Ep 21: AI Is Changing Work. Here's How to Become More Valuable. — The Shift

with Filip Gacic · The Shift, a podcast by Headquarters

AI won't replace you - but it will change what makes you valuable. Hear how to build a career around curiosity, initiative, and business skill.

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Transcript

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.

0:08 Would you believe me if I told you that I work for an American company from Serbia? Completely remotely for a pretty competitive salary in an industry that when I first entered it, I knew almost nothing about. And maybe the most important part, I'm

0:28 actively encouraged to do more of the things I'm good at. This podcast you're watching right now, it's part of my job. Talking to CEOs, founders, executives, people across the American cannabis industry is part of my job.

0:47 coming up with ideas, challenging things, trying something new, sometimes getting it wrong, and figuring out how to do it better. That's part of my job, too. And I don't live in New York. I don't live in Los Angeles. I don't even live in Belgrade. I live in

1:06 Požega, a small town in Serbia. And somehow from here, I built a career inside the American cannabis industry. Now, I'm not telling you this to sell you some ridiculous work from your laptop and make millions story. We have

1:24 enough of those on Instagram already. I'm telling you because I think there's something very interesting happening in the world of work right now. On one side, we're constantly being told that AI is coming for our jobs. Every week there's another headline, another

1:43 company automating something, another tool that can write, analyze, design, research, organize, answer customers, process data, things that people used to be paid to do. And understandably, people are nervous, especially young

2:02 people, because imagine being 20 years old right now. You're choosing what to study, what skills to learn, what career to build, while somebody is simultaneously telling you that technology that barely existed a few years ago might be doing parts of your future job 5 years from now.

2:21 So, what's the safe career? What you should learn? What job can't AI replace? And here's where I think we're asking the wrong question because I don't think the most interesting question is will AI replace people? Of course, it's going to

2:40 replace certain tasks. It's probably going to change certain jobs completely. And yes, some jobs will disappear. That's what technology has always done. But there's another side of this conversation that we don't talk about nearly enough. What happens to the value of genuinely

3:00 talented people? Because where I'm sitting, they're becoming more valuable. Think about it. If a company used to need 10 people to perform a certain amount of work and AI, automation, and better technology mean that five exceptional people can now

3:19 accomplish the same thing. Suddenly, the question isn't just how many people do we need. The much more important question becomes, who are the people we absolutely want on that team? And that changes everything because simply being present isn't enough

3:38 anymore. Doing exactly what somebody tells you to do isn't enough. Knowing how to complete the same repetitive task every day isn't enough. And I don't think having ChatGPT open in another tab suddenly makes you future proof either. What becomes valuable is the person who

3:58 asks questions. The person who learns incredibly quickly. The person who sees something that doesn't make sense and says, "Why are we doing it like this? The person who brings an idea nobody asked them for. The person who

4:16 understands the business beyond their job description. The person who makes a mistake learns from it and becomes better because of it. Someone who can communicate. Someone you know can trust. Someone who genuinely cares about what

4:36 they're building. Because you can automate a spreadsheet, you can automate an email. You can automate reports. You can automate enormous parts of administrative work. But somebody still has to look at the business and ask, "What should we do next?"

4:54 And here's the interesting part. At HQ, we love automation. We use it constantly. We use AI. We've built technology specifically because we don't want talented people spending eight hours doing something a computer could do in eight minutes.

5:12 And still one of our main focuses as a company is finding talented people. Not simply filling positions, finding talent, curious people, ambitious people. People who just don't want a salary deposited into their

5:31 account every month, but actually want to become excellent at what they're doing. Because when we find those people, we don't want to replace them with AI. We want to give them AI. We want to automate the repetitive parts of their work and see what they're capable of

5:50 doing with everything else. And that is what I want this episode to be about. Not why you should be afraid of artificial intelligence, not why everybody should suddenly quit their job and work in cannabis, but what it actually means to be valuable in this new economy. what companies like ours

6:10 are looking for and why. If you're sitting somewhere in Serbia right now, ambitious, curious, maybe feeling like you're capable of more than what you're currently doing, there is an entire international industry that you probably haven't even considered, and that's cannabis.

6:30 And no, you don't need to know how to grow cannabis. You don't even need to know much about cannabis because behind every cannabis company you've ever heard of there are accountants, salespeople, data analysts, marketing teams, developers, operations

6:50 people, customer service teams, finance professionals, managers, strategists, and thousands of other people who've never touched the plant like me. That's the side of the cannabis industry I want to show you today. And more importantly,

7:08 I want to talk about what kind of person this industry is looking for. Because if AI really is changing the work, the value of work that is, maybe the goal shouldn't be finding a job AI can never touch. Maybe the goal is becoming the kind of person a company would be

7:27 crazy to lose. So why cannabis? Because here's something I learned very quickly when I entered this industry. Cannabis is still being built. This isn't banking. This isn't an industry where every process has existed for 50 years. Every department has a 200-page manual

7:47 and your job is simply to follow it. Regulations change. Markets open. Companies grow incredibly quickly. New problems appear constantly. And that can be chaotic. But for the right person, it's also incredibly exciting because

8:05 you actually have an opportunity to influence how things are done. And I think that's something a lot of talented people are missing in traditional corporate environments. A friend recently told me something that perfectly illustrates this. He works for a large

8:23 corporation and they aren't allowed to use Canva. The explanation is security and obviously companies should take data security seriously. But from the way he described the situation, this wasn't somebody carefully evaluating

8:41 Canva and determining there was a specific security risk. It sounded much more like something we've probably all experienced in large organizations. It's easier to say no because saying yes means somebody has to take responsibility, somebody has to evaluate

8:59 the idea, somebody has to potentially change a process. And sometimes saying no is simply what management is expected to do. That environment can be incredibly frustrating for somebody who's curious because eventually you stop bringing ideas. You stop asking why. You learn the system and you stay

9:18 inside it. Cannabis often feels completely different. It's an industry where sometimes the system doesn't exist yet. So, somebody has to build it. And that's exactly where talented people become interesting. Maybe you're 25 years old and you notice a process that

9:38 makes absolutely no sense. In the right company, you don't necessarily need 10 years of seniority before you're allowed to say something. You can say, "I think I can make this better." And if you can actually prove it, suddenly you're not just doing your job anymore. You're creating value. That's also why I

9:56 think cannabis can be such an interesting industry for ambitious people in Serbia. You get exposure to American companies, international businesses, technology, finance, sales, marketing, operations, and an industry that's still figuring out what it's going to look like. And at HQ specifically, that's the

10:18 kind of environment we want to create. We don't want talented people waiting for permission to think. We want people who bring ideas, people who challenge processes respectfully, people who see something inefficient and ask, "Why are we still doing it this

10:37 way?" Because if part one was about becoming the kind of person a company doesn't want to lose, this part is actually important. You also need to find a company that actually gives you room to become that person. When I joined the industry, I knew almost nothing about

10:57 cannabis. And I think that's important to say. I wasn't somebody who had spent 10 years studying this market. I didn't come in knowing every regulation, every company, every product or how the industry was supposed to operate. What I did understand was business. And because

11:17 I didn't know how things were supposed to be done, I started asking questions. Why are we doing this manually? Why does this process take this long? Why is this information sitting over here when the person who needs it is over there? Why don't we measure this? Why don't we

11:35 automate that? And something happened that I think ultimately shaped my entire career at HQ. Instead of being told to stop asking questions, I was encouraged to ask more of them because this is a young industry. There are flaws. There are inefficient processes. There are systems

11:54 that were built quickly because companies were growing quickly. And that's not necessarily a weakness. That's an opportunity because every time you identify one of those flaws and actually figure out how to fix it, the company gets better.

12:12 Do that enough times and that's how you start becoming a leader in an industry that's still figuring itself out. And this industry is much bigger than people in Serbia probably realize. The legal cannabis industry in the United States alone currently supports

12:30 around 412,500 jobs in 2025. Legal cannabis retail sales were approximately $29 billion. And here's another number I find fascinating. New York alone added more

12:50 than 16,000 cannabis jobs in the latest reporting period. So when I say cannabis industry, don't picture one guy standing behind a dispensary counter. Picture an industry worth tens of billions of dollars with hundreds of thousands of people working across finance, technology, sales,

13:11 data compliance, operations, marketing, accounting, logistics, and management. And many of those skills aren't cannabis skills. They're business skills. That's exactly how somebody like me could enter this world knowing almost

13:29 nothing about cannabis and eventually find my place in it. So, if you're considering an industry like this, I wouldn't ask myself, do I know enough about cannabis? I'd ask, what am I exceptionally good at? And what could an industry that's

13:47 still being built do with someone like me?