Josh Oliveira

Dad of 3 (& Autism Dad), Husband, First-Gen American, US Marine Vet. I like politics, obscure music, hip-hop and old movies. Online, my commentary has been called radically socialist and far-right extremism, clearly indicating that I am totally in the center.

At work, I build bots. When they misbehave, I give them a good whack (the "SNES" technique for biz continuity). As a risk manager, I like this job, because there's a lot less HR issues and it's helping me prepare for the fight.

SVP, Risk Transformation

Risk Transformation PMO (2021-Present):
-Interim BU Chief of Staff and led activities to scale from 15 to 85 FTE
-Governance for 100+ Consent Order remediation and bank transformation deliverables
-Oversaw initiatives to transition 3rd party resources to our internal PMO

A few years ago, BBC reported how more people died of drug overdoses than of Covid in San Francisco over a 1/yr period. Now that POTUS is trying to do something about it (i.e. sending dealers to the bottom of the ocean)... it's a humanitarian crisis, because it's Trump. 

Hysteria drives clicks.

Content may contain traces of human error and existential dread.

Anti-AI posters on LinkedIn: look at AI from the lens of a founder or CEO who runs a large org and their biggest expense is people. 

Cut through the noise: people don't make as many decisions as they think. Most of our jobs are to gather data (both qualitative and quantitative) and package it up in a way for other decision makers. Getting A and B and making sure it follows C and D. 

AI can do that better than humans. 

Prompting ChatGPT is old news. Agents and custom bots can be trained on rules, processes, procedures, etc. and a majority of white collar jobs are just managing that information. AI is a tool that can do that quicker and more efficiently, and in many cases more controlled (or likely to be as the model gets fine tuned and evolves—that's what is being built now).

The writing is on the wall: why are companies investing more in AI and keeping comp flat? 

Hard truth: we are just not as valuable or important as we think we are. I know that's a tough pill to swallow, and I know it's a paradigm shift, but that's exactly what is happening, hence the surge in emotional anti-AI posts we're seeing. 

The way humans bring value to their employer is changing. White collar work is shifting to be a) build the bots, b) manage the bots and c) govern the bots, because that's more efficient than paying humans to move around and repackage 1s and 0s (which is a majority of the information flow in an organization). 

The work we do to survive has always evolved, this is the next step.

If you don't believe me, start building an agent for whatever it is you do personally—music, movies, research, cooking, travel, etc. As you start getting traction, apply that to every job at the company you work for. You'll see how we humans are becoming tech support. Because there's less risk in centralizing and systemizing expertise, which is why entry level jobs are looking pretty abysmal right now (when you build an agent, you're essentially building an analyst). 

This isn't meant to be a cynical dooms day post, just being realistic about the wave that's forming. Whenever there's a big oopsie that causes catastrophic market damage, we'll see a surge in mandated AI governance jobs, and round and round we go. And of course, innovation often requires humans to break the rules and introduce creative novelty that automated agents, by their nature, are designed to follow. 

The real long-term value will likely lie in the creative interplay between hyper-efficient AI agents and highly strategic human overseers.

taplio