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The AI tools market just had its most dramatic year ever. ChatGPT lost nearly 20 points of market share. Google Gemini doubled its user base to 750 million. Claude became the most valuable AI platform per user, generating $2.2 billion in enterprise revenue. And a free, open-source model from China called DeepSeek proved you don’t need billions of dollars to build competitive AI.

In this special season break episode, Carlo Thompson delivers a complete market report on every major AI tool: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, GitHub Copilot, and AI image generators. But this isn’t a product review. It’s a threat assessment. Each tool is mapped directly to the job functions it’s automating and the sectors where displacement is already happening.

With nearly 78,000 tech jobs lost to AI in 2025 and 41% of employers planning further reductions, understanding this market isn’t optional. It’s survival.

Plus: A full Season 2 recap and an exclusive preview of Season 3: Advanced Strategies (Episodes 13-18), covering geographic arbitrage, age-specific playbooks, the AI skills stack, and more.

SURVIVING AI | Season 2: The Protection Playbook | Episode 12 (Season Finale)
"The Final Immunity Test — Are You Actually Going to Survive?"

Two seasons. Twelve episodes. The data, the timelines, the risk assessment, the career paths, the retraining roadmaps. Now the hard question: Did you actually do anything with it?
In this Season 2 finale, Carlo Thompson delivers the Survivor Diagnostic — a five-question test to determine if you’re a Survivor, a Tinkerer, or Delusional. Then: the 7-Day Survival Challenge, a step-by-step action plan to transform from listener to actor in one week. Plus: the five biggest excuses for inaction and how to override each one, commitment devices from behavioral psychology, 6-month checkpoints by risk tier, and the future-self letter exercise that will change how you see your next two years.
Season 3: Advanced Strategies is coming — geographic arbitrage, the age factor, the AI skills stack, the relationship economy, side businesses, and the future-proof mindset. But it’s for people who’ve already started.

#SurvivingAI, #AIJobs, #CareerSurviva,l #FutureOfWork, #ArtificialIntelligence, #CareerChange, #AIDisplacement, #SeasonFinale, #Season2Finale

Think AI is going to take all the jobs? Think again. 83% of business leaders believe AI will ELEVATE the importance of uniquely human skills—not replace them. 65% of executives say human creativity remains essential to competitive advantage, even as they pour billions into AI. MIT researchers just released a framework called EPOCH—the human capabilities AI is most likely to complement, not replace. At the top? Creativity. Empathy. Original thought. But here's the paradox: As AI gets more capable, human creativity is actually declining. Students show a 42% decrease in divergent thinking. Junior professionals struggle to ideate without AI prompting. This episode makes the case that your creativity isn't a relic of the pre-AI world—it's your ticket to thriving in the post-AI world. We'll cover the science of what AI can't do, the economics of human creativity, and six actionable strategies to develop your irreplaceable edge. In the age of algorithms, your creativity is your superpower.

5.5 million new businesses in 2023. 19% of Americans are now entrepreneurs. They're not waiting around to see if AI takes their jobs. They're not hoping their companies figure it out. They're not praying, they're one of the lucky ones. They're doing the automating themselves. As an employee, someone else decides your fate. As a business owner, YOU decide. That's not freedom from risk—it's ownership of risk. And in the AI era, owning your risk might be safer than outsourcing it to an employer with no loyalty to you. This episode breaks down the binary outcome for entrepreneurs, specific business opportunities, the AI starter kit, a decision framework for whether YOU should start a business, and a 7-day validation exercise. You're 7 days from knowing if entrepreneurship is your path.

The narrative around AI and jobs has become monotonous: automation bad, humans doomed, learn to code or perish. But what if the very technology threatening jobs is simultaneously creating an entirely new category of work—one that values judgment over algorithms, ethics over efficiency, and management over machine learning?

In Episode 12 of Surviving AI, host Carlo Thompson unpacks "The Oversight Economy"—the rapid emergence of roles designed to govern, audit, and ethically guide AI systems. This isn't just legal compliance; it's a $3.7 billion market projected by 2028, and it's hiring now.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why 14,000+ AI governance positions remain open while entry-level tech hiring has dropped 25%
• The four categories of oversight roles: Ethics & Strategy, Compliance & Risk, Technical Oversight, and Implementation
• Specific job profiles including AI Ethics Officer ($75K-$250K+), AI Compliance Manager ($125K-$200K), AI Auditor ($130K-$188K), and Prompt Engineer ($90K-$300K+)
• The critical regulatory deadlines driving this hiring surge—including August 2, 2026, when EU AI Act enforcement begins for high-risk systems
• Why 72% of AI-exposed job vacancies require management skills, not technical AI expertise
• How to pivot into governance from legal, project management, or humanities backgrounds

Key Statistics:

• Only 1.5% of organizations report being satisfied with their AI governance staffing
• Workers with AI skills earn a 56% wage premium over peers in similar roles
• 77% of new AI jobs require Master's degrees or specialized certifications
• US AI executives average $1.1M total compensation vs. $565K in Europe

Sources referenced: WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025, IAPP Survey 2025, Second Talent Industry Report, OECD Future of Work, PwC AI Jobs Barometer, Heidrick & Struggles

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r8bceTpWHX4DZuGoLfLLlaR8ioJHgONVwjgfUnW7AHc/edit?usp=sharing

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Your company will automate. The only question: will you be the one implementing it or the one being replaced by it? In this episode, we break down the tactical playbook for keeping your white-collar job when the restructuring memo lands. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: The Three Types of Employees Why Resisters get cut first, Adapters survive, and Champions get promoted—and how to move from one category to the next in 30 days. The 6-Month Champion Playbook Month-by-month actions: from learning AI tools to leading implementation projects to positioning yourself for promotion. Role-Specific Survival Strategies Exact moves for accountants, data analysts, lawyers, project managers, marketers, HR professionals, and salespeople—what's being automated and how to stay ahead of it. The Sales Spectrum Why SDRs face 75% risk while Enterprise B2B sales faces only 15%—and the career pivot path from endangered to essential. Red Flags Your Department Is Next Six warning signs that restructuring is coming—and what to do when you see them. The Communication Strategy How to pitch AI initiatives to your boss without sounding alarmist—the exact 5-step framework. The 30-Day Champion Challenge Week-by-week actions to transform from replaceable to indispensable, starting Monday morning.

Added Source Materials: Dive in, AI makes mistakes, I make mistakes. Your own research could provide your best outcomes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15hhlvAh7mE_UI-KY6AwgS4q-Tx-JbAAVXehPMNh3J7E/edit?usp=sharing

AI is passing the bar exam, acing medical licensing tests, and crushing coding challenges. So why does research show these same systems fail more than 90% of the time on tasks lasting over four hours?

The answer lies in how AI gets trained—and the limitations that process bakes in from the start.

In this episode of Surviving AI, we go deep on the training problem: the gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability that creates both risks and opportunities for your career.

What you'll learn:

• How Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) optimizes AI to sound right rather than be right—and why this creates "sycophantic" systems that tell you what you want to hear
• The "4-Hour Rule": why AI succeeds on quick tasks but struggles with complex, sustained work—and what that means for job vulnerability
• Four predictable failure modes you can learn to spot: temporal blindness, distribution shift, benchmark theater, and inherited bias
• Why 98% of companies feel urgency to deploy AI while only 13% are actually ready—and what happens in that gap
• The three emerging roles that become MORE valuable as AI capabilities grow: the Validator, the Translator, and the Accountability Layer
• Specific questions to ask when AI enters your workplace for hiring, strategy, or workforce decisions

Key research discussed:

• "Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of RLHF" (Casper et al.)
• METR's research on AI task completion by duration
• Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index
• Stanford's Foundation Model Transparency Index
• Deloitte's findings on executive decisions based on AI hallucinations

The bottom line: The gap between what AI benchmarks measure and what work actually requires is your competitive advantage. This episode shows you exactly where to find it.

550,000 plumber shortage by 2027. An 80,000+ electrician shortage doubling by 2030. Median age in the trades: 46–48, with mass retirements coming. Meanwhile, AI threatens millions of white-collar jobs—but the infrastructure powering AI creates massive demand for the very work robots can't do.

As Nvidia's CEO put it: electricians, plumbers, and carpenters are in "astronomical demand."

In this episode, we cover: • Why electricians, plumbers, and HVAC techs face only 5–15% automation risk through 2040+ • The data center boom—one large facility needs 100+ electricians to build, 20–40 for ongoing maintenance • Real earnings: $40K–$50K during apprenticeship → $60K–$80K journeyman → $100K–$200K+ as a business owner • The complete career path from apprenticeship to master license to ownership • Field service trades you've never considered: telecom tower techs, wind turbine technicians, elevator mechanics ($80K–$100K+), medical equipment engineers • The hybrid strategy: electricians who understand solar, IoT, and building automation earning $150K+ • Why the stigma is wrong—this is knowledge work that happens to be physical

Plus: the exercise to research your local IBEW or UA union, find apprenticeship requirements, and shadow a tradesperson for a day.

If you scored Critical or High risk in our assessment, and you're not opposed to physical work, this is the fastest path to a six-figure, recession-proof, AI-proof career. And you get paid while you learn.