Meta’s Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz outlined three key factors that will determine whether AI leads to job reductions or workforce growth at companies. Speaking on "The A16z Podcast," Schultz, who has spent nearly two decades at Meta, emphasized that AI’s impact on employment isn’t predetermined—it depends on how organizations leverage the technology. First, Schultz pointed to AI’s ability to make existing tasks more efficient, which could reduce the need for human labor. “Existing stuff is going to be done more efficiently with AI as it exists today,” he said. “A lot of stuff can be automated, a lot of stuff can be done more efficiently. So that work, there will be less of it.” This trend is already visible at major tech firms. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently acknowledged that AI-driven efficiency gains could lead to a smaller corporate workforce, contributing to what some are calling the “Great Shrinking.” On the flip side, Schultz highlighted two ways AI can drive job creation. The second factor is the emergence of entirely new types of work that were previously impossible. “Things that literally weren’t possible before will become possible,” he said. He cited semantic understanding of content as an example—AI now enables more accurate content ranking and personalization, capabilities that were out of reach without machine learning. This shift has given rise to new job roles such as AI trainers, prompt engineers, and AI ethics or implementation specialists. Companies are hiring staff to guide AI adoption, evaluate vendors, and help teams understand and use new tools effectively. The third factor involves work that was technically feasible but too expensive to pursue. AI is now making such projects economically viable. Schultz used customer support chatbots as an example. While building them was once prohibitively costly, AI now enables affordable, scalable solutions. This opens the door to new roles in designing, training, and maintaining these systems. Ultimately, whether a company grows or shrinks its workforce hinges on the balance between efficiency-driven reductions and the expansion of new, AI-enabled opportunities. “It depends on how weird you think it’s going to get,” Schultz said—hinting at the possibility that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could disrupt the entire equation, rendering current predictions obsolete.