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a16z Podcast · 4 min · Mar 20, 2026

AI's economic impact depends on how people choose to wield it

Shyam Sankar argues AI's economic impact depends on how people choose to use it, not on an inevitable machine takeover. He sees a chance to lift worker productivity and revive manufacturing.

Shyam Sankar

Shyam Sankar is chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies.

Runs Palantir's technology as CTO, having joined as employee 13 and pioneered the forward-deployed engineering model.

  • Erik Torenberg, Host · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz

    Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.

About this segment

Shyam Sankar argues AI's economic impact depends on how people choose to use it, not on an inevitable machine takeover. He sees a chance to lift worker productivity and revive manufacturing.

From “Palantir CTO on The SaaS Apocalypse & Preventing The Next World War | a16z”, Mar 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Will AI boost economic growth?” See all 15 answers

“It is us as the wielders of it that are going to determine the future course of this technology.”
Shyam Sankarat 32:44 · a16z Podcast32:44

Takeaways

  1. People retain agency over how AI is used.
  2. AI could give workers new productive capabilities.
  3. Innovation improves when engineering and production are connected.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 24:11AI will pressure generic software and reward distinctive toolsPro pick 3:31
  2. 6:07Civilian industry once helped build America's arsenalPro pick 5:27

  3. 29:30AI's economic impact depends on how people choose to wield it3:58

  4. 5 more moments in the full episode
Up next · All-InPhysical businesses can be built like an atoms-based computer2:47

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 29:41

    and I won't forget them as we go through this. So the first bit is what always irks me about how we talk about AI is as if somehow we have no human agency. AI is going to do X. No, that's not right. Humans are going to use AI to do X. There's a choice here. Do we want to invest in AI slop and essentially AI slot to borrow an expression from John Collison, Patrick Coulson? No, I think that these things are, I don't want to invest in that at least.

  2. 30:08

    So what is our normative view of why AI is valuable? How does it result in American prosperity? How does it make our society better, not worse? And restoring the fact that we have agency and therefore an obligation to steer this in a specific way. So that's the first part of it. Then if, okay, if we have agency, what is that? You know, my view of this is we have a historic opportunity to fix the fundamental breakdown that happened in the 70s between wage growth and GDP growth, that this should be.

  3. 30:41

    If we look at just the example we have about the intel warrant officer who's suddenly able to do so much, well, I see that playing out on the ICU floor. I see that playing out on the factory floor. There is an opportunity to give the American worker superpowers with AI. It's David's slingshot in a world where the Chinese Goliath has been this giant sucking sound of American prosperity. If we do that, it's a basis for underwriting the reindustrialization of the country.

  4. 31:07

    And we're not going to do this symmetrically. That's why it's a slingshot. It's not like, hey, this is how they do it there. We're going to do this here. It's actually we're going to do this in entirely new ways. Like Hadrian is a perfect example of that, right? We are re-industrializing, using technology, making these people 50, 100 times more productive than it could be otherwise, and it's going to lead to all sorts of new possibilities, in particular, because I think the great lie of globalization is that we can do the innovation over here, and we're going to have the production go over there.

  5. 31:36

    But guess what? Innovation is a consequence of productivity. If you don't make the thing, you can't innovate on how you make the thing and what the thing is. You see that with SpaceX. There's a reason the R&D engineers are co-located on the production floor. What is the feedback loop in cycle time they expect to come out of that? And you see that in the negative, where we used to think Wuxi was just some cheap set of pipetting arms for contract pharmaceutical research, and now 50% of all clinical trials are being done in China.

  6. 32:02

    And so I think we should view this as a national emergency and a national opportunity around AI. And what concerns me a bit, these technology revolutions are usually, by the vast, vast majority, are tool revolutions, not concept revolutions. solutions. It was not Galileo who invented the telescope. He used it to discover planetary motion. It was the future of these technologies, the microscope, the power loom, the telescope, the personal computer. They are determined not by the inventor of the technology, but by the people who wield the technology. Today, when we listen to the AI dumerism, we're listening to the inventors who are incredibly smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. Just because they were smart at building the model doesn't mean they're going to be right about the implications of it. And then we are implicitly giving up our

  7. 32:55

    own human agency and how to steer it. It is us as the wielders of it that are going to determine the future course of this technology. And I see, you know, maybe the most authentic thing about that economist graph is those range of outcomes are exactly what's possible. And it's up to us to pick which one we want to be on. It's a choice we're making. It's not something that's being done to us. Yeah. No, you just said something so interesting that I think is underexplored,