John Hope Bryant, CEO of nonprofit Operation HOPE, speaks during a panel at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE on March 12, 2025.
John Hope Bryant, CEO of Operation Hope, warned on Wednesday that the risk of jobs being eliminated by artificial intelligence will disproportionately impact those “at the bottom of the pyramid.”
He urged governments to invest more resources into upskilling the working and middle classes, as well as younger generations, on the technology, which in the long run could help boost productivity and economies globally, he said.
“We are not spending nearly enough time focusing on the bottom of the pyramid,” Bryant told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Wednesday. “Convenience store [jobs are] gone, grocery store jobs are gone … This is not the future. This is right now.”
“So if you have a high school education and limited relationship capital, and you don’t have a government and a private sector that’s prioritizing [upskilling it’s people on AI] … in five years between 2025 to 2030, the world’s going to pass you by,” Bryant said.
The advancement and proliferation of AI will create massive waves of change, said Bryant, who’s also the founder of Operation Hope, a financial literacy and economic empowerment nonprofit.
“What people don’t realize is that literally everything we see is going to be touched by artificial intelligence. It’s a complete do-over of society,” he said. “It’s like the horse and buggy of 1850 in America … when the automobile was introduced … within 10 years, the horse was made irrelevant.”
Economies in transition
The United States economy, specifically, is facing big problems as the country’s national debt currently stands at more than $36.2 trillion.
“So you can say, well, in order to solve this deficit, we gotta cut, cut, cut. But you can’t cut yourself out of, in my opinion, [tens of trillions] worth of debt,” Bryant told CNBC.
“How about a novel idea? Let’s grow the pie. How about we get another 10 or 20% of people at the bottom of the pyramid who are hungry for success — we train them, incentivize companies to invest in them … and that could add 3-4% of GDP every year over the next five or 10 years,” Bryant said.
He said governments should implement tax policies that incentivize companies to create apprentice programs or internships that teach people how to use AI. He also suggested that financial literacy and entrepreneurship classes should be offered in school.
“The problem we have today is you have all this wealth where money is creating more money — and money creating more money is more valuable than labor creating more money,” Bryant said.
Class divides have widened and it has become more difficult for the working and middle classes “climb up the ladder,” he said. “Now it’s the wealthy taking up more. That’s fact [and] that’s not sustainable.”
Therefore, the long-term solution is to invest into the working and middle classes, and the younger generations, by providing opportunities for upskilling and more.
The risks of not doing so “could get bad,” Bryant said. “As a society, you have dysfunction, you have disruption… if you don’t bring people with you, they’ll fight you, or worse, and markets and economies hate noise and friction.”
“We’ve got to grow the economy and reduce waste at the same time. We want people to want to become billionaires and multi-millionaires so [as] to stop demonizing wealth,” he said, and the best way to rally people is to “give them participation in the future.”