out-skill the machine instead of out-owning it. New episodes every week on Prompting Revenue. Connect with Brett: Work with Brett: https://brettjansen.ai/workwithbrett Join the BUILD Community: https://brettjansen.ai/community LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brettjansen