Francesco

KPMG is laying off 10% of their audit partners. You might have missed the news amidst today’s announcement that Meta is also laying off 10% of their employees. I’ll be blunt: If you work in front of a computer, your job isn’t safe. It doesn’t matter how senior you are (KPMG’s partners literally own the company). Nor does it matter how good you are at your job (Meta’s engineers are among the best of the best in the tech industry). Your job is at risk, and it’s incumbent on you—and no one but yourself—to plan for what you do in your career to proactively manage that risk. Four reasons why this is happening: 1. Competition: AI is reducing barriers to entry across every industries, from professional services (such as the audit and advisory services provided by the likes of KPMG) to software and everything in between. Reduced barriers to entry mean increased competition, which means lower pricing power, margin compression, and pressure to reduce costs—especially fixed costs such as labor, which is the number one expense for most white-collar businesses. 2. Need to Invest: As incumbents face increased competition from new entrants to their market and from substitute products (e.g., vibe-coded homebrew SaaS replacing expensive vertical SaaS products that previously enjoyed virtual monopolies within their respective target markets), they are forced to make sizable investments in technology to remain competitive. In the case of professional services companies, this means large investments in proprietary software (all of the Big Four firms are investing billions in new technology right now); for big tech companies, this means tens of billions of dollars going into data centers and physical infrastructure. Essentially, capex and opex are in the middle of a zero-sum battle in corporate budgets. As companies face the need to invest more in capex and R&D—and as capital markets become increasingly averse to providing them additional liquidity to fund it, out of concerns that the ROIC on said capex will not be accretive to earnings—opex is cannibalized to fund capex. And, again, the primary lever CFOs in white-collar companies have to instantly reduce opex is layoffs. 3. Automation: These competitive pressures are compounded by AI rapidly automating work faster than incremental revenue is able to be generated. In other words, workers are being made redundant faster than companies are able to come up with the new business that might otherwise save those jobs. Some in the tech industry (people far smarter than me, I will add) conjecture that, on a net basis, AI will create more jobs than it will destroy, due to an AI-facilitated period of hypergrowth and a corresponding boom in corporate earnings. But with every company I advise, across the worlds of startups, SMBs, and large industrial companies, I’m simply not seeing that yet, and I don’t know anyone who is. 4. It might feel like ancient history at this point, but many companies are still dealing with the excesses of the Covid-era labor market. Money was loose, talent was in short supply, and software companies, financial services firms, and professional services companies hired too many people too fast, with standards that were too low. They’ve made significantly progress in right-sizing their workforces over the past couple years (return-to-office mandates, for example, have essentially created “soft layoffs” at many large companies), but much work still remains. If you’re picturing your career and your company as you read these words, I can’t emphasize it enough: Plan ahead. Build a network of people outside your company who would want to work with you if your current job were made redundant. Think about businesses you might want to start (it’s a lot easier to keep your job if no one but your customers can terminate you). Set money aside. Be proactive, not reactive. Be a predator, not the prey. Because these trends are inexorable, they’re unstoppable, and, chances are, they’re coming for all of us. Start planning. And start planning now.

CHRIS CAMILLO JUST LAID OUT HOW TO MAKE $500,000 A YEAR AS AN "AI GUY" FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES His blueprint: 1. Walk into any HVAC, plumbing, or sprinkler business. 2. Ask where they're leaking money. 3. Build them an AI agent that answers after-hours calls, sends instant texts, and gets quotes out in real time. 4. Integrate it with their CRM for free. 5. Charge them $2K-$3K/month to be their "AI guy." Repeat across 10-20 businesses. "There are people right now doing this."

Meta just killed the biggest technical barrier in performance marketing. for years, the gap between big brands and small businesses wasn’t just budget. it was developer resources. if you wanted to run dynamic product ads or set up the conversions api, you needed a dev team to configure servers and manually map structured data. that changes today. we just rolled out two massive updates that automate the entire backend setup: 🔵 ai-powered pixel enrichment: the pixel now uses ai to automatically read your website and pull product names, prices, and availability into your events. no more manual coding or schema .org mapping. smaller businesses get performance benefits without technical work and larger businesses can refocus tech resources on more important areas 🔵 one-click capi: we launched a “meta-enabled” conversions api setup. it’s literally one click. no servers, no ongoing maintenance, no costs. this is a huge deal for signal quality. advertisers using capi for web events see an average 17.8% lower cpa than those relying on the pixel alone. historically, getting that setup was a nightmare for lean teams. now, the playing field is leveled. the machine handles the technical plumbing, so you can focus entirely on creative and strategy. if you’ve been putting off capi because it was too technical, now is the time.