As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the economy, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev believes the real impact won’t be job loss, but a redefinition of what work looks and feels like.
In a recent appearance on Fox Business, Tenev pushed back on fears that AI will wipe out employment, arguing instead that it will give rise to entirely new types of work.
“AI will lead to an explosion of not just new jobs, but new job families,” Tenev said during a segment on “FOX Business In Depth: The A.I. Arms Race.”
He compared the current moment to earlier technological revolutions, when society shifted from agricultural and factory labor to office and digital work.
At the time, people viewed the new types of work with skepticism.
“Maybe 100 years ago, our ancestors would be looking at what you and I are doing right now, which is sort of like talking to each other digitally about AI. They think, you know, that’s not real work,” he said.
“I probably not think of what we’re doing as real work, we’re going to look ahead at the job families and job opportunities in the future.”
Those future jobs, according to Tenev, could include things like investing or trading for a living, roles that some still struggle to see as legitimate.
“Maybe that’s not real work,” he said.
“But to the people of the future, it’ll definitely feel very real and stressful, and it’ll have with it all of the feelings that we get about our jobs.”
Retail Investors Left Behind?
While Tenev is optimistic about AI’s potential, he voiced concern over who will benefit from it.
Most of the leading companies in the AI space, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI, are privately held and inaccessible to everyday investors.
“Retail investors don’t have exposure to the lion’s share of the companies doing interesting things,” he said.
“The companies behind these technologies are getting to the valuations of hundreds of billions in the private markets, and that’s accruing only to the relatively small group of institutional investors and venture capitalists.”
He contrasted this with crypto, which was accessible to retail investors from the start. That early access, he argued, helped build a strong grassroots movement.
“Now you’re at the point where, you know, if there’s even the slightest hint of regulatory overreach, there’s not just venture capitalists and institutions fighting against it, but you have like a huge crypto retail army, millions of people that are vocal supporters of these technologies and companies,” he said.
Without a similar movement around AI, Tenev warned, public support for the technology could falter and innovation could suffer.
Amplifying Human Creativity
Tenev also spoke about his investment in Harmonic AI, a private research lab focused on solving advanced math problems.
The company made headlines last year by achieving gold medal-level performance at the International Math Olympiad.
After making the technology publicly available through an open interface, Tenev said the team saw a “surge of activity” from users around the world.
“We’ve seen just an explosion of activity and different types of research being done that we would have never anticipated,” he said.
“If we were doing all of this ourselves as a company, we just wouldn’t be able to do any of this stuff.”
That public participation, in his view, is proof that AI tools can “amplify human creativity and ingenuity” instead of replacing it.
A Faster Pace of Disruption
Still, Tenev acknowledged that the speed of change is unsettling.
“Even though we’ve seen disruption like this in the past, we have a feeling that it’s going to be more rapid,” he said.
“The velocity, the rate of change, and the acceleration make us very nervous.”
Despite that, he believes the most extreme outcome, a world where AI eliminates all jobs, is unlikely.
“I think the possibility that people worry about, which is that all jobs will be gone and will be done by AI, is almost the least likely outcome,” he said.
Instead, he envisions a world where tools like AI create new opportunities, especially in investing, computing, and creative problem-solving.
Those new roles may look different from traditional work, but they will come with the same challenges, pressures, and sense of purpose.
“It’ll definitely feel very real and stressful,” he said. And in Tenev’s view, that means it’s still work, even if it’s not the kind our ancestors would recognize.
IMAGE CREDIT: “Vladimir Tenev, TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 – Day 2” by TechCrunch, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Image adjusted for layout.