Scott Galloway: ‘AI is corporate Ozempic’

For Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern, AI is not the most important technology – weight loss drug Ozempic is.

I think of AI as corporate Ozempic.”

That’s the topline of his closing keynote on Day Two of the world’s most influential HR event, UNLEASH World.

Speaking to a packed out Main Stage of HR leaders and innovators, Galloway explained why AI is corporate Ozempic.

Historically, companies have had the view, “if we’re planning to grow 15%, we probably need to increase our hiring by 10,12%” – “we need to keep eating more, we need calories to fuel the growth”.

However, Ozempic says: “You don’t need to eat this; you can stop eating.”

Now, with AI, CEOs are thinking “I’m not sure I need to eat more”, or hire more.

This could lead to up to 16% job losses – “that may not sound like a lot”, but that’s chaos for the HR industry.

This has happened before – generally speaking, every technological breakthrough goes through the same pattern. There’s a wave of layoffs, then the additional margin of profits are reinvested in new companies that ultimately end up creating” jobs.

“You can’t get in the way of AI – you can slow it down, but you can’t really get in the way of it” – but every time there’s a new innovation, “there’s a bit of a dip in employment, then it ultimately recovers, and employment goes up”.

“I think the same thing will happen here”.

“I wonder if the biggest winners” in this AI-powered world is “all of us”.

Yes, the AI companies are making a lot of money, but breaking even is difficult – historically, other breakthrough technology sectors (like airlines and vaccines) have struggled “to ring fence and create shareholder value”.

Plus, “AI companies have convinced shareholders that it’s all about growth and vision, and not about profits”.

“I would be more excited about us getting a lot of benefit and stakeholder value from AI than necessarily any small number of companies capturing that value.”

Experiment with AI, but build human relationships, says Galloway

Clearly, Galloway is an AI optimist; he shared on stage that it can be tempting to catastrophize, but rather than thinking what could wrong, why not ask, what could go right?

Galloway believes that “AI is not going to take your job. Somebody who understands AI is going to take your job”.

“The people who know how to incorporate AI tools into their jobs are going to make much more money” – they will become “ninjas with these weapons”.

“I’m trying to get really skilled and essentially become an AI-enabled warrior” – he told the audience to always have a second screen with various HR tools open, leverage them to see how can I use AI to become more productive.

The second tip from Galloway is that “relationships have never been more important” – they are a “key point of differentiation”.

“You need to create as many advocates in the offline world as possible.”

“The person that gets the job is whoever has the best relationship with the decider, the person who holds onto the job is the person who has the best relationship with your suppliers, customers, and key investors,” stated Galloway.

“The only enduring skill that I believe will be hugely beneficial for the next 50, 60, 100 years is your ability to get in front of people, and convince them to action, compel them, hold their attention” – you “create relationships and goodwill through storytelling”.

For Galloway, “the greatest threat of AI is not that it becomes sentient and decides to kill us” – “there’s almost always an off switch, that’s almost always a human behind the curtain”.

“The great threat of AI, hands down, in my view, is loneliness.

“The most meaningful things in your life have one thing in common – they all happened in person. You will not regret telling people how much you care about them”.