It’s been quite a journey over last 100 days.
I am very happy I made the decision to go all in on AI.
I know a huge amount more than I did 100 days ago.
I can see that it’s going to become a huge opportunity for big corporates to automate almost all their tasks.
Big insurance companies will use AI to make most of their workforce redundant. Whether they find new work for them to do, I don’t know… but I can clearly see that the big companies are going to want to use AI to cut costs.
Here’s where a potential down spiral begins:
1 – Companies have always been interested in cost savings.
2 – AI will offer the perception of massive cost savings.
3 – Companies will either: a) ignore & wait b) upskill & create an internal AI team c) get in external contractors
4 – Current internal systems and workflows will be analysed
5 – Patterns in these systems / workflows will be identified
6 – These patterns will be automated with AI
7 – Companies achieve cost savings
Obviously this is fairly abstract, but it’s sufficient to demonstrate what I’m talking about.
So, all the big companies in the world will start investing in internal or external workforces (creating a new career sector) and they will reduce the bloat that humans created. So they will eventually, mostly, get rid of staff.
How quickly and at what magnitude this happens I don’t know, but basically, take the UK as an example, all FTSE100 companies will eventually downsize significantly. This is simply because most ‘work’ that is done in enterprise companies is the moving around of data in a certain way. And in reality, most workers are a bit bone idle. There is huge room for improvement.
As of January–March 2025, the UK’s labour force—comprising 33.98 million employed and 1.61 million unemployed, for a total of about 35.6 million people House of Commons Library
Total employed (Jan–Mar 2025): 33.98 million people
FTSE 100 companies: ≈ 6.0% of the workforce (≈ 2.04 million employees)
Public sector (government): ≈ 17.4% of the workforce (≈ 5.90 million employees, excluding major reclassifications)
So, let’s take a cautious approach – 10% of the workforce will be made redundant. So for every 100 people at AVIVA (insurance company), AI will absorb about 10 peoples jobs. That doesn’t seem unrealistic right?
Let’s extrapolate to the entire 34 million. So 10% made redundant … thats 3.4 million jobs gone and not coming back … which triples the number of unemployed straight off.
This is potentially manageable, but will put huge strain on welfare. Massive growth in government sponsored training companies as they try to achieve any sort of retraining numbers.
The circular problem is:
- 3.4 million people (many with kids) … suddenly have less money.
- Less money goes into economy
- Businesses shrink again, lay off more staff
- Process repeats
And the problem mainly is that the new brains are looking to create companies that are entirely AI driven. The fewer humans the better is the mantra. So you have that, and probably the fact that most companies will self-preserve and take out more than 10% of their workforce.
The only way out of this is either:
- Reduce supply chain costs (mainly through energy sources)
- Open up new industries
- Nationalise and subsidise industries
- UBI
To be continued.