This top Biden and Obama economic official is worried about the speed of AI

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Note the speed at which AI is displacing workers throughout the US economy.

“What we have to take seriously is not just the size of the potential impact [on jobs from AI]but the speed at which it plays,” said BlackRock group vice president Mike Pyle in a new episode of Yahoo Finance’s Power Players and Brian Sozzi podcast (watch above; listen below).

The transition from agriculture to manufacturing jobs “has played out over many decades. And new jobs and new industries have increased because of the decline in agricultural employment,” he added.

The speed of AI’s impact on the labor market will be the key determinant of how important this is from a labor and macroeconomic perspective, he explained.

Pyle spent time in senior economic advisory roles during the Biden and Obama eras.

Prior to joining BlackRock in the fall of 2024, Pyle led President Joe Biden’s international economic policy efforts. He was Biden’s “sherpa”, serving as the lead in key economic negotiations with the G7, G20, and APEC.

His latest warning about AI is timely.

The growing impact of AI is on display, from Block (XYZ) laying off 40% of its workforce to layoffs at Amazon (AMZN), Oracle (ORCL), Coinbase (COIN), Cloudflare (NET), and Meta (META).

With billionaire founder Larry Ellison still at the helm, Oracle reportedly laid off about 30,000 workers across the US, Mexico and other countries on April 1. Amazon reportedly cut 16,000 jobs this year as part of its AI operations plan.

Coinbase recently announced a 14% decline in performance this month. Cloudflare recently cut 20% of its workforce. And Meta is in the process of reducing 10% of its workforce.

Circle (CRCL) founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire recently doubled down on his call that we are on the cusp of AI agents reshaping the US workforce.

“I think it’s very early days for the impact of AI agents on work behavior and how that plays out for employees,” Allaire said in Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid.

Allaire issued an early warning about two months ago at the Economic Club of New York. He said AI-related job losses will increase soon and possibly continue until 2027.

Allaire said the Circle relies heavily on AI, and it produces results.

Billionaire Block founder Jack Dorsey said he is not done removing layers of management from the company and changing the job requirements of the modern manager.

“So right now … we’re about five layers deep. I’d like that to go down to two to three layers by the end of the year,” Dorsey said at a JPMorgan conference call on Tuesday. He was talking about the number of organizational layers below him.

Dorsey said that in the future, managers should be assigned to teams of hundreds of people instead of one team. “He is focused on helping [workers] be able to control their discipline and help them think about their work and like to think about problems and see around corners … but you don’t have to like to tell them what to do. You can show them how it’s done.”

He said at the beginning, “in engineering last year, we went from a world of pure managers to a requirement that every manager has to be technical and have to contribute code. And that was just one step, and we need to do that across the organization in all of our other fields.”

What Dorsey proposes is an effective framework that relies heavily on public enterprise to accelerate idea creation and implementation. Also, a completely reinvented role for managers.

Brian Sozzi is the Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo Finance and a member of the Yahoo Finance editorial team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagramagain LinkedIn. Tips for news? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.

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