$1.5B AI Founder: This Is Your Golden Age to Build With AI

What do you think are the jobs that have the highest risk of extinction?

Jobs where [beep]

Meet Jesse Zhang, twenty-seven years old and already co-founder of a $1.5 billion AI company. His startup, Decagon, powers conversations for brands like Hertz, Duolingo, and Notion. In just two years, his team has grown to nearly two hundred, so he is hiring. But the question is, how and who? You're seeing some of the companies actually laying off agencies that they're using, right? What do you feel like the percentage of these companies is?

Within those categories that I listed, maybe one-third, one-third, one-third.

So it is happening, and you see it. In this episode, we explore the future of work, from the jobs most at risk in the AI era, and we're gonna talk about new career paths that are opening up and the skills that will define the next generation of leaders.

For people with non-technical backgrounds that want to get into it, I think right now is a golden time.

And when you interview people for a company, can you name some skills that you're looking for? Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl, everyone. Jesse, you founded a company that helps corporations build AI agents to automate processes inside those corporations, and one of your customers said working with you is like having sixty-five people working on a particular pro- problem. Do you see it as creating more opportunities or, like, taking jobs from people who were doing these tasks?

Yeah, no, hap- happy to give some context. So you mentioned kinda using AI agents to automate things. We, we focus specifically on conversations with end users, right? So as an example, let's say, uh, you know, we work with a hotel chain, and as you can imagine, a lot of the customers that go and stay in the hotels and, and so on, they'll have a lot of inquiries, like, "I wanna book a room," or, "I want to upgrade my room," or, "I have questions about my loyalty points." Um, these are classic... You know, you can think of these as customer service or customer support inquiries that come in, and the AI agent's job is to have a conversation with them. This can be over the phone. It can be over live chat, and the AI agent can have the full conversation. It might need to go look up information about you, right? It might need to figure out, like, what are your past stays, or it might need to figure out, like, what loyalty tier you are. So it might- it can go in and look up information. It can take actions as well, so it can go and, and book a room for you, and, and so on. So in a nutshell, that's what we do, and so those are the... You know, you mentioned automating processes.

Mm-hmm.

That's, that's kinda what we do. Uh, it's, it's more about automating these conversations. Um, so back to your question about how we view the innovation, the, the, and sort of impact on these organizations. It really depends on what the organization is looking to get out of, get out of AI agents, and different organizations are in different stages. Uh, some people are in heavy growth mode, right? So the AI agent is more of an amplification of what they currently do. There's, there's no one that's replacing per se, but it's, it's making, it's making their operation just much faster and, and making it so that it's a lot less operationally intensive for them to grow, right? If they grew five X in the last year, maybe they don't need to, you know, five X their support team. So that, that's one, uh, thing that we see. Other organizations that we talk to are more focused on, um, the quality of the experience. Maybe they just don't care about cost, so they don't really care how many... Uh, they're not, you know, replacing anyone. They're, they're more just kind of like, "Okay, we think that having the AI agent here will make the customers a lot happier with us because, you know, they can get answers instantly. They can get what they wanted, you know, within a few seconds, rather than waiting on hold." And so that's what we're seeing, and th- those are kind of different profiles. And, of course, there is also a third, uh, category of company, where maybe they're just in cost-saving mode, and so what they're using AI for is kind of, you know, making their operations more efficient and, uh, either reassigning those folks to other, uh, jobs or, more realistically, sometimes they're using, like, outsourced, um, you know, agencies, and they can downsize those, right?