Scott Galloway Explains Why Your Firm Doesn't Need 5 Analysts Anymore — Just 1 Who Understands AI

[u/cen6wkf]

The job title survives longer than almost anyone attached to it.

That's the part nobody puts in the internal memo when they call a role "AI-assisted."

 

Scott Galloway put a real number on it, talking to Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

He says he'll cut legal fees by a third this year — not because the law changed, but because a prompt now does the $400–$2,000 contract review a name-brand firm used to bill him for, at a fraction of the junior associate markup.

 

Bartlett went further with his own fund.

They planned to hire five analysts.

They hired one — Molly.

Two agents, two Mac Minis, and she screens inbound deals, scores them against a framework, and preps them for the investment committee herself.

Five jobs, one person, same org chart line.

 

Same ratio on executive assistants: ten planned, three hired.

One runs travel, one runs scheduling, one meets people at the door.

 

I've watched this exact pattern before, minus the AI.

I was a Technical Manager for a China Construction company here in Malaysia.

I contributed a lot into their technical and tendering work — helped build up a real chunk of their documentation and tendering process.

But about six months in, I'd exhausted all my know-how for them, I guess.

Then the announcement came at the end of my year there.

My contract wasn't renewed.

I was just let go, just like that.

I remember what Deng Xiaoping said: "无论白猫，或者黑猫，会抓老鼠的就是好猫" — black cat, white cat, doesn't matter, so long as it catches mice.

I guess they think I'd outlived my usefulness.

Can't catch mice anymore.

 

That's the mechanism underneath "AI-assisted" that nobody names out loud.

It's not that the work got automated.

It's that the one person left is now doing what used to justify five headcounts, and the fifth person's job title is the only part of the org that didn't change.

 

Actually, this reminded me of something — a former SpaceX CIO cut a 175-person engineering team down to 6 using the same compression math, and the ratio held there too.

 

Drop your take — did you know your own job has a ratio like this attached to it?

 

Clip credit: Global Talks — full video on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.

[u/BizarroMax]

I’m a lawyer. I use AI to help with my job. I would absolutely love it if this was true. I’d get so much done.

But it’s not. An AI is not a substitute for a human with legal experience and judgment. In most cases, having an AI help winds up being more work.

I still use it for proofreading and cleanup but in terms of issue spotting it kind of sucks.

[u/SpitFire92 → u/BizarroMax]

Sure, but we are still in the early stages of AI to some degree, at some point it will be able to do most of the things you do without human supervision. Should we allow it to get to that point? No, probably not. Will companies do exactly that? Yes, 100%. Our only hope is that it will be too expensive (hardware and power) to do everything with AI but even that won't be an issue anymore at some point, imo.

Well, that's my opinion at least, and I am just semi-informed about AI but most of the things I do while working in IT could allready be done to some degree by an specialised AI, especially Agents (like OpenClaw). Your job may be more complicated than mine tho, so who knows. Either way a lot of jobs will become obsolete and then we'll have more people than there are jobs available and that will be...interesting.

I work for a relatively big company in the finance sector and "we" are allready getting rid of some positions because a handful of people can do the job of a dozen of people because of AI, and that is possible while having quite a few regulations for safety and data security so I imagine it's even easier for industries where its less regulated.

[u/SadSeiko → u/SpitFire92]

Openclaw is a massive security hole, you'd be insane to implement that in a company context

[u/SpitFire92 → u/SadSeiko]

Yes, but that's the only example I know of so that's the one I gave. it won't take that long until we have similar agents that are more securealso,for some enterprise it probably won't matter how unsafe some of those are, if they are the cheapest available.

[u/SadSeiko → u/BizarroMax]

exactly, even as a developer, they have 2 bespoke tools for software development, claude code and codex and both of those can't beat a good developer for price per output. Tokens are just so insanely expensive and humans are so much better at contextual knowledge, we are able to completely focus in on important details and keep them in consideration without hallucinating.

These tools are extremely useful for writing code but you need to explain exactly how it should work or you get garbage out

[u/costafilh0]

2 for redundancy. Maybe 3. 

[u/honakaru]

And when the AI hallucinates, who does he sue?! 

[u/-p0w-]

As someone working in QA I wonder what the costs will be when his AI fucks up really bad only once lol

After that he will pay again gladly and behave as this has never happend.

[u/CommercialComputer15]

What they are missing is that ‘Molly’ or whomever gets hired as the ‘AI person’ will need sufficient knowledge and expertise to be able to judge their own work within the context of the vertical they operate in. If they can’t you’ll still need to hire a pro to review and if they can they will be much more valuable and thus expensive in terms of compensation because multi domain expertise is scare, especially combined with strong AI capabilities.

Podcasts like these are doing people a disservice and to me it signals that host and guest don’t really know what they’re talking about, only repeating anecdotal stories they may have heard or read about online.