Month: November 2025

• Geoffrey Hinton doesn’t think CEOs have thought about how mass unemployment impacts buying.
• Hinton argued AI will likely destroy more jobs than it creates, impacting white-collar roles.
• Students express concern that AI could harm their future job prospects and economic security.

The “godfather of AI” has a reality check for CEOs.

Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian Nobel Prize winner for his contributions to machine learning, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders for a discussion at Georgetown University on Tuesday about “the promise and the peril” of AI.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, kicked off the discussion by asking whether multibillionaires like Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Larry Ellison, a cofounder of Oracle, have considered the impact on working-class people when making enormous investments in AI and robotics.

“They should be, but I don’t think they are,” Hinton said in response, “And I think many of them haven’t really absorbed canes, that if the workers don’t get paid, there’s nobody to buy their products, and they haven’t really thought through the massive social disruption we’ll get if we get very high unemployment.”

Sanders followed up with the examples of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who once predicted that humans won’t be needed for most things, and Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, who more recently said that AI could lead to the loss of half of all entry-level white collar jobs.

Hinton thinks that these predictions “are probably right.”

“So you often see articles saying, ‘oh, AI’s not going to replace jobs, AI fails in lots of things,'” Hinton said. “AI currently does fail in some things. What you have to remember is we’re in the very early stages. This is a new technology. It’s getting better very fast.”

“I don’t believe it’s going to create as many new jobs as it replaces,” Hinton added of AI later in the conversation. “It’ll create jobs like prompt engineer — how do you prompt this chatbot to get the best out of it — but I don’t believe there’ll be nearly as many new jobs created as it destroys, as it replaces.”

Musk, last month, said that AI will replace desk jobs “at an accelerated rate.”

“Ultimately, working will be optional because you’ll have robots plus AI,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “And we’ll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, not just universal basic income. Universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want, but there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.”

Musk is not alone in suggesting that some form of universal basic income be distributed with the wealth created by AI; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a proponent.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said back in June that AI’s capabilities would allow Amazon to shrink its white-collar workforce in the future. The company laid off 14,000 corporate employees in October, although Jassy attributed the firings to “culture” rather than AI. Earlier in 2025, Shopify and Duolingo both informed their teams that they would need to demonstrate that AI couldn’t perform the roles for which they were hiring before they could request additional head count.

Georgetown students who attended the event seemed acutely aware of the downsides of AI. At the end of the discussion, Sanders asked the audience whether they think AI would benefit their future or harm their prospects. The latter option saw significantly more raised hands.

Authenticity and consistency in brand marketing allow for companies to not just be created but to be sustained with longevity, said Dara Treseder, the chief marketing officer at Autodesk. Courage, she said, is essential to build trust with consumers.

“Having the courage to not only have purpose and value as a brand … but that stick-to-it-ness regardless of what comes your way—I think that is one of the things that helps you deepen that emotional connection with your customers and allows you to stand the test of time,” said Treseder, whose company Autodesk creates software for a variety of industries, from entertainment to infrastructure to design. She provided sustainability as an example of a value that Autodesk has been committed to prioritizing for years. 

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Treseder’s comments came during a conversation with two other innovators and experts on consumer behavior and marketing at a TIME100 Talks event in New York City on Nov. 18, 2025. Treseder was joined by Katy Milkman, professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania; and Nuno Leal, EY Studio+ America Marketing Practice Leader at consulting firm Ernst & Young LLP (EY); on a panel moderated by TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar.

Treseder went on to say that authenticity is just as important as commitment in order to keep trust with customers. “Authenticity is consistency,” she said. “Consistency between what you say, what you believe, and ultimately what you do. And when those three things are in harmony … that is ultimately how you earn trust.” 

Milkman, who studies behavioral economics, said that statistics support Treseder’s statements that consumers value consistency in brands, especially when it’s paired with a powerful and empathetic stories that people can resonate with.

“It’s critical both to have narratives and people who we can see in the narratives,” Milkman added. “When [consumers] have a story that they can associate with this company, they can see it has helped people and how it’s helped people, that is much more powerful as a way of keeping them happy.”

Treseder noted that authenticity has placed a lot of responsibility on brands like Autodesk in a changing world. She pointed to Edelman’s 2025 Brand Trust report, released in June, which found that trust in brands has “soared” in recent years: 80% of people reported trusting brands they use, a larger percentage than trust in traditional institutions like, media, government, and their employers.

The panelists also emphasized that artificial intelligence will change the way we interact with everything, and they said brands are going to have to step up to the plate. That desire for consistency, Leal saidsays, should not prevent brands from taking risks out of fear of making mistakes. If companies are too scared to take marketing risks, they are “avoiding taking the next step.”

Leal provided the example of when he was talking about AI to a major company’s head of brand, and the executive immediately recoiled. 

“If your first reaction is not taking any risk and not taking any step, I think what will end up happening is that 80% of your brand will just be vanilla,” Leal said. “In my opinion, that’s one of the biggest risks: not risking anything.”

The panelists agreed, however, that some companies are relying too much on AI and new technologies in a vacuum. Instead, they said, companies should use AI to help bolster their own human creativity and authenticity.

“There’s some research showing that when either customers or entrepreneurs rely on AI in a vacuum, it can actually lead them to make worse decisions than if they had a mentor or a coach or a human in the loop, but when people rely on AI and have an AI coach as well as a mentor, that’s when you really see tremendous benefits,” Milkman said. “Think about how to make this experience and this shift more social, so that we’re not just relying on these tools in isolation, but they’re helping us in a community together.”

The panel ended with the three panelists predicting how brands and marketing might change in five years. AI, they said, will not overtake the role that brand has in culture, if companies play their cards right.

“I think you actually have to elevate brands in your organization,” Leal said, “and keep it insulated enough so it’s still coming from human beings and it’s still fostering creativity.”

TIME100 Talks: Culture, Choice, and Change—Empowering Consumers was presented by PMI U.S.