Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman Warns His Employees: 'AI Is Coming For Your Jobs. It's Coming From My Job Too. This Is A Wake Up Call'
Fiverr (NYSE:FVRR) CEO Micha Kaufman isn't sugarcoating the reality of artificial intelligence. In a company-wide email that's been making waves online, Kaufman wrote plainly: “AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too. This is a wake-up call.”
Speaking Frankly About the Future of Work
In a CBS News interview on May 21, Kaufman said the email was a response to growing unease among his team. “They weren't really waiting for my email,” he said. “This email was a validation of the things that they feel. And it was all about, you know, talking openly and directly to our team, like grown-ups.”
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Kaufman's message wasn't about fear—it was about urgency. He encouraged employees to embrace AI as a tool to increase output and quality, saying it should feel like gaining “superpowers.”
“My expectations are double or triple the output per unit of time, and the same for the quality,” Kaufman told CBS News. “If something used to take us three months to build and then fail… today we can test things in three days.”
He urged his team to automate 100% of their repetitive tasks. “That might raise the question, will that make them replaceable? And my answer is absolutely not,” Kaufman said.
“Because when you have all of your time free… you free up your time to do things that human beings have special capabilities in—non-linear thinking, judgment calls, issues that have to do with taste, making decisions, thinking about strategy,” he told CBS News.
His belief: AI won't erase humanity from work. It will force people to double down on their uniquely human strengths.
Gen Z And The Disappearing Career Ladder
Meanwhile, others in the industry are sounding similar alarms, especially when it comes to entry-level jobs.
LinkedIn Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman wrote in a May 27 op-ed for The New York Times that AI is already replacing starter roles like junior software engineers, paralegals and retail associates. “Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder,” Raman wrote.
He warned that college graduates are feeling the pressure hardest, with unemployment among them rising to 30% since 2022. According to LinkedIn data that Raman cited, 40% of Gen Z workers would be willing to take a 2 to 5 percent pay cut if it meant more advancement opportunities.
Raman also highlighted long-term consequences. “Young adults who experience six months of unemployment at age 22 can expect to earn approximately $22,000 less over the next decade,” he wrote in The Times.
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The Case For Rethinking Entry-Level Work
To address the issue, Raman says companies must rethink entry-level work. He pointed to firms like KPMG and Macfarlanes, which are giving new hires higher-level responsibilities and using AI to help, not replace, them.
“They need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by AI,” Raman wrote.
The message from both Kaufman and Raman is that AI is here, and it's not going away. But instead of running from it, the challenge is learning how to work with it—and make room for the things only humans can do.
Read Next: Can you guess how many retire with a $5,000,000 nest egg? The percentage may shock you.
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