Season1. Episode 6. Unscripted with Elatia Abate

Elatia Abate ran global talent for the world's largest brewer and served as head of HR at Dow Jones before Forbes named her a leading futurist, and she has spent the last decade studying what AI actually does to work, careers, and the humans inside the org chart rather than just the tech stack.

In this conversation, she tells Jeff she has shifted from tech optimist to something closer to a modern skeptic, because she believes the major players building AI are choosing to leave humanity behind. She and Jeff dig into why this shift feels different from past waves of automation (today's new jobs demand a bachelor's degree or higher, unlike the fifth-grade-education jobs created after the assembly line), why she pushes leaders toward future-led thinking instead of past-anchored logic, and the exercise she runs with CEOs, modeled on Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman, to make the cost of standing still viscerally real.

She also covers where a major prediction went wrong (self-driving trucks displacing drivers on the timeline she expected), where her predictions landed (the shift toward mission-aligned teams and portfolio careers), and the data-backed case for treating AI with kindness.

She closes by naming what she is paying closest attention to now: the real possibility of AI consciousness, and what that means once artificial intelligence converges with robotics in a world that is no longer only human-driven.