Tech executives have offered foreboding visions of the future of work due to AI, with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott predicting unemployment will exceed 30% in a matter of years.
But Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says that’s nothing to be afraid of.
People should embrace the future of AI job displacement, Srinivas said in an episode of the All-In podcast released on Monday and recorded at Nvidia GTC last week. While AI may lead to unemployment, that job displacement subsequently frees people from careers they may not have enjoyed, he suggested. This, instead, gives them opportunities to pursue entrepreneurship.
“The reality is most people don’t enjoy their jobs,” Srinivas said. “There’s suddenly a new possibility, a new opportunity, to go use these tools, learn them, and start your own mini business…Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.”
AI-related layoffs are already on the horizon. Last month Block CEO Jack Dorsey reduced 40% of his staff, saying “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” The 4,000 laid-off Block employees are part of a total of more than 101,000 AI-linked job losses in the U.S. since February 2025, according to data compiled by the nonprofit the Alliance for Secure AI.
However, some economists argue potential job displacement as a result of AI has been drastically overstated. Oxford Economics wrote in a recent note to clients companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and are insteading “AI washing” by blaming workforce reductions on the technology.
Venture capitalist and Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley said the AI boom is no different from other eras of rapidly evolving technology, in which layoffs happen, but the labor market ultimately adapts and stabilizes.
“I’m not that big of a doomer, Gurley told CNBC earlier this month. “I think these waves come, and especially with AI, there have been a lot of people pumping kind of miracles into it … .They get this kind of apocalyptic view. We’ve had technology disruption before.”
How AI is building small businesses with few employees
The future of work in an AI-powered future is a departure from the rote and repetitive jobs that emerged at the turn of the 20th century, according to Srinivas.
“America has always been about entrepreneurship. We’ve been about trying to build new things, discover new things, go explore,” he said. “Henry Ford came and built factories and brought jobs and things like that, and put people into a box.”
AI instead makes people more nimble, eliminating startups’ and small businesses’ need to raise as much money because they no longer need to hire as many employees to jumpstart operations, Srinivas suggested.
“What we are going to try to do is help businesses run as autonomously as possible,” he said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long predicted AI would create the first billion-dollar business run by one person, but Srinivas claimed the feat has not yet been achieved because an AI-powered venture has not increased in U.S. GDP by $1 billion, and therefore not yet “truly creating new value.” He said the best way for this one-person unicorn to emerge is from a small business that has been optimized with AI.
A new era of AI-powered startups
This new era of startups is already emerging. A Bank of America report published this week found the number of business applications with clear plans to hire employees fell by 4.4% year-over-year in January. Meanwhile, The number of “high propensity businesses,” those likely to hire employees, jumped more than 15% in the same period. The discrepancy suggested the potential emergence of several new companies, but without plans to onboard staff to run those businesses.
In 2024, Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan created an AI-powered flashcard and quiz tool called TurboAI with an initial investment of less than $300 while the pair were still in college. The pair has since growth the company to 8.5 billion users and are generating $1 million a month in revenue with just 13 employees, the pair told Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. Without AI, their workforce would have swelled into the triple digits.
“If we were a company two-and-a-half years ago, it would take over 100 employees,” Arora said. “The only reason we’re able to do it with 13 employees right now is because of AI.”
