Why AI Likely Means More Work For Humans

InnovationEnterprise TechWhy AI Likely Means More Work For HumansByJoe McKendrick,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Joe McKendrick covers how technology moves markets and careersFollow AuthorMay 24, 2026, 07:00am EDTAI will create more, not less, workgettyJeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, just predicted in a CNBC interview that rather than gut employment opportunities, AI is leading to an impending “labor shortage” as a result of AI. The employment doomsayers are wrong, he said. “What’s really going to happen is it’s going to elevate people.” By analogy, a software engineer who has been digging out a basement with a shovel gets handed a bulldozer. "We humans are never going to run out of problems, or the need for solutions, but the work is going to be done at a higher level, with a bulldozer."Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, sees this within his company, and across the industry. AI speeds things up and solves problems, but the human work is nonstop. AI is "creating more work for humans, not less. The more we automate, the more expert human work there is to do.”In his latest missive, Shipper describes how his own company has “automated every single thing we can with AI agents. And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from four to more than 30 human employees since GPT-3.”The paradox of AI is that replacing some aspects of expert work may only accentuate the need for human experts. “It creates more situations where expert judgment is needed," Shipper explained. "When operations people submit pull requests with AI, you need engineers to review them. When marketers make YouTube thumbnails, you need designers to sharpen them. When engineers write, you need writers and editors to make the draft good.”There are two forces at work, Shipper explains. First, AI still requires human oversight at the beginning and at the end of a process. Second, as AI churns out homogenized sameness i...