If you think AI replaces software engineers, here’s a quick thought experiment. Imagine you’re a life sciences company. 10 years ago you want to invest heavily in lab automation, processing data at scale, and other software. You look at the cost of doing so and realize you can’t compete with tech for as many engineers as you need, so you pare down your goals and do what you can. Every new software project has a fixed cost of a certain sized team, so you can only do so much given budgets, ability to compete for talent, and other trade offs. Now, AI comes along. And all of a sudden you have the *exact same* output tokens as the best tech companies in the world. Your engineers are using the same AI models as the tech industry, which means you have just boosted your engineering team by a some meaningful amount, while also neutralizing your differences with tech. Do you continue with your pared down approach, or do you start to hire more engineers because each engineer is 2X or 5X more capable than before? In almost every company I’m talking to, they’re doing the latter. Now extrapolate this to every bank, manufacturer, industrial company, retailer, and on and on. And extrapolate it not to just large enterprises, but also every SMB up and down the stack of these value chains. Oh, and also extrapolate this to other job functions, not just engineers. Resource scarce domains in marketing, legal, finance, design, and so on. If you’re wondering why new jobs show up because of AI this is the reason. Any other view of what happens doesn’t contemplate the variety of unmet needs there are in the economy.