The 1% Club (Financial advisory start-up) recently laid off 15% of its workforce, citing new efficiencies gained from AI. The cuts affected roles across content creation, research, and marketing.

On a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, explained an essential idea about AI: “AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs.” Altman elaborated that AI was developed to take over specific tasks, not whole jobs.

Applying this logic to the 1% Club’s recent layoffs:

Tasks: Creating graphics and conducting research are tasks.
Jobs: These involve linking tasks to create value, like gathering research, analyzing it, presenting insights visually, and sharing them with the team over a coffee.

Letting people go purely due to efficiency gains seems shortsighted in a knowledge-driven economy. Should it imply that these employees had no meaningful work left that AI couldn’t enhance rather than replace?

Personal Opinion: A 15% cut might seem incremental rather than radical, but it’s still a warning sign—like a canary in the coal mine.

Or it is nothing. Maybe the 1% club is sending a positive signal to the investors that layoffs are due to a gain in efficiencies( wow!). We are growing! we don’t fire people because we are slowing. 🙂