The good in the bad:

A lot of people were laid off. But we’re using it as an opportunity to show you exactly how NOT to be one of those people as these layoffs continue becoming larger and more frequent

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Last week Oracle laid off 30,000 employees with a single email sent at 6AM.

Intel cut 25,000 last April. Amazon, 16,000 in January. Microsoft, 9,000 in July. Not just random companies here. These are the organizations that used to be career makers. You put Oracle or Salesforce on your LinkedIn and you were hireable anywhere.

Now they're part of the layoff graphic being shared on X.

AI isn't coming for sales. It's already here. Tech moves first and then every other industry follows. So if you're not in tech and you feel fine right now, cool. But don't confuse "not yet" with "never."

The question is, what actually makes you immune to this stuff?

We believe the perfect storm of the following help build immunity: 1) The ability to sell 2) The ability to build an audience 3) And AI as a daily practice, not a concept.

Selling is obvious. It's the reason reps tend to survive cuts longer than most. You're either generating revenue or you're not, and that math is hard to argue with. But selling alone has a ceiling. You're still a cost on someone else's ledger. You're still one email away from filling your days with LinkedIn easy applies.

The audience piece is different. When you can get people to think through your lens at scale, you stop being a line item. You become a distribution channel. You become someone people want to work with, bet on, or buy from directly. That's a different kind of job security. Example here.

The third thing is the multiplier. Not AI as a concept. AI as a daily practice. The reps who are front-running this right now are building compounding skills. The ones ignoring it are going to find themselves behind a curve that only gets steeper. Kind of like the wealth gap between the middle class and the “rich”.

It’s difficult to find top percentile sales people as is. Now you bundle that person up with a positive social footprint + a deep understanding of AI and it’s use cases within selling? Just about unicorn status at that point.

One person can now do the work of seven with distribution + AI. Which means if you're the one person who can do that, you're not on the layoff list. But the jobs you’re automating, those people need to be worried.

The reps who survive what's coming aren't just the ones who close the most deals. They're the ones who made themselves hard to replace by building something outside the walls of their employer. An audience. A skill set. Maybe even a side business.

Oracle can't mass email those.