Scott Galloway’s Best Metaphors to Describe AI’s Impact on Workers

AI is changing the workplace fast, making it harder than ever for employees and their bosses to keep up.

Scott Galloway, a New York University Stern School of Business professor and host of the podcast The Prof G Pod, shared some of the metaphors he’s come up with to describe AI’s impact on the workplace in a discussion with Microsoft Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan and Greg Shove, the CEO of Section, an AI education company.

Here are some of Galloway’s best metaphors:

‘Corporate Ozempic’

The leadership and boards of many companies are using AI to cut costs. In this scenario, Galloway said he thinks of AI as having some of the same properties as GLP-1s.

I think of AI as “corporate Ozempic.” and that is, Ozempic goes into your brain and kind of switches off a switch that says ‘you don’t need more calories’ even though your instincts are telling you to consume as many calories as possible if you’re fortunate enough to have salty, or sugary, or fatty food in front of you.

And typically when you’re a CEO, and you’re growing, the signal is ‘I need more calories. I need more people.’ Musk, to a certain extent, by offering a minimum viable product with 20% of the staff of Twitter, and really Meta announcing what was the seminal earnings call where they said, ‘We’ve laid off 20% of our staff, and meanwhile maintain growth of 23% sending earnings up 70%,’ everybody started thinking I want the great taste of growth without the calories of more people. And AI is the Ozempic.

‘The East German Stasi with WiFi’

The “dark side” of AI lies in how easily it can identify low performers, Galloway said, comparing it to East Germany’s Cold War-era secret police, notorious for their widespread surveillance.

Now, I can upload all the email and Slack interactions I have with an employee and say ‘Give me an estimate of how many hours a week this person is actually working.’ And it’ll give me what I believe, maybe incorrectly, but I believe, and that’s all that’s important, is my perception of how many hours a week this person is actually working.

‘Warrior making machine’

For the top 10% of the US labor force, however, Galloway thinks AI is a boon.

If you’re really good, this is really good news for you. America has essentially been optimized for the top 10%. Essentially companies, essentially America over the last 50 years, have transitioned to an economy where you use the bottom 90% as a nutrition bag to make the top 10% wealthier and wealthier. And AI kind of speedballs that AI is gonna take the top 10% who work really hard and are really creative and know how to leverage these tools and just make them fu—-g warriors. I mean they’re just going to be monsters.