In brief
- Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said AI is driving a “job singularity,” accelerating the creation of new jobs and industries.
- In a TED Talk, he argued AI gives individuals “a world-class staff,” lowering barriers to entrepreneurship.
- Tenev predicted a rise in micro-corporations, solo institutions, and single-person unicorns as work reorganizes around individuals.
We’ve all heard the dystopian prognostications about AI and how it’ll wipe out the job market.
But here’s a rosier view, according to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who, during a recent TED Talk, said AI could drive a “Cambrian explosion” of new innovation and job creation.
“We’re on a curve of rapidly accelerating job creation, which I like to call the ‘job singularity,’ a Cambrian explosion of not just new jobs but new job families across every imaginable field,” Tenev said. “Where the internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff.”
Tenev said that the shift reorganizes the future of work by giving individuals capabilities once reserved for large firms.
As AI tools take on tasks across engineering, marketing, research, operations, and customer support, he argued that people can operate with far less institutional support, lowering the barriers to launching companies and new kinds of work.
“There’s going to be a flurry of new entrepreneurial activity with micro-corporations, solo institutions, and single-person unicorns—which, by the way, I don’t think we’re very far from,” he said.
Research supports elements of Tenev’s thesis, including an October 2025 study from MIT Sloan School of Management, which said firms that adopt AI tend to grow faster and add jobs. A January 2025 analysis from the World Economic Forum, meanwhile, estimated nearly 170 million new roles will emerge as AI use spreads.
Tenev said this job singularity is part of a long historical pattern in which entire classes of work—from hunting and farming to blacksmithing and factory labor—have disappeared as productivity through automation has increased.
“Job disruption is an essential quality of human evolution,” Tenev said.
What makes the current transition feel different, he said, is the speed at which AI is disrupting the job market. AI systems can now move beyond narrowly defined tasks and operate across domains in ways earlier technologies like the personal computer and smartphone could not.
AI sparks concerns
That acceleration, however, has fueled unease across the workforce, as traditional career paths become less predictable.
According to a February 2025 Pew Research Center survey, over half of U.S. workers say they are worried about AI’s impact on the workplace, and roughly one-third believe it will reduce their long-term job opportunities rather than expand them.
Still, Tenev cautioned against assuming that disruption means long-term job scarcity. He pointed to earlier technological scares that failed to materialize, including warnings in the 1990s that programming jobs would be outsourced and fears that chess would decline after IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.
“So even where it seems obvious, sometimes our predictions of the future end up being completely off,” he said.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, Tenev said human societies have consistently adapted to technological change.
“Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest and most uncertain of times,” he said. “I feel very confident that the 20-year-olds of the future, perhaps in collaboration with AI, will continue to build new things that we’re simultaneously scared of and excited by.”
