The next big battleground for podcasts is video — and YouTube wants to cement its dominance.

On Tuesday, YouTube announced a slate of new AI products as it seeks to solidify itself as the leader in the category over competitors like Spotify or Apple.

Starting next year, audio-first podcasters will be able to generate video clips for YouTube from their audio transcripts. The tool uses Google’s Veo AI technology to generate short 30-second to 60-second visuals that can either become a YouTube short or a part of a long-form video upload. The feature will initially be available to a limited set of US podcasters.

The target audience? Audio podcasters with little to no video experience.

There is a class of podcast creators who are not gifted in video or who “don’t want to make the conversation awkward by having four or five cameras in a studio,” T. Jay Fowler, YouTube’s senior director of product management focused on podcasts and music, told Business Insider.

AI-generated video could make it easier for those creators to get started on YouTube, Fowler said.

“You can imagine some partners or podcasters thinking, ‘Oh, getting on YouTube is a big hurdle,'” he said. “It is a video-centric platform. And so this will also help ease people into the experience. They can dip their toe.”

YouTube emerged as the top player in podcasting by hosting a slate of talk-show style channels from creators like Rhett & Link, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. About a third of weekly podcast consumers in the US prefer YouTube, beating out all rivals, according to a January report from Edison Research.

But the company is a less natural fit for podcasts that aren’t talk shows and aren’t easily adapted to video. YouTube thinks these new AI tools can help it make inroads there.

Adding video could help audio-focused podcasters meet consumer demand. The share of US adults who said they preferred video podcasts hit 42% in August 2024, up from 32% in October 2022, per a Morning Consult report from October.

Spotify made a big push into video last year and told investors in July that consumption of video podcasts was growing 20 times faster than audio alone. Even Netflix is looking to get into the game. It’s held exploratory meetings with creators and sought to hire a video podcast executive.

But YouTube has a clear head start in the category as a native video platform with a well-established creator ad revenue sharing model. The company’s TikTok-like short-video feature, shorts, can also serve as a marketing tool for podcast creators. Forty-four percent of new podcast audiences begin listening on YouTube, according to a June report from Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.

On Tuesday, YouTube announced an additional AI-powered tool to help creators clip highlights from their video podcasts for YouTube shorts. Clipping has become an increasingly important marketing tool for podcasters and other long-form creators. The feature will roll out in the coming months, the company said.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly driving innovation and growth, FATE Foundation is set to spotlight the transformative power of AI in business.

The foundation has announced its 10th business conference to bring together industry experts, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to explore the opportunities and challenges of AI-powered business.

According to the foundation, this year’s conference promises to be a groundbreaking event, exploring the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in driving business growth, innovation, and sustainability.

The AI Powered Business conference is a timely platform for FATE Alumni to showcase their innovative ideas and solutions,” said Toyin Bakare, FATE Alumni president. ”

“We are confident that this event will provide valuable insights and opportunities for growth, and we look forward to seeing the impact it will have on our community.”

The conference will feature keynote speeches, panel discussions, and a pitch competition, providing a platform for industry experts, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to share insights, best practices, and innovative applications of AI in business.

Attendees will have the opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, potential partners, and investors, fostering collaborations and business growth.

Themed ‘ AI Powered Business’ is schedule to hold September 26, 2025, at the Balmoral Convention Center in Lagos.
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The conference will also feature a pitch competition, where entrepreneurs will have the chance to showcase their AI-powered business ideas and compete for grants of up to N1 million.

“We are excited to explore the vast potential of AI in business at this year’s conference,” said Dipo Davies, Chairman, 10th FATE Business Conference Technical Committee.

“As AI continues to revolutionize industries, we believe it’s essential for entrepreneurs and business leaders to stay ahead of the curve and harness its power to drive growth, innovation, and sustainability.”

“This conference will provide a unique opportunity for knowledge sharing, networking, and collaboration.”

The conference has been priced at N50,000 per attendee, to afford small and medium sized companies the opportunity to attend physically.

The confirmed speakers are Kofo Akinkugbe, OON, founder and group CEO, SecureID Group; Adedeji Olowe, founder, Lendsqr and Olatunbosun Alake, commissioner for Innovation, Science & Technology, Lagos State Government among others.

Adenike Adeyemi, executive director of FATE Foundation, said the conference will enable over 1000 entrepreneurs with the knowledge, insights and tools to innovate and accelerate their business growth and open new opportunities for success.

“By bringing together industry experts, thought leaders, and innovators, the conference aims to foster a dynamic ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship and economic development,” she said.

Interested participants should visit the foundation’s website to register for the event.

Anthropic’s latest Economic Index report published on Monday found 77% of businesses using the company’s Claude AI software are doing so for automation purposes like “full task delegation,” while just 12% are using the tech for collaborative purposes such as learning. Anthropic used data selected from one million application programming interface transcripts from mostly businesses and software developers for its report.

The proliferation of task automation—most heavily used for coding tasks, as well as writing and educational instruction—is likely a result of both AI bots getting better at completing tasks, as well as users getting more comfortable with the technology, according to Peter McCrory, head of economics at Anthropic. For businesses integrating AI into their workplace, automation may help drive efficiency.

“Businesses are figuring out how to build the embedded infrastructure to unlock the productivity effects,” McCrory told Fortune. “And there are likely to be some labor market implications as well.”

McCrory said the purpose of the report is not to draw conclusions about how AI will impact the labor market in the future. Still, as AI automation tools become more readily available, so does evidence of its impact on the future of labor, particularly for those just entering the job market. A first-of-its-kind study from Stanford University published last month found indications of AI having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” including a 13% relative employment decline for early-career employees in the most AI-exposed jobs since companies began widely integrating the technology into their workplaces.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is well-aware of the risks of this shift on the labor landscape. He warned in May that AI could wipe out nearly 50% of entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years.

“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it…We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”

Gen Z’s AI fears, realized

For Gen Z, the fear of AI knocking them off their career paths is already salient. According to a survey by career platform Zety of 1,000 Gen Z workers, 65% of respondents said a college degree would not protect them from a job loss related to AI.

The generation’s concern about AI-related job loss is “on the right track,” Christopher Stanton, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, told Fortune.

According to Stanton, jobs won’t be entirely automated, but tasks will, raising questions more about what is asked of employees, as well as how they are trained. For example, an AI bot may be able to generate marketing copy for an ad, but a writer or editor is still needed to input prompts and edit the outputs.

However, the automation of tasks will have an outsized impact on entry-level jobs in particular, Stanton said. Workplaces will start to prioritize giving workers apprentice-like experiences to train them, which will likely hit wages for those positions.

“You can imagine that AI is doing a lot of what entry-level workers used to do, but you still need those people to get context,” he said. “You might imagine that their wages are going to fall so that they can accumulate experience.”

There’s another shift Stanton can envision for young people: a switch to occupations requiring physical labor that AI is currently unable to perform, such as trades. According to a 2024 Harris Poll commissioned by Intuit Credit Karma, about 78% of Americans said they’ve noticed a surge of young people pursuing trade jobs like carpentry, electrical work, and welding.

“The generative AI revolution is proceeding much faster than the revolution in physical AI or robotics,” Stanton said.

Cashier or consultant?

It’s still early to predict the impact of AI on the labor market with certainty, Stanton said, but there’s a wealth of data indicating that when young people graduate into a weak labor market, they can suffer long-term professional and financial consequences.

A 2016 landmark study titled “Cashier or Consultant?” measured how entry conditions of the labor market impacted college graduates’ wages more than a decade after graduation, using data from students from the graduating classes of 1974 to 2011. The study found that entering the workforce during a recession was associated with a roughly 10% reduction in wages in the first year of employment, an effect that mostly faded after seven years after graduation. For high-earning majors like finance, these effects were less pronounced; for low-earning majors like philosophy, they were more pronounced.

This drop-off in income for those graduating into a recession could be because in order to get a job, recent graduates find work on the lower end of the occupational earnings distributions, like working as a barista or restaurant server, which pay less, but could be more readily available, Stanton said. Today’s budding young professionals are not trying to join the work force during a recession, but they are entering a weak labor market, in part due to the changing AI landscape. Therefore, there are some unfortunate parallels between young Gen Z needing to sacrifice wages due to wavering job opportunities and millennials graduating into the Great Recession.

“We at least have some past empirical evidence that does give us a signal, where some recent college graduates graduating into a recession have historically been pretty extreme for people’s careers,” Stanton said.