There are plenty of predictions that AI will lead to massive job losses, but Groq’s CEO believes in something quite different—AI will lead to labour shortages.
In an interesting counterpoint to prevailing narratives about AI-driven unemployment, Jonathan Ross, co-founder and CEO of Groq—recently acquired by NVIDIA at an estimated valuation of $20 billion—has outlined a provocative vision of the future. Rather than mass joblessness, Ross predicts a world where AI creates so many opportunities that there simply won’t be enough workers to fill them. His argument rests on three interconnected trends that he believes will fundamentally reshape the economy and workforce.
“I believe that AI is going to cause massive labor shortages. I don’t think we’re going to have enough people to fill all the jobs that are going to be created,” Ross said. “There’s three things that are going to happen because of AI.”
The first pillar of Ross’s thesis is what he calls “massive deflationary pressure.” He envisions a future where AI-driven efficiency dramatically reduces the cost of virtually everything. “This cup of coffee is going to cost less. Your housing is going to cost less. Everything is going to cost less, which means people are going to need less money because you’re going to have robots that are going to be farming the coffee more efficiently, you’re going to have better supply chain management,” he explained. This widespread deflation, Ross argues, will fundamentally change people’s relationship with work—if goods and services cost less, people won’t need to earn as much to maintain their standard of living.
This leads directly to his second prediction: people will increasingly opt out of traditional full-time employment. “That’s going to lead you to number two, which is people are going to opt out of the economy more. They’re going to work fewer hours, they’re going to work fewer days a week, and they’re going to work fewer years. They’re going to retire earlier because they’re going to be able to support their lifestyle working less,” Ross said. In this scenario, the traditional 40-hour work week and decades-long career become relics of a more expensive era.
But the most intriguing aspect of Ross’s vision is his third point: the emergence of entirely new industries and job categories that don’t exist today. Drawing a historical parallel, he noted, “Think about a hundred years ago, 98% of the workforce in the United States was in agriculture. 2% did other things. When we were able to reduce that to 2% of the population working in agriculture, we found things for those other 98% of the population to do. The jobs that are going to exist a hundred years from now, we can’t even contemplate.”
Ross offered concrete examples to illustrate this pattern of job creation. “A hundred years ago, the idea of a software developer made no sense. A hundred years from now, it’s going to make no sense, but in a different way because everyone’s going to be vibe coding, right? And influencers—that wouldn’t have made sense a hundred years ago. But now that’s a real job. People make millions of dollars off of it,” he said. His point is clear: just as we couldn’t have predicted today’s careers a century ago, we can’t foresee what work will look like in the future.
Summarizing his framework, Ross said: “So number one, deflationary pressure. Number two, opting out of the workforce because of that deflationary pressure. And number three, jobs and companies that couldn’t exist today that are going to exist and are going to need labor. We’re not going to have enough people.”
Ross’s predictions come at a moment of intense debate about AI’s impact on employment. While concerns about automation-driven job displacement dominate headlines, there are emerging signs that support aspects of his thesis. The rapid growth of AI-native companies has already created demand for new roles—prompt engineers, AI trainers, and AI safety researchers didn’t exist a decade ago. Meanwhile, some economists have noted that previous waves of automation, from the Industrial Revolution to computerization, ultimately created more jobs than they destroyed, though often requiring workers to adapt to entirely new fields.
The acquisition of Groq by NVIDIA—a company at the forefront of AI infrastructure—adds weight to Ross’s perspective on the sector’s trajectory. Whether his optimistic vision of AI-driven abundance and labour shortages materializes remains to be seen, but his argument offers a thought-provoking alternative to dystopian narratives of mass technological unemployment. The real challenge, his framework suggests, may not be finding work for people, but finding people for work in industries we haven’t yet imagined.