Ben Horowitz of A16z notices ‘AI anxiety’ taking over Silicon Valley founders. Workers’ fear of something else is hindering adoption

(SeaPRwire) –   Two distinct types of AI-related anxiety are currently spreading across the U.S. economy, and they stem from very different concerns.

On one hand, founders and investors are struggling with the disorientation of a time when project execution timelines have shrunk almost instantly. On the other, ordinary employees aren’t worried about being too slow—they fear the entire system is built to make them redundant.

In a recent video from Andreessen Horowitz, a16z cofounder and general partner Ben Horowitz shared the now-familiar narrative of the ongoing AI-driven industrial revolution, describing an era where the core rules of competition have been so thoroughly rewritten that pre-AI companies are operating in a game they no longer understand. “If you keep looking at it like the old world, and it’s got completely different laws of physics, you are definitely going to die,” he told the audience at a16z’s Connect/Fintech conference in Park City, Utah. The window that once gave a strong software product 10 years of runway, then five years, he said, has now compressed to “maybe five weeks.” That disorientation—the fear of not moving fast enough—is what Horowitz calls founders’ AI anxiety.

This shortened timeline is creating a widespread sense of unease among founders, especially those who built their companies before AI and now face a market that has structurally shifted beneath them. The two competitive moats software CEOs relied on for decades—being unable to throw money at a problem to catch up, and customer lock-in via switching costs—are both gone, Horowitz argued. “You can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything in software,” he said. And as for lock-in: “It’s very easy to replicate the code. It’s very easy to move the data.” The SaaS apocalypse, in his view, isn’t hype—it’s arithmetic.

This perspective carries weight, coming from Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential and respected figures. A rare mix of battle-tested operator and elite venture capitalist, Horowitz is practically mythologized in the Valley for his no-nonsense management philosophy. He’s famously intolerant of excuses and victimhood—once publicly calling out “the crybabies of Silicon Valley” for not outworking their rivals. His management insights—particularly around wartime vs. peacetime CEOs, the importance of candor, and making tough personnel decisions—are widely cited in startup circles as some of the most actionable leadership content ever produced. But what Horowitz observes among founders—let’s call it top-down AI anxiety, the fear of not moving fast enough—is the mirror image of what’s happening on the ground inside those companies.

The Fear of Becoming Obsolete

Workers aren’t afraid they’re moving too slowly. They’re afraid they’re becoming completely irrelevant. Call it FOBO—the fear of becoming obsolete. Roughly half of American workers now name AI-driven job loss as one of their primary fears, a share that’s nearly doubled in a single year, per KPMG. Even more say AI will make the workplace feel less human. Unlike traditional job insecurity, FOBO isn’t about getting fired today—it’s about waking up one morning to find your skills no longer matter.

The behavioral impact of FOBO is already visible in data. A new global survey by WalkMe of 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries found that over 54% of workers bypassed their company’s AI tools in the past 30 days and completed work manually instead; another 33% haven’t used AI at all. Combined, roughly eight in 10 enterprise workers are either avoiding or actively rejecting the technology their employers are spending record sums to deploy, even as average digital transformation budgets rose 38% year over year to $54.2 million. WalkMe CEO Dan Adika previously told that the share of employees doing meaningful work with AI is “sub-10%.”

This resistance isn’t irrational. As a new MIT FutureTech study suggests, it’s “far less like a sudden catastrophe and far more like a slow, rising flood.” For workers, that’s cold comfort. The flood is still approaching—it’s just moving at a pace that lets them watch it come. Workers seeing Oracle and Block announce layoffs with AI cited as the reason are drawing conclusions no training program can override.

A perverse irony, documented in FOBO research, is that the fear itself accelerates the outcome workers dread most. Workers who resist AI adoption fall further behind peers leveraging the tools—in some cases by a factor of 10 or 20 to one in productivity.

Horowitz, for his part, isn’t pessimistic about where this leads. Invoking the Industrial Revolution—when over 90% of Americans were farmers before virtually all those jobs were automated away—he argued the pattern is consistent: Technology eliminates jobs people recognize and creates ones they can’t yet imagine. “The history of technology is things have always gotten better,” he said. “I think it’s very very likely to be way, way, way better for everybody.”

But he also let slip a premise that complicates that argument. “If you take a lot of these ideas to their logical conclusion,” he said, “then nothing is worth anything, because there are no people at companies. And if there are no people, who’s going to buy your software?” Still, he said tech disruption has been much more “subtle” than that throughout history, and it will take time to play out, just like previous disruptions.

Founders are anxious about pace. Workers are anxious about purpose. The gap between these two anxieties is where real disruption lives—and right now, almost no one is bridging it. Fewer than 19% of U.S. establishments have adopted AI, according to Goldman Sachs economists. The revolution Horowitz is racing toward has barely begun. The workers dreading it have already started to check out.

A16z did not respond to a request for comment.

For this story,  journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.