Is AI quietly creating more work than it’s replacing, and are we measuring the job market the wrong way?

In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with the CEO of Upwork, Hayden Brown, about what the platform is seeing across the global freelance economy, and why the “AI is killing jobs” narrative can miss what’s happening at the edges of the market. We also dig into how to adopt AI inside an organization without just “sprinkling fairy dust” on old workflows, and what it takes to make AI rollout a cultural shift, not just a tooling upgrade.

Guest

Hayden Brown is the CEO of Upwork, the global work marketplace connecting businesses with freelance talent across knowledge-work categories. We discuss Upwork’s vantage point on hiring trends, the rise of fractional work, and what AI-driven change looks like when companies redesign workflows end-to-end rather than retrofitting existing systems.

Key topics we cover

• 03:50 — A global background and why opportunity access shapes the mission
• 05:27 — The scale of Upwork and why freelancing is a major part of the economy
• 07:14 — How we approached AI adoption as a structured, company-wide program
• 08:47 — Early “two-year vision” ideas that reshaped marketing and product workflows
• 11:34 — Reducing fear: how we framed AI internally, including room for mistakes
• 16:03 — Building an AI agent experience (and what it changed about job posts)
• 17:14 — Why “reinventing, not retrofitting” separates AI winners from strugglers
• 22:24 — Why macroeconomics can explain more than AI in hiring slowdowns
• 23:01 — The core claim: AI creating more opportunities than it’s destroying
• 24:05 — Fractionalization: how full-time jobs get broken into AI + human slices
• 25:09 — A concrete example of humans working alongside AI in production workflows
• 26:32 — From “prompt engineer” to “AI generalist”: orchestration becomes the ask
• 28:11 — Why the AI jobs debate is too binary, and what’s getting missed
• 31:43 — Practical reskilling: embedded experts who train teams while upgrading systems
• 36:29 — AI’s impact across unexpected categories, including creative work
• 39:15 — Five-to-ten-year outlook: humans as orchestrators, premium on human skills
• 43:22 — Career advice for early-career listeners in an AI-shaped job market
• 45:40 — Real-life AI use: editing, learning, and replacing the blank page problem

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