{"id":50069,"date":"2026-05-06T17:11:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/apollos-marc-rowan-says-to-expect-blue-collar-ascendancy-and-white-collar-stress-in-the-age-of-ai\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T17:11:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T17:11:15","slug":"apollos-marc-rowan-says-to-expect-blue-collar-ascendancy-and-white-collar-stress-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/apollos-marc-rowan-says-to-expect-blue-collar-ascendancy-and-white-collar-stress-in-the-age-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Apollo&#8217;s Marc Rowan says to expect &#8216;blue-collar ascendancy&#8217; and &#8216;white-collar stress&#8217; in the age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69fb6234f9e4752b6d601635?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo\"\/><figcaption>Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo<\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>AI will be good for blue-collar jobs and bad for white-collar jobs, Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said.<\/li>\n<li>Within private equity, it will offer opportunities and &quot;succession risk,&quot; per some market players.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#039;s what private markets bosses said about the impact of AI on white- and blue-collar workers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Wide pants, a Middle Eastern oil crisis, and pesky inflation. It almost feels like the 1970s, but don&#039;t expect this decade&#039;s labor crisis to hit Americans who work with their hands.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the AI-revolution labor squeeze will come for office workers, Marc Rowan, the CEO of private markets giant Apollo, said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This will be very, very far-reaching, almost every job will be enhanced or replaced,&quot; Rowan said, noting this was &quot;certainly&quot; the biggest tech cycle of his career.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We&#039;re going to see, in our opinion, a complete flip of blue-collar ascendancy and white-collar stress,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you are an Ivy League graduate who&#039;s in the liberal arts and certain things, you&#039;re 10 years out of school, you&#039;re making 60 grand,&quot; Rowan, the former chair of Ivy League business school UPenn Wharton&#039;s board, said. &quot;If you can level a concrete floor, you&#039;re making 250 grand.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>This will have &quot;unknown&quot; consequences on politics and beyond, he said, because &quot;we have no political history&quot; of this sort of change. Rowan, a prolific GOP donor who was floated as a potential Treasury Secretary in Trump&#039;s second term, is watching &quot;blue cities&quot; where many of these white-collar workers are, and he expects &quot;some amount of political upheaval&quot; in these cities here and in Europe.<\/p>\n<p>The loss of white-collar coastal workers could be to the gain of blue-collar workers. Jobs may be more plentiful outside the cities, as &quot;the middle of the country where the bulk of this physical investment is happening,&quot; said Blackstone president Jon Gray at the Milken conference on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>Blackstone, with $150 billion in data centers and massive investments in the power supporting digital infrastructure, has a front-row seat to the capital behind AI.<\/p>\n<p>Gray predicted a &quot;huge boom in blue-collar employment,&quot; both in the economy and in his portfolio.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Our company, QTS, and data centers \u2014 a year ago, it&#039;s something like 10,000 people working at job sites,&quot; Gray said. &quot;By the end of this year, it&#039;ll be 40,000. There is, between the energy, the physical infrastructure, the data centers, the reindustrialization, something very powerful happening.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>What it means for private equity<\/h2>\n<p>AI won&#039;t just be affecting investors&#039; portfolio companies or their loans to software companies. Private equity and credit are, after all, white-collar jobs.<\/p>\n<p>Early career private equity associates may be spared the brunt of the impact.<\/p>\n<p>Anthony Tutrone, global head of private markets at Neuberger Berman, said the biggest benefit of AI is getting more work done, not hiring fewer people.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;In the beginning, we thought this was going to be mostly a cost game,&quot; Tutrone said. &quot;For us, it&#039;s been more of a productivity and quality game and increasing our capacity to look at more transactions and to react quicker.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>That&#039;s not to say it can&#039;t lead to labor savings in back-office areas like legal and corporate finance, he said, with AI agents taking over the &quot;hundreds of thousands&quot; of NDAs the firm signs.<\/p>\n<p>Mohsin Pirzada, the head of funds for the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, struck a more cautious tone. As an investor in funds managed by these firms, he&#039;s concerned about the long-term talent picture.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The replacement of jobs is something that I personally worry a great deal about,&quot; Pirzada said, because firms that focus on just cutting costs and not increasing productivity are &quot;going to have succession risks.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Without having juniors running around doing screening memos, investment diligence for you, they&#039;re not going to be in a position to manage the organization 5 years from now,&quot; Pirzada said.<\/p>\n<p>David Golub, president of credit specialist Golub Capital, said that the industry&#039;s &quot;pyramidal structure&quot; will prevent any issues with developing future private markets executives.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When AI has been fully implemented, we&#039;ll still have a pyramidal structure,&quot; Golub said. &quot;Maybe it&#039;ll be a little steeper, but it&#039;s not going to be a lot steeper.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Junior workers will still be employed, but their jobs will be different and more productive, Golub said.<\/p>\n<p>It will &quot;enhance decision-making,&quot; but Tutrone said he doesn&#039;t think it&#039;ll replace humans. After all, private markets are about who you know.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#039;s going to be tougher for an avatar to build relationships with CEOs,&quot; Tutrone said.<\/p>\n<p>Moderator Dan Primack, business editor at Axios, then asked if firms could have their two agents talk, and &quot;you can get your summary on the beach.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Maybe my grandchildren will have to worry about that, but I don&#039;t think I do,&quot; Tutrone said.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Bloomberg\/Getty Images AI will be good for blue-collar jobs and bad for white-collar jobs, Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said. Within private equity, it will offer opportunities and &quot;succession risk,&quot; per some market players. Here&#039;s what private markets bosses said about the impact of AI on white- and blue-collar workers. Wide [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-50069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}