White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks pushed back on growing fears that AI will wipe out large swathes of the workforce, arguing that it still relies on human supervision to generate real business value.

His comments come after Microsoft researchers unveiled a list of the 40 positions most likely to be replaced by AI, some of which are roles found within the crypto industry. 

Sacks said the “AI job loss narrative is overhyped,” pointing out in a Saturday post on X that AI still needs to be prompted and verified to “drive business value.”

AI does the middle-to-middle work, while humans manage the end-to-end processes, he said.

Certain crypto jobs at risk, Microsoft study suggests

The Microsoft Research study found that knowledge-based occupations such as news analysts, reporters, journalists and technical writers are among the most impacted by AI in the future, roles that can also be found in the crypto industry.

Customer service representatives were also high on the list.

The Microsoft researchers analyzed 200,000 anonymized Microsoft Bing Copilot chats to study real-world AI use, finding it’s mostly applied to information-gathering, writing, advising and teaching. 

They assessed how effectively AI completes specific tasks to calculate an “AI applicability score” for various roles.  

The reporting and writing roles received scores between 0.38 and 0.39, while the more data-driven market research analyst and data scientist roles were on the lower end of the spectrum, between 0.35 and 0.36.

The study comes as the US Department of Labor reported just 73,000 new jobs added in July, far short of the 100,000 estimates by Dow Jones.

As for crypto, just 38 new positions were added to the CryptoJobsList.com board in July, while Remote3.co added 69.

Sacks in agreement with crypto entrepreneur

Sacks reached his conclusion after citing a post from former Coinbase chief technology officer, Balaji Srinivasan, who challenged some of the most prominent narratives about AI replacing human jobs.

Related: Crypto adoption in 2025 spurred by payments, AI: Survey

Balaji argued that AI is still constrained: “Today’s AI is not truly agentic because it’s not truly independent of you,” he said, adding: “AI doesn’t take your job, it lets you do any job.”

If it replaces anything, it’s the job of the previous AI, Balaji said:

“For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job, and GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image generation, AI code generation, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model. Hence, AI takes the job of the previous AI.”

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