Breaking news: a shrinking labor force
Jared Blank hosted alongside Andy Hoar this week, with Brian Beck away. The breaking-news segment set up the main topic with a striking jobs figure. In June 2026 the US labor force participation rate fell to 61.5%, its lowest level outside the pandemic since 1976, as roughly 720,000 people left the labor force in a single month. Unemployment ticked down to 4.2%, but for the wrong reason, since it fell mainly because people stopped looking for work rather than because they found it.
Andy noted that economists cannot fully explain the exodus. The candidates include discouraged workers giving up, retirees leaving on their own terms, a shrinking working-age population tied to immigration changes, and the cost of caregiving keeping people at home. Jared added that flexing in and out of the workforce has become easier and more socially acceptable, with consulting and fractional roles giving people ways to step back and return without a hard gap to explain. As he put it, a two-year gap on a resume no longer needs a defense.
The changing nature of work
Andy tied the labor data to a shift he documents in his book, Bot 2 Bot: The New Future of B2B Commerce. Work is moving from people-centric to a mix of people and technology, and increasingly to technology alone. His projection is that a majority of work tasks will soon be handled by humans and bots together or by bots by themselves, leaving roughly a third performed by people alone. He pointed to McKinsey research finding that a large share of all work, and an even larger share of the intellectual work done in front of a computer, is technically automatable today.
Both hosts noted how quietly this has already happened in past waves. The receptionists who once sat at the front of every office, and the administrative assistants who supported every executive, largely disappeared over 25 years without a single dramatic moment. Jared expects the same pattern with AI: chunks of work changing shape in quick succession rather than one overnight replacement. The hosts also flagged what they called freelance fever, citing Upwork research suggesting skilled freelancers are more optimistic about their prospects than full-time employees and see their skills as more in demand. Skills, Jared argued, are more transportable now than at any point in his career.
Meeta Kratz: growth through technology
The guest was Meeta Kratz, a commercial growth executive whose career spans Lonza, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Brady, Zebra Technologies, Label Master, and nearly a decade at Grainger. Her through-line, refined over 20 years, is that commercial growth is a technology problem as much as a commercial one. She described taking over a stagnating, declining business at Lonza and returning it to growth within six to eight months using pricing analytics, digital channels, and AI-enabled commercial teams and distribution. At Thermo Fisher, she said, she built a customer-behavior data science platform before AI was an enterprise tool, and grew revenue several times over against target in the first year.
The executive career reset
Kratz joined at an inflection point, having left a role and mapping her next chapter, which made her a fitting guest for the episode’s theme. She is fielding steady inbound interest for fractional, consulting, and advisory work, and is weighing traditional corporate roles, fractional arrangements, and private equity in parallel. She was candid that this is the first time in her career she has stopped to do a deliberate reset, prompted partly by life stage: her twins are 20 and off to college, which opened room to choose intentionally rather than let the next step just happen.
Jared, who has twins the same age, agreed that matching career decisions to life stage is an underrated exercise, and that doing it made him feel better about the choices he made. Kratz added a third axis, interests, and a philosophy about opportunity.
You create your own luck by being prepared for what opportunities come in front of you. Luck is created by what you are willing to lean into.
Meeta Kratz
For experienced executives, she argued, that means staying open to learning, including reverse mentoring from people earlier in their careers, and resisting the trap of assuming decades of experience make new tools unnecessary.
Doing the reset with AI
Kratz has put this into practice quickly. In about two weeks she set up an LLC, handled the banking, wrote a proposal, built a pitch deck, and drafted her first contract, much of it with AI. Rather than hiring a legal team or staff to stand up a consulting practice, she is augmenting with AI agents. The result, she said, is a way of working that runs partly on its own, letting her have her whole family home for five days while work continued in the background. She also described using several AI platforms in parallel to answer the same question, to avoid a single viewpoint.
I use multiple AI platforms to ask the same question. I do not want confirmation bias. That is another member of my executive board.
Meeta Kratz
What keeps her up at night: the enterprise people impact
Asked about the downside, Kratz was direct that her concern is people. She drew a gap between individual AI adoption, which she put in the range of 30% to 70% depending on the survey, and enterprise adoption, which she estimated is still in the low teens. That gap, she argued, means most companies are early enough to choose how they handle the human side. Her view is that the real payoff is redeploying people rather than simply removing cost.
Use AI to optimize systems and to innovate in areas a company has neglected, she said, and move people into the work that still needs human engagement: technical sales, high-end commercial and key-account management, and the scientific, relationship-driven environments where human-to-human trust matters. That redeployment, she noted, is also what determines whether the shrinking-workforce trend shown in the opening chart becomes a crisis or an adjustment.
The next generation and the skills problem
Kratz’s second worry is younger workers. She shared an example from home: helping one of her sons reach out to a professor about a research internship. Rather than have AI write the message outright, she walked him through building it first.
We are going to build this together first. What is the key message? How do you write an email? Then we put it through an AI tool to polish it. I get worried that we are going to lose the skill, something as basic as writing an email.
Meeta Kratz
Entry-level jobs still exist to train young people, she said, and the path forward is unclear if AI absorbs that early work. Jared offered the other side: younger workers can now do more than earlier generations could, from deep spreadsheet analysis to teaching themselves entire subjects. Andy shared a sharper version of the same dynamic, an intern whose employer laid off close to 10,000 people on his second day. The people let go were capable programmers in their late twenties and early thirties, but were not native to the newest tools, while the youngest workers arrive unburdened by older languages. The lesson both hosts drew is that the rate of change is high enough that skills built even a few years ago can date quickly, which raises hard questions for how education and entry-level hiring adapt.
What it means for B2B leaders
For B2B practitioners, the episode reframed AI as a workforce question as much as a technology one. The macro backdrop is a labor force that is getting smaller and harder to hire from. The individual opportunity is a career that can be built around portable skills and augmented by AI agents. And the leadership task is to use AI to redeploy people toward the human-to-human work that still creates value, while being deliberate about how the next generation learns the fundamentals. As Kratz framed it, the goal is value creation rather than cost reduction.