AI question every job candidate on interview should prepare to answer

If there is still no clear answer to the question of how AI affects gains and losses in the job market, there is at least one AI question that job candidates and current employees hoping to retain their roles should be prepared to answer clearly in 2026.

“The bottom line in many roles is now ‘Can one person do this job?’ It won’t happen. “Can they do this in a way that adds unique value beyond what AI can do alone and beyond what humans can do alone,” said Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. he said.

The evolving relationship between AI and human work is a critical issue in the labor market, and the technology’s payoff is starting to show up in productivity data, at least anecdotally. Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari said artificial intelligence is causing major companies to slow hiring and that many businesses are seeing “real productivity gains.”

Kashkari told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the impact remains mostly at large firms, and he expects low hiring and low layoffs to continue in the labor market overall. But he added: “There are so many anecdotes about businesses using this and actually seeing productivity gains. Businesses I spoke to two years ago were skeptical, ‘No, we’re actually using this now.'”

“I would say we’re not actually hiring fewer people.” AMD CEO Lis Su told CNBC’s Jon Fortt from the CES conference in Las Vegas. “Obviously, we’re growing significantly as a company, so we’re actually hiring a lot of people, but we’re hiring different people. We’re hiring people who are advanced in artificial intelligence.”

Last year, Shopify, Accenture and Basrr They included examples of business leaders overseeing layoffs while also encouraging employees to improve their skills or face the possibility of making themselves less involved in the workforce.

While Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman encouraged teams to “deepen their AI skills, this wasn’t a token gesture. It was recognition of where business is heading. AI is reshaping every industry, and the most responsible thing any company can do is to prepare its employees for this change early, transparently, and with purpose.”

Some of the ways companies are talking about this shift remain unclear; for example, having AI perform repetitive or computationally heavy tasks so that humans can focus on higher-level tasks that involve judgment, empathy, creativity, and context. According to Rus, this vision of human work enhanced by AI with technology in the background represents “a shift from replacement to empowerment.”

But workers are right to be skeptical.

“These transitions are about efficiency, but also about trust and transparency: employees will need to trust that companies are not just using AI as a cost-cutting tool,” Rus said. He added that there is a risk that the AI ​​transition will erode unique human skills rather than enhance them.

Kaufman acknowledged that managers’ transparency cannot alleviate employee concerns. “People learning to use AI may fear that they are training tools that will replace them,” he said. “But I see something very different happening. Individuals who learn to guide AI, interpret and improve its outputs are not training their replacements; they are becoming the architects of the next generation of businesses,” he said.

Offering a platform that connects employers to freelancers, Fiverr is at the forefront of AI adoption as it makes it easier to work in places where AI usage is increasing. According to him 2024 Free Economic Impact Report40% of freelancers were already using AI tools; Kaufman said its use saves an average of more than eight hours per week. The research found that early adopters did better work and earned higher wages. “Those who learn to integrate AI are not being replaced by AI; they are improving because of it,” he said.

A. last work A study from the Budget Lab at Yale is encouraging that the relationship between AI and jobs so far isn’t all that different from past eras of technological advancement. It concluded that the broader labor market has not been disrupted since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and that available data shows that AI automation has not reduced demand for knowledge-based labor across the economy.

Budget Lab researchers cautioned that no findings can be considered conclusive in the first few years of a new technology’s introduction, but they noted historical precedents such as the introduction of the computer into offices that show “widespread technological disruption in the workplace tends to occur over decades rather than months or years.”

“Even if new AI technologies continue to impact the labor market as dramatically or more dramatically, it is reasonable to expect that widespread effects will take longer to materialize,” the Yale report stated.

recently McKinsey study He estimated that AI could “theoretically” automate more than half of current working hours in the US, but added that this view does not necessarily mean job loss. “Some roles will shrink, others will grow or change, new ones will emerge – work will increasingly focus on collaboration between humans and intelligent machines,” its authors wrote.

McKinsey estimates that 70% of the skills desired in the job market are applicable to both automatable and non-automatable jobs. “This overlap means that most skills remain relevant, but how and where they are used will evolve,” the researchers wrote.

Companies that initially focused heavily on AI rather than hiring may also recalibrate based on experience.

Armando Solar-Lezama, professor of computing at MIT and associate director at MIT CSAIL, pointed to the example of fintech Klarna, which laid off 40% of its workforce in an AI-first policy change but was forced to do so. rehiring most employees in customer service following poor quality performance due to technology. “Some of these efforts are likely to backfire,” Solar-Lezama said. But the failure of individual corporate AI should not provide much comfort to workers across the economy. “Many of them will succeed and lead to a reduction in the workforce,” he said.

Solar-Lezama said it is organizations that may pay the highest price for employees who fear they have been tasked with robot replacement training by their employers. In fact, human failure at work remains an irreplaceable skill in the workplace.

“It is important to remember that AI systems do not learn in the same way as humans,” he said. “Current organizations are set up to deal with human failure modes, so if you replace those humans with AI systems, they will fail. It will take time for companies to understand this,” he added.