Martijn Verbove@verboveLessons · #3

I keep seeing the take: “AI will wipe out jobs.” What I think we’re actually watching is classic economics reassert itself. When a technology drives the price of a product/service down, the market for it expands. Demand grows, supply has to catch up, and labor reallocates to the new bottlenecks. AI is a productivity shock. That means: • Some work gets automated (and yes, some roles shrink) • Prices drop • More people get access • Entirely new categories become viable • Human labor shifts toward what stays scarce: trust, taste, responsibility, physical execution, context, relationships I’ve seen this dynamic up close before. During Covid hotels cut staff, then demand returned overnight. Many hotels couldn’t operate at full capacity because the physical rooms existed, but the labor to run them didn’t. You can see a similar pattern in job markets like the Netherlands. The constraint is not “there is no demand.” The constraint is “where can labor actually flow to meet it?” Important nuance: it doesn’t mean everyone’s current skills will be in demand. It means the economy will keep rebalancing around scarcity. Zoom out: there are far more people who would like to eat out at restaurants than the current system can serve. If the process becomes more productive (less waste, lower cost, higher throughput), quality of life goes up and it becomes the new standard. Many things that used to be financially impossible will become normal. Like previous technology waves, this plays out over years, not weeks. The question isn’t “will AI remove jobs?” It’s “which constraints become the new bottlenecks, and how fast can we retrain and reallocate labor to meet expanding demand?” Curious how you’re seeing this in your industry: where is the bottleneck moving to?

Labor reallocation mechanism with case study