Ex-Google Exec: How to Position Yourself Now Before the Next AI Phase (2026–2027) | Mo Gawdat

My AI startup took me six weeks to build. If I had started in 2022, it would have taken me four years. And, and when you really think about that, that basically means everyone now has a chance.

This is Mo, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, where he spent over a decade running business innovations. He says everyone now has a chance, but only if they understand what's actually coming.

The skill of an entrepreneur in the past was the ability to foresee something in the future that no one else saw and to prepare for that. That's a game of chess. It's over. It's off the table. This has turned into squash. I'm just basically saying get prepared.

How much time do we have to prepare?

Within the next two to three years, you're going to see a massive shift in the jobs market. So you asked me what should we do? Number one, learn the skills. Number two...

Mo, thank you so much for doing this. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl.

Thank you.

You said something that we're about to enter what you call twelve to fifteen years of hell before heaven, possibly starting in 2027. So what's going to happen in 2027?

Uh, I think it will peak in 2027. It w- it already started for sure. Um, I call it FACE RIPs, uh, just as, uh, an acronym for people to remember. Uh, you know, each of those letters is a word, but let me tell, tell the story quickly in, in ways that people will understand. Uh, there is the power and freedom, uh, uh, dimension, uh, so the P and the F. Uh, there is the R and the C, the reality and connection dimension. Uh, there is the, uh, I and the C, the innovation and connection... and, and, uh, sorry, and, um, an economics dimension, and then there is the A. So let me tell them very quickly. This-- To start with, uh, AI is our last innovation, right? Uh, most people don't know that, but we are already building AIs that are building AIs.

Yeah.

We're building AIs that are discovering scientific discovery that will blow you away. Uh, they're reinventing math. Uh, they are understanding biology in ways that we've never seen before. They're, uh, understanding material science in ways that are, uh, just mind-blowing. And so very quickly, uh, most innovation, definitely tech innovation, will be done at the hands of AI. Um, because of that, and because most tasks that need intelligence will be handed over to the machines. As the machine's capabilities, uh, increase, lots of debate around when exactly. Say it's ten years, say it's two years, doesn't really matter, hmm. Eventually, every job that AI does better than humans will be handed over to AI. Um, and every, every task we've ever assigned to them, they eventually ended up doing better than humans. And so, um, the first part of the dystopia is that innovation is going to take away all jobs, okay? Of course, the capitalists of Silicon Valley will tell you, "This is great. It's incredible productivity gains for everyone." Uh, you know, "You see, jobs will be easy. Uh, people won't have to work as hard." All of the fancy PR-led, uh, um, you know, conversations that we try to appear, uh, uh, altruistic when we share them. Uh, the truth is people will be out of jobs, right? Ten, twenty, thirty percent of certain sectors will see unemployment of that rate in the next few years, right? And when that happens, uh, economics at large will change massively. The whole definition of capitalism was labor arbitrage. And without labor, uh, you know, without the need for labor, the obligation to or s- or the need to keep people happy and engaged and alive and un-disgruntled, if you want, to the point where they don't rise, becomes more of an obligation than a desire, right? There's a very big difference in, you know, in terms of wanting someone to, to be the be- their best because they are, uh, productive members of society or trying to just give them a UBI, a universal basic income, to just keep them alive so that they don't, uh, uprise. And you can imagine that in a capitalist society, especially like the US and most of the West, you know, while we start with UBI, that UBI is going to be pa-paid by the taxes of the platform owners, and the platform owners will have enough power to, uh, to say, "I don't want to pay that much. I mean, those guys are not producing anything." And so over time, you can imagine how that would turn into a struggle, right? So, so that dimension of intelligence and innovation on one side becoming entirely a machine thing, leading to a redefinition of economics, a redefinition of money, a redefinition of jobs, a redefinition of earnings, um, a redefinition of capitalism.