Good morning. What’s the prognosis for the economy if AI turns out to be fantastic for profits and disastrous for demand? That’s the scenario explored in a viral essay titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” Co-authored by James Van Geelen, founder of analysis firm Citrini Research, and AI entrepreneur Alap Shah, it imagines a near-time future in which real wage growth collapses as white-collar workers lose jobs while owners of compute see their wealth explode, resulting in a “Ghost GDP: output that shows up in national accounts but never circulates through the real economy.” (Van Geelen wrote that he spent 100 hours on the essay, a poignant metric, perhaps, in an era where AI could write up any scenario in seconds.)
There are plenty of predictions about AI’s economic impact, good and bad, for those who seek them out. There are also signals right now that indicate disruptive change is already happening: a record gap between corporate profits and worker pay, staggering salaries at AI firms for workers with analog skills, predictions of job loss in everything from Uber drivers to office work, and of course the recent rout in tech stocks.
CEOs are not oblivious to these risks. Most are focused on using AI to redesign work and not just shrink headcount or grow profits. Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S, for one, is planning to hire about 25,000 junior workers this year, a 20% increase over 2025, as AI puts expertise in the hands of more junior talent. (For a deeper dive on his “Hollywood model” of hiring, check out my recent interview with him.) IBM is also tripling the number of Gen Z entry-level jobs, as are others. That’s good news for those who worry about AI disrupting opportunities for the next generation of leaders, though it’s unclear how democratized expertise will impact skilled workers higher up the pyramid. IBM shares lost 13% of their value yesterday after Anthropic announced that its Claude Code tool can help modernize Cobol programming language that runs on IBM computers.
