3 Tips for the Age of AI in 2026 with Matt Rouse (286)

In this solo episode, I break down three realities of AI in today’s workplace and what they mean for your career or business. First, I explain why loudly positioning yourself as anti‑AI can hurt your job prospects when most leaders are prioritizing AI‑literate talent to drive productivity. 

Second, I unpack common misconceptions, that AI is more than chatbots and simple automation. I reveal why many companies aren’t seeing ROI: the doorman fallacy (misunderstanding what people actually do in their roles) and mounting token costs from poorly designed automations. I share how we avoid those pitfalls by upskilling experts and using AI to supercharge their work instead of replacing them. 

Third, I highlight where AI is creating demand, not taking jobs, like healthcare and small business, showing how AI‑assisted professionals deliver better outcomes and handle more work, which fuels growth and hiring. I wrap with practical guidance to future‑proof your skills, understand AI agents and automation at a high level, and position yourself to thrive in the evolving economy.

Let's go, people!

Looking for a podcast guest? Author Matt Rouse
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Welcome to the stage,

the host of your show,

for another solo stand up performance.

Your AI futurist,

the marketing master,

your AI chicken wrangler,

Matt Rouse.

Today,

we're talking about three things you need to know about AI in the workplace in 2020 sifts.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Routh. And as many

of you know, but maybe not everyone,

I'm the author of Will AI Take My Job and Will AI Take My Job Too, which is my eighth book. I've done a lot of research

for those two books, you know, over the last four years.

And

there are some things

in those books that I alluded to, but I didn't entirely spell out. And though some of them I did, I think they're still important to talk about right now. Though I'd like to talk a little bit about

some AI misconceptions

and some things that I predicted that are definitely coming true, but are also pretty important whether you are,

you know, in a job or a corporate environment or, you know, part of another organization or whether you're a business owner, you have a side hustle,

you know, any of those kind of things.

Number one,

if you wanna make sure you can keep your job

or you're trying to get a job,

being on the AI hater

or anti data center bandwagon

is probably not going to get you that job.

The anti AI people are going to be the ones who get laid

I'm not saying this because I think they should.

I'm not saying this because I'm

against protesting or anything like that. I'm quite the opposite.

But

the majority

of corporate jobs, at least in the Western world,

the

ownership,

the board of directors,

the management, they are looking for people who have AI skills

or the ability

to pivot or

to learn new skills around AI to increase productivity.

That's something that is on their radar right now. And if you're an anti AI person or you refuse to use AI tools,

then you're going against the directive that the company has.

It's never been a good way to get a job or keep a job. And

you don't have to be rah rah AI, but you definitely don't wanna be anti AI

or at least not loudly.

If you're a person who

hates AI,

probably not somebody who listens to this podcast anyway. Let's be

If you know somebody, you know, they're going out to get a job, you can't give them a heads up

because

from the the standpoint of businesses, business owners, leadership, people that I talk to, their concern

is that they're going to be left behind

if they don't get improved productivity from AI, and they're looking for that improved productivity to come from their staff

using or implementing AI.

Number two is

what most people think

is AI is either a chatbot

or automation.

But they don't really understand what automation is for the most part, and they probably don't understand

much about AI outside of using a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini or something. One of the biggest reasons that we've seen companies

not showing

productivity

gains from replacing workers,

there's two reasons that companies are not seeing a return on their investment in AI

with their workers. There's there's more than two, but the the two biggest ones that I see are they

have have a misunderstanding

of what people do in their jobs,

and

that is

something called the doorman fallacy, which I'll get to in a second. The other

factor

is that a lot of layoffs are being blamed on

productivity or efficiencies gained through AI,

but they're using that to cover up

the bad performance of their company. So a large company lays off a bunch of workers. Let's say they lay off 10% of their workforce.

Normally, people would look at that and go, ugh. Company's not doing so great, and the stock price would go down

because people are selling it.

But now they can say, lay off 10% of their workforce, and they say, that's not a negative thing. This is a good thing because we have all these efficiencies that we can lay off 10% of our workforce, and then their stock doesn't go down as much.

And for the most part, those companies are not being truthful. So

there's that.

But let's get back to the doorman fallacy. Rory Sutherland works for o Obalby.

He came up with the doorman fallacy

where a hotel decided to save costs that they would fire the doorman.

What happened is the the business actually kept getting worse

and doing worse and doing worse in sales,

and it turns out that it's because the doorman did a lot more than just open the door for people.

They were the person who knows everybody's name. They chat with the customers.

Right? The people are staying at the hotel. They know the doorman, and he tells them where things are, and he does kind of a concierge role. And

he's basically the customer

facing point of communication

between the business and the customer.

A lot of companies who are using AI and automation,

they go through

the tasks

that are assigned to a role in their company,

and they say, okay. We can automate this task, this task, this task, this task. But

I don't know about you, but every time that I've ever worked in a company,

they say, these are the things that you're gonna do at this job. And then once you get into the job, for starters, you don't end up doing half of those things.

And as time goes on, you ended up doing more and more other things

that were not in the original job description.

So what happens is all those extra things that you're doing that are not document that are not documented,

those things stop getting done when they eliminate your position and automate what used to be your job function.

And then the companies go, oh my god. How come we've automated all this stuff? We've removed these positions,

but our company is doing worse, not better.

And that's because of the doorman fallacy.

They don't understand what the jobs actually were that people were doing

because

they were not involved or oftentimes

upper management is disconnected from the average customer facing your field worker. Right?

I think there's one other thing there too that's interesting, which is companies are seeing that the token cost

of

paying for AI systems that they're using through automations

and tokens is how you pay for AI. If it's outside of a subscription environment, like paying for ChatGPT or something, if you're using an API, an automation system, Zapier, n eight n, something like that,

those systems or software systems pay for tokens.

And what ends up happening is

it takes so many iterations to get the work done properly for the automation to get going that the amount of tokens that they had to buy end up costing them more than the employee cost in the first place. You see this a lot in SaaS companies.

They bolted

AI onto everything.

And first, they're like, the CRM will be, write this customer description with AI. Just click this button.

And then they burn through so many tokens that their profit margin goes in the toilet.

And then they go, okay. Now we're gonna have to up the subscription fee for our app because we're burning through so many tokens.

And then

they end up having to have complex billing where they're recharging tokens and all this kind of stuff when it used to just be that it's $39 a month to use Mailchimp or whatever it is. Right?

That token cost

is starting to kind of transfer

the profit margin from SaaS companies into these big AI companies and cloud companies like AWS and Google and Microsoft. Another thing that's interesting is that those tokens are heavily subsidized.

So because they're trying to get

as many people and as many companies on board with using it, they're

subsidizing

the cost of the tokens with their venture capital.

And as time moves on, they're slowly removing

that that subsidizing.

Part of it is through efficiency,

but also part of it is by raising the token cost.

So the the cost to use a model,

generally speaking, gets cheaper every year.

The problem is it only gets cheaper for the existing model.

Using last year's model now might be 90% cheaper,

but using the top of the line model is getting more expensive than it was to use the top of the line model last year.

And

that is the problem that they're having where the token cost is increasing over time.

So

they are using more tokens than they thought they would, which costs more money than the employees they replaced,

but then also that token cost is increasing over time. And I think eventually it will be a lower cost for most of the automation and most of the AI than it was for the employees or the tasks of those employees that they replaced.

But

what is a better model, and this is the model we use in our company,

is we train our employees how to use the best tools to do their job and which parts of their job they should use those tools for to get the most benefit.

So instead of laying off employees,

we're training our employees to be like super employees.

So we only hire people who are already experts,

and then we basically supercharge

them with AI and automation tools.

Number three,

and this is something I covered in my book, Will AI Take My Job and Will AI Take My Job Too, Many industries are grossly understaffed.

For example,

medical.

There is a lack of doctors, nurses, support staff, specialists in almost every category in every country in the world.

So thinking that going into medicine, you might get replaced by AI, really, really unlikely.

You might get replaced by AI if you're the guy sweeping the floors,

but

they said that AI was gonna get rid of radiologists by 2027.

And in 2026,

radiologists now make 30% more money, and they're twice as in demand as they were before. Because using these AI tools,

they're able to not only find more problems,

so they get better medical outcomes.

They can get better medical outcomes for more patients more quickly.

So they are not less in demand. They're actually more in demand,

and we're not training them any faster than we were before.

So

even though the demand is growing, the supply is going down, which is causing them to be more expensive. Right? Supply and demand.

If you think about small businesses,

most small businesses

have so much work to do in their business

that there is no way that their staff can ever get it all done. They have to do a lot of prioritizing.

They gotta say, okay. Wow. These are the things that because they can't afford to hire any more employees

unless they can get more efficiency

or they can

kind of get more customers,

but serve more customers in the same amount of time.

So that's where the efficiency piece comes in.

These are two fields where people

can use AI for the most benefit. Let's say you're an administrator or something for a small business. You're an operations person.

You run the office, whatever it is.

If you can automate some of the kind of day to day tasks or weekly, monthly tasks,

repetitive data based tasks,

those things can be done more quickly or automatically.

And

by using a combination

of AI to make simple decisions

and an automation system so that it's done on a regular basis where it can take multiple steps.

Now what you've got is a system where that administrator or that office manager, operations manager, whatever it is,

can handle more works than get more done. And once they start getting lots of the regular day to day business stuff done, they can start focusing

on the things that will make the business more profitable,

or they can start working on the things that will make the business more efficient. And both of those things

allow that business to grow and expand,

hire more staff, and so on.

So again, you've got a place

where AI use and automation use will improve the business, and it's not taking away jobs. It's being used to add jobs and to increase the value of those people in the business and increase the value of the business itself. They get a better business

outcome.

Like in the medical field where they're getting a better medical outcome using AI.

In the small businesses and kind of middle market businesses,

these efficiencies and things that they can gain

are allowing them to get a better business outcome.

So that's it for this week. We're gonna keep it short, and don't forget to buy the book, Will AI Take My Job Too, which was just updated a couple months ago. I know AI moves really quickly,

but I think you're gonna find that the things that I talk about in the book, most of them are pretty timeless.

What's gonna happen in the next five to ten years in different industry verticals?

I talk a little bit about robots, a little about self driving,

AI, and AI agents, and agents swarm. But in a way that the average person can understand what I'm talking about, it's gonna give you strategies to make you more valuable

and to be able to pivot where needed

and avoid

any kind of a a dip

between

as AI gets implemented

and

when the new economy comes up out of the age of AI.

So I'm Matt Rouse, and I will see you next week.

I'm

feeling lost.

What's coming next?

The world is changing.

It's so complex.

Will AI take my job?

Will I be replaced?

Am I just a cock

in this corporate

race?

I know there is

a lot going on,

and AI

even

sang this song.

Just read the book.

Buy that book. Get the book already.

Will AI take my job

to

with every page,

already.

Will AI take my job

to

maybe

you're right I'll take that chance. To understand AI.

To join

the