Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excert. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, July 20, 2025.

The U.S. job market is undergoing a fundamental shift as AI advances, roles that were once gateways to upward mobility are disappearing.

In a recent interview quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Ford conceded that artificial intelligence will, quote, leave a lot of white-collar people behind, end quote.

For college graduates graduates just entering the

job market, the outlook is particularly bleak as advancement in AI make those jobs mostly obsolete.

As AI challenges and redefines the landscape of employment, how can society reconcile the human

desire for self-sufficiency and the need for meaningful work?

And how can individuals traverse an increasingly tricky job market?

Here to share us insights on the impact of AI and job cuts is executive coach Jim Frawley.

Thanks for joining me, Jim.

Thanks for having me.

I want to tackle how to navigate a rapidly changing job market.

But first, if CEOs believe they can succeed with a fraction of today's staff, what does

that mean for the middle class when white-collar jobs are facing a steep decline?

Yeah, this is going to be, and we've been talking about it for a long time, a very large

shock to the system. And there are two angles to sit on it, right? There's one side of the CEO has to

run a business and run that business really, really well, and why do you pay for workers that

you just don't need, right? So there's validity there, but there's also almost a social obligation component

for the people who are no longer going to be employed and what do you do for them and how do you

prepare for them. And so they're really stuck in between the rock and the hard place on how do we

actually take care of the people that we don't need, how do we reposition them, and how do we make

sure that people are going to be set? At the same time, how do you acknowledge the accountability on the individuals

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