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
Google just let AI decide if your job should exist
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Referenced Links:
Reddit r/technology — "Ask AI before hiring" discussion thread
Hacker News — AI justification for headcount threads
Google — Official Company Page
The Verge — AI and workforce coverage
Bloomberg Technology — AI hiring and labor reporting
Want to go deeper with AI? A community of professionals is learning AI together right now at aihammock.com — show notes, links, tools, and real conversations about how to actually use AI in your life.
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. A major tech company just decided that an algorithm should decide whether your job needs to exist before a human even gets to apply for it. I'm Chuck Getchell. This is AI Inten. What happened? Why it matters, what you can do with it, let's go. So here's what's been circulating over the last few days, and I want to be clear up front, this comes from leaked internal documents and employee accounts that have been making the round since July 4th and 5th. Google has not made a formal public announcement about this, but the pattern of employee reports is consistent enough that it's generating serious buzz, and the underlying idea is real enough to talk about regardless. Here's what the reports describe. Google has been piloting something internally called an Ask AI step in their hiring process, and not at the end of hiring, at the very beginning, before a job is even posted. Here's how it apparently works: a manager wants to bring someone new onto their team. Under this system, before HR will process the request, the manager has to submit a description of the role into an internal AI tool. That tool is powered by Google's own large language models. It then evaluates the proposed job and returns a written recommendation. And if the AI decides that automation can handle most of what that role would do, the default recommendation is do not hire a human. The manager isn't locked out. They can still push back. But here's the catch: they have to write a formal justification explaining why a human would deliver value that AI cannot. They have to reference specific things, creativity, relationships, judgment, legal nuance, and if they don't have the time or the internal credibility to fight for it, the position just doesn't get approved. So basically, the burden of proof has flipped. It used to be, here's a role we need, let's fill it. Now it's here's a role we need. Now prove to a machine that it shouldn't be automated first. That's like having to convince your thermostat that you deserve to decide the temperature in your own house. Roles being flagged in these reports include operations, customer support, basic marketing content, routine data work, and some entry-level software implementation. These are not obscure niche roles. These are the kinds of jobs millions of people hold right now. Now let's talk about why this matters to you even if you've never worked at Google and never planned to. Google is one of the most watched and most imitated companies on the planet. What Google formalizes internally, other large companies tend to study, refine, and adopt. A startup CEO commenting on this story put it bluntly: if you're selling AI to enterprises as a way to reduce headcount, your board will eventually turn around and ask you, are we using it on ourselves? Google is just making that question official. And here's where it gets real for everyday people. Imagine you're a recent grad looking for your first job in marketing. Or you've been in customer support for 10 years and you're looking to move to a bigger company. Under a system like this, you might never even get the chance to apply. The role you would have competed for was never posted because an AI decided it shouldn't exist. That's a different world than the one most of us grew up expecting. The old concern was AI will take my job. This version is quieter and in some ways more unsettling. AI might prevent your job from ever being created in the first place. One Labortech researcher framed it this way, and I thought this was sharp. We've moved from AI scoring resumes to AI deciding whether the job should exist. That's a very different power dynamic. And there's a fairness angle worth noting. HR analytics experts are already raising the question of whether the tasks AI systems flag as automatable tend to cluster around roles that are disproportionately held by younger workers or people earlier in their careers. If the algorithm decides entry-level and routine digital jobs are not worth creating, who does that actually affect? It's a real question and one that regulators in the US and Europe are going to be watching closely. Now, I'm not going to tell you the sky is falling, I don't believe that, but I do believe that ignoring this is not a strategy. So let's talk about what you can actually do with this information, because knowing about a shift is only useful if you respond to it. The single most useful thing you can do this week is audit your own role. Take a piece of paper or open a notes app, whatever works for you, and write down the 10 to 15 things you do most often at work. Then ask yourself honestly, could a decent AI system do this? Not perfectly, not the way you do it, but well enough? For tasks that are clearly repeatable and routine, standard reports, basic drafts, simple data entry, those are the ones to start moving away from as the core of your professional identity. Not because you should stop doing them, but because you should stop leading with them as your value. They are no longer your competitive advantage. They are table stakes. What you want to be building, and this is where it gets genuinely exciting, is fluency in the things AI still struggles with. Complex judgment calls, navigating human relationships and organizational politics, catching risks that a model couldn't have known to look for, creative thinking that draws from life experience, not training data. These are the things that when a manager at a company using a system like Google's has to write their justification for hiring a human, they'll be pointing to, you want to be the example they reach for when they have to make that case. Second thing, start learning to use AI as a collaborator. Not because it's trendy, because it changes the story about who you are. There's a massive difference between being someone whose work AI could replace and being someone who uses AI to do three times as much work with better results. The people who are most defensible in this new environment are not the ones who resist AI tools. They're the ones who pick them up, combine them with genuine human judgment, and deliver outcomes that neither the person nor the AI could have pulled off alone. That combination is genuinely hard to automate. And it's genuinely rare right now, which means it's genuinely valuable. If you're ready to go deeper on that, my applied AI certification is built exactly for this. It's for non-technical people who want to go beyond basic AI use and earn a real credential that shows employers you know what you're doing. Worth checking out if you're serious about this. Third thing, and this one is more of a heads up than a task, start paying attention to internal communications at your company about AI efficiency initiatives or headcount optimization or AI first operations. These phrases are corporate for something real happening. If you're hearing them in meetings or emails, that's your signal to engage early, ask questions, volunteer for pilot programs, be the person helping to shape how those tools get implemented rather than the person waiting to see how it affects you. The employees at Google who are going to be just fine are probably not the ones panicking in anonymous forums. They're the ones who already understand the tools well enough to be in the room when decisions get made. That's a posture anyone can choose at any company. Look, the big takeaway here is not that Google is evil or that AI is out to get you, it's that we've crossed a real threshold. AI is no longer just something that helps you work. In some organizations, it's starting to shape whether certain work gets created for humans at all. That's not a reason to panic. It is absolutely a reason to be intentional. The people who will thrive are the ones who see this shift clearly, adapt their skills to match it, and learn to work with AI instead of being surprised by it. The ones who are building uniquely human value, judgment, relationships, creativity, leadership, and combining that with genuine AI fluency, those are the people that no algorithm is going to recommend against hiring. The tool can decide whether a role should exist. It cannot decide whether you are irreplaceable. That part is still entirely up to you. That's today's AI intent. 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.
