Shadowing Practice: How AI Is Changing the Working World - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Will AI take your job or will it work for you?

AI can analyze medical scans, design ads, translate languages and code.

Check out this AI twin that helps its owner manage his workload.

AI can already do a lot of what humans do, but the great AI jobs apocalypse hasn't arrived yet.

So the question isn't really which jobs will AI take away from us, rather it's how is it changing the way we work?

Steam engines, assembly lines, computers.

Every tech revolution has sparked anxiety about the future of jobs.

In 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry -level jobs.

One year later, he focused on how AI can help businesses grow.

Even in sectors outside of tech, the outlook isn't quite as bleak anymore.

The consulting firm Ernest & Young regularly conducts large -scale surveys of CEOs.

In early 2025, 46 % of them expect that AI would lead to significant job cuts.

By May 2026, that figure had dropped to just 20%.

Many believe AI is creating new opportunities.

For example, how a company is using AI twins.

Meet technology consultant Richard Skellert.

And now, meet

Digital Richard, his digital twin.

My job is to amplify Richard's original intelligence.

I help Richard and his team learn faster, see connections and solve bigger problems.

Human Richard has been collecting loads of his data for the last four years.

He has granted access to his photos, bank accounts and emails to his digital twin.

With AI tools like

Cloud or ChatGPT, he feeds them into Digital Richard.

Every single meeting, Digital Richard is in the room, recorded.

So it comes in as an input.

So all these inputs, therefore, are growing each day.

It's like a wave.

It's going off and getting bigger each day.

Colleagues and clients can chat with Digital Richard, while a master copy sits securely offline.

But the digital twin cannot make decisions independently.

Digital Richard cannot go off and do anything without Human Richard.

So I set the guardrails, I set the governance.

Richard owns me.

He decides what I learn, what I'm allowed to do and which decisions need his approval.

I can challenge his thinking, but I cannot take his place.

Every employee in Richard Skellert's company is offered a digital twin.

The result, he says, has been an enormous increase in productivity.

The digital twins are fast, are never sick and work around the clock.

Richard and his colleagues can use their time for other tasks that require a human touch.

It's a trend that's accelerating very, very fast.

You might have seen

Mark Zuckerberg is using his own digital twin.

And I know of many, many, many business leaders.

But the kinks haven't been all worked out yet.

For example, who owns your digital twin?

Richard Skellert thinks that each employee owns their twin and

that companies would need to pay a fee if they continue to use it in case the employee leaves the company.

He also wouldn't want his digital twin to stand in for him as a dad.

But when he's not around, his 11 -year -old son

Ben is allowed to use

Digital Richard to help with his maths homework.

Only the one. Do I trust

Digital Richard to speak to my children?

Yes, I do.

Because it's me.

It's an extension of me.

It's not artificial intelligence.

It's my original intelligence.

So I do trust it.

I guess I don't love him in the same way

because I can physically have my dad and I can hug him

and do whatever I want to him because he's my dad.

But with digital Richard, he's more like to help me all the time.

Richard Skellert is not afraid that his digital twin could replace him.

For him, the human always remains at the center.

Oh, well done.

A digital twin can be helpful and feel like a personal upgrade

if it has reliable guardrails and if you feed it the right data based on a skill set.

With routine tasks increasingly being done by AI, young graduates are now finding it hard to land an entry -level job,

like Sai Pranavi from Dresden, Germany.

Sai Pranavi has a master's degree in computer science and several years of professional experience, yet she couldn't find a job for months.

More than 300 applications sent and hardly any offers.

Is AI to blame?

We have been seeing a lot of companies who have cut down a lot of workforce

because they are replacing them with AI.

Many young people in Germany are in the same situation.

There are fewer entry -level jobs and employers are now looking for different skills.

In software development, some routine programming tasks are increasingly being taken over by generative AI.

AI.

A newly trained software engineer or computer scientist who has specialized in traditional programming would find it more difficult to keep up.

They'll need to actively engage with what AI is capable of today.

They'll have to build those skills.

It's still unclear how exactly AI will reshape how we work.

But in the future, you will need AI for many jobs.

Universities need to adapt.

Digital processes, automation and artificial intelligence still play too small a role in many degree programs.

Actually, everything needs to change.

We have the opportunity to learn differently, with university students interacting on a more personal level with AI.

It can explain the same concept again and again, and I see great potential in that.

Pranavi studied at the Dresden University of Technology.

After months of searching, she found a job.

Her persistence and willingness to learn new skills has paid off.

You might spend hours polishing your CV, but keep in mind, AI is increasingly being used to screen applications and shortlist candidates.

So if you're job hunting, what does that mean for you?

Nowadays, if you're applying for a job, your first interview might not be with a person, but with an AI agent.

It scans your CV and compares your skills with those of hundreds of other applicants.

You see indeed an avatar, a human avatar.

And what we hear a lot from candidates as well,

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is that what they miss is an opportunity really to present themselves and to distinguish them so from others.

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In this demonstration, candidates complete multiple choice questions and answer spoken interview prompts.

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They also verify their identity through a facial scan that is matched with their ID document.

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More and more recruitment companies around the world are using AI technologies like this headhunting office in London.

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Here, recruiters say application numbers have increased sharply as both candidates and companies rely more on AI tools.

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The company recruits for jobs in finance, technology and business services at different levels.

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Candidates are using AI to try and help them tailor their CVs, write their cover letters.

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And it's understandable because employers have been asking them to give more specific answers to that for a lifetime now.

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And employers are using AI to write job descriptions, write the job ads that you see online.

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They're using it to try and book interviews.

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If you're applying for jobs, AI can be useful, but it is also changing the rules of the game.

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A clear and well -structured CV matters more than ever because many systems now read applications automatically.

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But there are limits.

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AI looks for patterns in data.

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It does not understand a person in the same way a human recruiter does.

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We try and use it to make our recruiters more productive

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so they can actually get to the important human elements of the recruitment process.

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But the change that we've noticed over the last three to four years,

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that employers are coming to us to ask to put more human back into the process.

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As AI changes the way companies recruit, employers and job seekers need to decide where automation helps and where human judgment is still essential.

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While AI handles the tedious stuff, that human touch is what really matters.

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Creative gigs might seem safe, but not quite.

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In China there's already a full -blown AI film industry, complete with its own festivals.

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Some AI characters even call themselves actors, like Tilly Norwood from a London -based AI -driven studio.

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I want to be regarded as a serious actor, pushing the boundaries of what performance can be, not just as a demonstration of AI's capabilities.

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Concerns about AI's growing role are rising across the film world and even here in Germany, film and media jobs are starting to feel the heat,

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as these examples show.

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Hi, my name is Christoph.

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I'm a commercial and voiceover actor.

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And yes, AI is causing me and the entire industry.. to lose a lot of work.

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I'm a fashion designer and stylist.

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I've lost a lot of jobs due to AI.

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Is AI killing creative jobs or is it all just scaremongering?

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Well, AI can create realistic videos, answer complex questions, write texts, compose music and even speak.

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This is an AI generated voice.

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Voice actors like Christoph Walter are among those who are increasingly losing work to AI in advertising and video games,

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though the feature film market remains stable.

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I don't get what's so great about taking a job from someone who genuinely enjoys it and finds fulfillment in it.

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Taking that job away just so that you can have someone else do the same work for 10 hours at minimum wage,

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only to end up with a result that, unfortunately,

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doesn't come close to serving the purpose as well as what you could have produced in just 15

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or 30 minutes with those people.

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This stylist from Berlin, let's call her Pia, wants to remain anonymous.

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She lost 70 % of her work when her client started using AI tools to retouch photos.

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Stylists will have to fix a lot of mistakes.

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And now it can be easily fixed by AI tools.

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AI always has to learn first in order to perform its task.

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And it needs the right data to do so.

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To generate an authentic voice, it needs a human model.

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It's basically the metadata that tells you how I speak, how I emphasize words, how I pause,

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how I breathe, how I play certain accents.

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And just like that, what sounded like a robot now sounds like a human being.

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I think people see this technology and they see the potential of the technology

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and they see the potential for labor market disruption.

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And they jump ahead to the labor market disruption is happening right now.

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Christoph Walter doesn't think he'll be able to keep his job and is already working on establishing a second career in marketing.

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It's not humans or AI, it's humans working with AI that will shape how we work in the future.

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So don't ignore it, learn to use it.

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Build your human skills of judgment, creativity and connection and stay adaptable because the jobs of tomorrow may look very different from the jobs of today.

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That's it from me.

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Bye.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “How AI Is Changing the Working World”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: digital, Richard, twin. This video has 128 sentences and 1885 words to shadow. The speech runs for 12:22. The speaker talks at a natural 152 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
twin noun	/twɪn/	Either of two people (or, less commonly, animals) who shared the same uterus at the same time; one who was born at the same birth as a sibling.
employer noun	/ɪmˈplɔɪə/	A person, firm or other entity which pays for or hires the services of another person.
increasingly adverb		Increasing in amount or intensity.
scan verb	/skæn/	To examine sequentially, carefully, or critically; to scrutinize; to behold closely.
recruit verb	/ɹɪˈkɹut/	To enroll or enlist new members or potential employees on behalf of an employer, organization, sports team, the military, etc.
routine noun	/ɹuˈtin/	A course of action to be followed regularly; a standard procedure.
input noun	/ˈɪnpʊt/	The act or process of putting in; infusion.
judgment noun	/ˈd͡ʒʌd͡ʒ.mənt/	The act of judging.
artificial adjective	/ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/	Man-made; made by humans; of artifice.
generate verb	/ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/	To bring into being; give rise to.
demonstration noun	/dɛmənˈstɹeɪʃən/	The act of demonstrating; showing or explaining something.
recruitment noun	/rɪˈkruːt.mənt /	The process or art of finding candidates for a post in an organization, or recruits for the armed forces.
colleague noun	/ˈkɒliːɡ/	A fellow member of a profession, staff, academic faculty or other organization; an associate, a workmate.
automation noun	/ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/	The act or process of converting the controlling of a machine or device to a more automatic system, such as computer or electronic controls.
disruption noun	/dɪsˈɹʌpʃən/	An interruption to the regular flow or sequence of something.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
go off verb	To explode.
check out verb	To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
cut back verb	To reduce the amount of (something).
keep up verb	To maintain; to preserve; to prevent from deteriorating or falling.
pay off verb	To bribe, especially to deter oversight.
stand in for verb	To replace; to act as a double or substitute for.
take away from verb	To subtract a quality from; make something seem not so good or interesting.
take over verb	To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

For example- who owns your digital twin?
Yes, I do, because it's me.
It's an extension of me.
Challenges you've faced, what you did or would do?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	has been collecting · have been seeing · have been asking
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	hasn't arrived · has sparked · has granted
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is offered · is allowed · being done
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	those who are · someone who genuinely

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 25 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, they're, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: breathe /bɹiːð/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, authentic /ɔˈθɛn.tɪk/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, demonstration /dɛmənˈstɹeɪʃən/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, disruption /dɪsˈɹʌpʃən/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/
Long words — get the stress right: artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, demonstration /dɛmənˈstɹeɪʃən/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, anxiety /æŋˈzaɪ.əti/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like twin, employer, increasingly.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How AI Is Changing the Working World - Learn English Speaking with Video

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