He Was Laid Off Because of AI, Sparking an ‘Existential Wake-Up Call.’ So He Built an AI Agent That Helped Him Land His Next Role.

At first, AI was a scapegoat. It was the reason Mark Quinn was laid off from his role as vice president of operations and responsible AI at DeepScribe, a Silicon Valley startup focused on automating medical documentation for doctors. 

When Quinn joined DeepScribe after a four-year stint at Waymo, his goal was to build and run a 3,000-person supervisory organization for the startup’s AI. His team would watch, train and help collect data to build AI, overseeing a system that listened to doctor-patient conversations and converted them into medical records. 

He signed on in October 2022. Within months, the ground shifted. ChatGPT came out in November 2022, and by March 2023, GPT-4 marked a major leap forward in computing.

That leap was devastating to the operation he was hired to scale. 

“It took us about a month to realize that it essentially made the operation I was building out almost moot, almost completely redundant,” Quinn says in a new interview with Entrepreneur. 

Quinn tried to pivot inside the company, but the writing was on the wall. He was laid off in early 2024; he says he and the company “mutually agreed” it was time to part ways.

The layoff wasn’t an abstract “AI disruption.” It was personal; it was his organization, his career, his identity as an operations leader. “From there, it was an epiphanic existential wake-up call,” he says. 

From scapegoat to career coach

The most striking chapter in Quinn’s story is how AI not only displaced him, but also later convinced him that he was the right candidate for a job he almost ignored. 

Shortly after he left DeepScribe, he built a career buddy AI agent, a custom agent he seeded with several books and resources he trusted. He fed it his detailed career profile, his LinkedIn and his resume. The result was an always-on career coach.

“I could search for jobs. I could give any job to it, [and] it would help me assess my candidacy. It helped me prepare,” he explains.

That agent changed the course of his career when he stumbled across a posting for a role as senior director of AI operations at Pearl, a marketplace connecting individual consumers with experts.

“I originally passed on it,” he admits. “Because on paper it didn’t look anything like my previous roles or what my experience would normally qualify me for.”

Revisiting the role 

Weeks later, Pearl reposted the role with a different title. This time, curiosity won. 

“I figured, well, they don’t know what it is,” Quinn says. “Maybe I don’t know what it is. And so I gave it to my career buddy GPT, and it came back, and this is no embellishment. It came back and said, ‘Hey Mark, I bet you think that you are not qualified for this role, but let me tell you why you could very well be the perfect candidate.’”

The agent then did something many humans struggle to do for themselves: It reframed his experience.

“It kind of broke down my experience and applied it in a way that I hadn’t really thought of before,” Quinn says. He followed its lead. “I thought, Fine, sure, write me a note to the CEO. So it did, and I sent it, and that kind of opened up the doors to the conversation.”

AI had once rendered his organization “almost completely redundant.” Now it was writing the cold outreach that got him in the door at the next opportunity.

Using AI in the hiring process

It didn’t stop there. Quinn says he used AI to refine his resume, rehearse interviews and tailor his story to different hiring managers. He asked it to give him feedback on his answers, point out holes and gaps in his experience and help him tell his story in the most effective way to still show up as a good candidate.

He would not fabricate his experiences. “I never tried to embellish or over-rotate with my own experience or standing,” he says. Instead, he treated the technology as a sparring partner, using it as a way to “pregame” the interactions and think through what might come up and how he could answer. 

He also put the follow-through on autopilot: “I used it for writing cover letters, tailoring every resume and sending follow-up notes, pretty much everything,” he says. 

As a result of these efforts, Quinn got the job at Pearl. His current work reflects a more mature, nuanced approach to AI. At Pearl, he leads the company’s first AI operations team and created the enterprise model for how the business adopts AI. 

Quinn says companies face a fork in the road. They can either use AI to reduce expense, or they can use AI to move faster and do more,” he says. His litmus test for employers is: Are you “using AI to cut or to grow and unlock capability and innovation that you couldn’t otherwise?”

At Pearl, he found that leadership “was in that latter camp of using AI to grow.” Internally, the mantra is “AI plus human,” not AI instead of human. “It’s what the two imperfect things can unlock together, often enabling more capability than either could achieve on its own,” he says. 

Reflecting on AI disruption

Quinn is clear that if he had stayed in his previous role, at a company that is taking it “slow and steady and very cautious with any new technology,” he would have likely faced disruption anyway. 

“I have a feeling that if I had stayed on the path I was on, I would have been caught off guard,” he says. “I may not have been kind of shaken awake the way that I was.”

Now, even if he ever goes back to a “typical” operations role, he insists he’ll never run it the old way. “I would never pursue it the same way that I would have without going through the experience I did,” he says. He would incorporate AI into his job early on. 

Coaching others through the same shock

As someone who was laid off “by AI” and then rehired with AI’s help, Quinn has become an informal coach to professionals getting the same email he once did: AI is impacting your role.

Thousands of people have gotten that email. This year alone, fintech company Block laid off 40% of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, while Meta cut 8,000 jobs and told employees that AI agents would “primarily do the work.”

Quinn’s first message to impacted workers is emotional. “First is don’t despair,” he says. “No matter how much AI shows up in the world, it’s truly still mostly populated by people, and you’re not alone.” 

He even turned to AI itself for perspective during his own low points. “I had a chat with AI about it too. And it reminded me, ‘Mark, it’s not as bad as you think.’”

His second message is pragmatic: “If you hadn’t already, lean into AI. Go learn all those things that I’ve talked about so far,” he says. “Understand the basics for your job and beyond. Know what the tools are.”

In interviews, he advises candidates to understand “how AI is now a part of the way you think and operate,” because “the kid who knows how to do the job with AI is 10 times more valuable and capable than the one who doesn’t.”

Finally, he recommends doing what he did: Use AI to build a plan out of the disruption. “There are tools available,” he says. “You can have a professional job coach or maybe a therapist to guide you in this moment for $20 a month. So get your ChatGPT Plus subscription and use it.”

The technology that once automated Quinn’s job is now the same thing he uses to future-proof his career. What started as the technology that took his job became the tool kit he used to build his next one.