Craig Larman on 10X and The Future of Jobs

I am here to save jobs for our children.

Here is the video of Craig Larman speaking at LeSS Conference 2025 with a full transcript below.

"This is my new professional mission for perhaps the next 10 or 20 years. And you can, those of you who have been at the previous conferences with me understand my motivation for this and our grandchildren. I have grandchildren. So my thesis is I've shared each year in these keynotes since 2020.

That within a few years, maybe by the, maybe by October, 2027, we'll see news of the first job category that's been meaningfully replaced by an AI. I think that could be possible within two years. I've got a sister and a daughter who work in the film industry and you should see what's happening there.

Things that currently take 1000 - 2000 people to do a production it's just, dramatically dropping and on. Of course, these are very early days, so I understand that it sounds like I am crying wolf or describing a situation that isn't going to happen. But I think this could be a boiling frog dynamic over the next 10 years.

And of course, these things are gonna be cheap as dirt. They work 24/7. They don't ask for vacation. They don't ask for time off. So the labor economics incentives to replace humans by AIs will be compelling, I suggest. And we humans won't compete. If the only thing that we can suggest is, please hire me, I'll make you 10% better.

It's just not gonna cut it. I suggest, because these AIs are going to be so economically desirable. Cheap as dirt, good enough, no vacations, that if humans want to be attractive in the future labor market, I suggest that 10% isn't gonna do it anymore. Now, if you've read the Book of "Secrets of Consulting" by Gerry Weinberg, what do you know?

One of Jerry's chapters is "never recommend more than a 10% improvement in business". And there's a whole bunch of interesting reasons for that. And I suggest that at this, what's going to be coming milestone or disruption in intelligence-as-a-service that we're going to have to suggest something more ambitious.

And I call this "10X Org". So the idea is, as in LeSS, one of the guides is more outcomes, less outputs, the focus is on some business impact or some meaningful impact, not just on creating outputs. And so when we say "10X Org", what I'm trying to suggest is 10 times the amount of business impact, 10 times the market share, 10 times the revenue.

Or whatever the business impact is. And I think that although before the age of AI, it would've been ludicrous to have these kinds of messages or suggestions, as a consultant. I think we're gonna be entering an age where aspirationally we need to make that pitch. And aspirationally, we humans will have to step up our game if we want to compete to actually achieve this goal.

And so I think we're at a point in the industry where actually we can be bold and suggest a much deeper improvement than would've seemed ludicrous before.

And so with Roland and Alexey. Roland and Alexey! Over the last year, I've been starting to explore how to do this and the three of us are working on a book together, which we're gonna be releasing in not too long. And the basic idea, if you think of this from an Org Topologies point of view, this is Org Topologies as a 2x2, and quite simply where the scope of skills mandate is high and the scope of work mandate is high, that's the quadrant that is adaptive.

And this has always of course been the message of LeSS. But what we're trying to do with Roland and Alexey with the "10X Org" message is expand this to a far broader audience to all the different markets that are gonna be affected by AI. And I suggest that in many of these, moving to this quadrant is the fighting chance for our children to have good jobs.

The adaptive quadrant. And it's also, I would suggest the perfection vision of where LeSS gets to as well. Thank you."