Read the account of The Long Play closely and notice who is in the room. A media mogul, a WeWork chief executive, a fintech co-founder, a footwear CEO. They were there to talk about "the future of work." The people who will actually live in that future were not on the program, at least not according to the coverage.
That absence is the story. Artificial intelligence is being treated at these gatherings as a strategic question for management: how to adapt, how to pivot, how to hedge. Barry Diller, who is 84 and says he won't retire, offered the hedge that "real-world experiences" might protect against AI. Maybe so. But look at what that concedes. The people steering these companies expect AI to eat into large parts of what they sell, and they are already thinking about where to stand when it does. They have capital, ownership and optionality. A paralegal, a copy editor or a customer-service rep has a résumé and a rent payment.
Then there is the footwear company shifting toward AI. I don't know the details of Smartbird's plan, and I won't pretend to. But the sentence tells you something about the moment. "Pivot to AI" has become the corporate equivalent of a magic word. It signals seriousness to investors and uncertainty to employees. Executives will say it is about opportunity. Workers hear it as a question: whose job is the pivot built on?
The WeWork segment is the most revealing, because it is so small. Chief Executive John Santora credited a dress code and flexible return-to-office policies with reshaping company culture after the company's earlier troubles. Fine. But remember what those troubles were. WeWork was a company whose founder was reportedly paid hundreds of millions of dollars to leave, with a package valued at up to $1.7 billion, while ordinary employees faced layoffs and a collapsed valuation. The cost of that failure was distributed down the org chart. The reward went up it.
Now "culture" is the fix, and culture means what management says it means. Flexibility is something the company grants and can revoke when the quarter turns. A dress code is a rule. Remote work is a perk. Neither is a right. That is the quiet truth of the modern workplace debate: employees are bargaining over their own time and dignity with no binding power, so every concession arrives as a gift from leadership and every reversal as a strategic update.
This is where the Left should be sharper than it often is. We argue about AI as if the central question were whether the technology is good or bad. The more important question is who decides how it is deployed and who captures the gains. If a company automates a third of its tasks, do the savings go to shareholders, to executives, to shorter hours, to retraining that actually leads somewhere? Right now, the default answer is whoever is already holding the equity. Leaders gathered in New York can discuss "long-term strategy" all they like, but long-term for them usually means a time horizon the people paid hourly cannot afford.
Nothing here requires villainizing anyone at the conference. Diller is entitled to work as long as he likes; Nubank is entitled to expand. The problem is structural and political: decisions about technology that will reshape millions of livelihoods are made in rooms with panel chairs and no seats for labor. Workers need a say in how AI is introduced, notice before it is, and a real claim on what it produces. Those claims come from unions, from law, from bargaining power. They do not come from a better dress code.
Executives will keep telling us they are thinking about the long play. The question for everyone else is whether we get a say in the game.
