How to prepare for the AI job apocalypse
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As AI continues to grow, its innovators have warned of its potential impact on jobs. Meanwhile, young people in the UK are facing record levels of unemployment. Fearing for his own teenage daughter’s future, one Microsoft veteran has taken matters into his own hands and used data to identify the most AI-proof jobs.
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Guests:
- Babith Bhoopalan, creator, AI Career Playbook.
- Thea Babith.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producers: Colette Fountain.
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Read more:
- My daughter wants a career that survives AI — so I ranked them
- Answered by an expert, the AI career questions every parent asks
Photo: Chona Kasinger for The Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:09.6 | There is growing concern about young people with nothing to do. |
| 0:17.5 | A new report commissioned by government says almost a million 16 to 24 year olds are not in education, |
| 0:23.6 | employment or training, and opportunities for them are shrinking. We're cultivating a lost generation, |
| 0:31.5 | it says. Now on top of the many, many factors feeding into this, should we be worried that the giddy adoption of artificial intelligence tools in the workplace could mean even fewer jobs for young people going forward? |
| 0:45.3 | The man who's been banging on about AI-induced job losses for years, the Open AI boss, Sam Altman, recently seems to have reverse ferreted. |
| 0:57.8 | If even the AI barons don't know what's coming, |
| 1:03.4 | what is a young job seeker or career curious student to make of all of this? |
| 1:14.2 | Well, in Seattle, in the US, one dad has built a tool to actually help his teenage daughter and others pick an AI-resistant career path. The story is that AI is really taking the first run of the jobs. Think about |
| 1:20.6 | really almost how every professional career develops, including my own, right? You know, I was a trainee initially when I joined |
| 1:29.0 | into the workforce. The primary job at that stage would be basic analytics, reconciling |
| 1:36.3 | spreadsheets, drafting standard documents. Now, these are exactly the task where AI is already |
| 1:42.6 | faster, it's cheaper, and it's accurate enough. |
| 1:46.8 | Babit Bupallin worked in tech for 25 years in companies like Microsoft. |
| 1:52.2 | And he's written for the Sunday Times about how he advised his daughter and how it changed |
| 1:57.0 | her career choice. Finance sounded like a safe answer, and that was just because that was what my friends were doing. |
| 2:03.4 | But I think once my dad started showing me, it was a lot of building models and spreadsheets, |
| 2:09.3 | which was fine, but it wasn't exactly what I was imagining in my head. |
| 2:24.8 | Yeah. The story today How to prepare for the AI job apocalypse |
| 2:28.2 | Really it all started with one of the many dinner table conversations that we were having. |
| 2:42.1 | Tia was 16 at that time. |
| 2:44.0 | And she approached me to ask me about what she would study once she gets into the university |
... |
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