AI in 10
The most important AI story—explained in 10 minutes.
Every day, I break down the biggest AI story in just 10 minutes - what it is, why it matters, and how you can actually use it. No tech jargon, just AI made simple.
AI in 10
California just put AI job losses on watch
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Referenced Links:
California Labor Market Info — EDD Dashboard
Office of the Governor of California
ACM FAccT 2026 Conference — Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology
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Welcome to AI Inten. I'm Chuck Getchell, and every day I break down the biggest AI story in just 10 minutes. What it is, why it matters, and how you can actually use it. California quietly built something that could change how every working person in America thinks about their job. And most people have never heard of it. I'm Chuck Getchell. This is AI. In 10, what happened? Why it matters? What you can do with it. Let's go. A couple of days ago on June 26th, California became the first state in the country to launch a public dashboard specifically designed to track what AI is doing to jobs and wages in near real time. Not a report that comes out once a year, not a PDF buried on some government website, an actual live tool built for regular people that shows which jobs are disappearing, which ones are growing, and which communities are getting hit the hardest. Think about that for a second. For the first time, a state government is treating AI not just as a tech story, but as an economic force that needs to be watched the same way we watch unemployment numbers or inflation. That is a genuinely big deal, and I want to make sure you understand why. So let me break down what this dashboard actually is and what it does because the name sounds a little dry, and the story underneath it is anything but California is calling it an AI in the economy dashboard. It pulls in data from state labor statistics, employer filings, and industry reports, and it organizes everything into a visual searchable format that anyone can use. You do not need a degree in economics. You do not need to be a union organizer or a city planner. You just need to want to know what's happening to jobs like yours. You can look up your industry, say customer service or marketing or logistics. You can filter by your region, not just statewide, and you can see real trend lines. Is employment in your sector going up or down? Are wages growing or stagnating? Are AI tools being adopted in ways that replace workers or in ways that change what workers do? That last distinction matters a lot, by the way. There's a big difference between AI took that job and AI changed that job so much it barely resembles what it used to be. Both can affect you. This dashboard tries to show both. Now, why is California doing this? A few reasons. First, the state is ground zero for the AI industry. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and hundreds of AI startups, they're all based there. So the economic effects of AI, both the opportunities and the disruptions, are playing out in California faster and more visibly than almost anywhere else. Second, there has been enormous pressure from workers in unions who feel like they only find out AI costs them their job after the pink slip arrives. Big companies can see what AI is doing to their workforce from the inside. Workers and communities can't. This dashboard is designed to close that gap. One official put it this way: if you work for a living in California, the state now has eyes on what AI is doing to your paycheck. Which is either reassuring or mildly unsettling depending on your relationship with the government keeping an eye on things. But the intent here is clearly on the side of the worker. Here's the part that I think matters most for you, even if you don't live anywhere near California. This dashboard is basically an early warning system. And the patterns it surfaces in California tend to show up in other states a few years later. That's been true with housing trends, with tech industry growth, with gig economy shifts. California is often the preview. So if the dashboard shows that customer-facing roles in retail are declining sharply while AI-assisted analyst roles are growing, that pattern is probably not staying inside the state borders. If it shows that certain regions anchored to a specific industry are losing ground while urban tech hubs hold steady, that's a preview of what regions in Ohio or Texas or Georgia may face in a few years. This is the AI story we haven't been talking about enough. Not which model is smarter than which other model, but what all of this is actually doing to the working economy, neighborhood by neighborhood, job category by job category. California just put that data in front of everyone. That's a significant move. Now let me connect this to your actual life because that's why we're here. If you live or work in California, you can go use this thing right now. Search your occupation, search your sector, look at what the trend line says. If your role shows a pattern of shrinking employment and stagnating wages alongside rising AI adoption, that's your signal to start moving, not to panic, not to quit, but to start moving. What does moving look like? It means identifying the adjacent skills that make you harder to replace. A customer service rep who also knows how to configure AI chatbots and review their outputs is not the same as a customer service rep who doesn't. A marketing coordinator who can use AI to produce and test content at 10 times the speed is not the same as one who can't. Same job title, very different job security. Think of it this way: knowing where the iceberg is doesn't save you if you don't actually turn the ship. The dashboard gives you the map, you still have to steer. If you're outside California, the actionable move is this. Treat California's data as a heads up about your own field. If you work in customer support, logistics, marketing, data entry, or back office operations anywhere in the country, the trends California is measuring are probably already underway where you are. You just don't have a dashboard showing you yet. And here's where I want to give you one specific thing to do today. Search your job title alongside the phrase AI Impact 2026. You don't need the California dashboard for this. A simple search will pull up recent industry reports, LinkedIn articles, and workforce analyses that give you a snapshot of where your role stands right now. What you're looking for is your role being described as at risk, augmented, or growing. Those three words show up constantly in workforce research. At risk means AI is starting to do the core task. Augmented means AI is changing how the work gets done, but humans are still needed. Growing means demand is increasing, often because AI is creating new needs. Most people reading those results will land in the augmented category, which sounds scary until you realize it's actually the sweet spot, because it means your job isn't disappearing. It's changing. And people who understand how it's changing and learn the new version of their role will thrive. People who ignore the change will struggle. That's not a prediction. That's already happening. If you're ready to go deeper than a quick search and actually build some skills around AI that last, my applied AI certification was built for exactly this moment. It's designed for non-technical people who want to go beyond the basics and earn a real credential they can show an employer. Worth looking into. Let me land this where it belongs. What California launched a couple of days ago is not just a government website, it's a philosophy. It's the idea that AI's impact on working people should be visible, measurable, and publicly available, not just talked about in boardrooms or academic papers. Whether you think government dashboards are the right tool for that, or you'd rather see the private sector lead the way, the underlying point stands: AI is reshaping the economy in ways that are specific, trackable, and already happening to real people with real bills to pay. The more information workers have, the better decisions they can make. People who thrive in the next decade won't be the ones who waited for someone to protect them from AI. They'll be the ones who looked at the data, understood the direction things were heading, and made their move before they had to. That's the whole game right now, and you're already ahead just by paying attention. That's today's AI Inten. If you want to go deeper and learn AI with a community of people just like you, join us at aihammock.com. I'll see you tomorrow, my friends.
