Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?
These industry leaders have expressed concerns about the impact of AI on job displacement and the need for workers to acquire new skills. They are emphasizing the importance of reskilling and upskilling to adapt to the changing job landscape. The discussions around AI and automation have highlighted the necessity for continuous learning and development in the workforce. Companies are exploring ways to integrate AI while also ensuring that employees are equipped with the necessary tools and knowledge to thrive in this evolving environment.
Tech companies that are cutting jobs and leaning more on artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves. Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last month that he expects the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.” At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work. Other tech leaders have chimed in before. Earlier this year, Anthropic, an AI startup, flashed a big warning: AI could wipe out more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Ready or not, AI is reshaping, displacing, and creating new roles as technology’s impact on the job market ripples across multiple sectors.
The Impact of AI on Job Market
The AI frenzy has fueled a lot of anxiety from workers who fear their jobs could be automated. Roughly half of U.S. workers are worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future and few think AI will lead to more job opportunities in the long run, according to a Pew Research Center report. The heightened fear comes as major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, and Meta cut workers, push for more efficiency, and promote their AI tools. Tech companies have rolled out AI-powered features that can generate code, analyze data, develop apps, and help complete other tedious tasks.
“AI isn’t just taking jobs. It’s really rewriting the rule book on what work even looks like right now,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a company based in Folsom, Calif., that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers, and other contingent workers.
Debate on Disruption
Exactly how big of a disruption AI will have on the job market is still being debated. Executives for OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, have pushed back against the prediction that a massive white-collar job bloodbath is coming. “I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is going to be real pain here, in many cases,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, at an interview with “Hard Fork,” the tech podcast from the New York Times. In many more cases, though, I think we will find that the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now.”
As new economic policies, including those around tariffs, create more unease among businesses, companies are reining in costs while also being pickier about whom they hire. “They’re trying to find what we call the purple unicorns rather than someone that they can ramp up and train,” Lucido said.
The Role of AI in Tech Companies
Before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT — a chatbot that can generate text, images, code, and more — tech companies were already using AI to curate posts, flag offensive content, and power virtual assistants. But the popularity and apparent superpowers of ChatGPT set off a fierce competition among tech companies to release even more powerful generative AI tools. They’re racing ahead, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, facilities that house computing equipment such as servers used to process the trove of information needed to train and maintain AI systems.
Economists and consultants have been trying to figure out how AI will affect engineers, lawyers, analysts, and other professions. Some say the change won’t happen as soon as some tech executives expect. “There have been many claims about new technologies displacing jobs, and although such displacement has occurred in the past, it tends to take longer than technologists typically expect,” economists for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a February report.
The Future of Jobs with AI
AI can help develop, test, and write code, provide financial advice, and sift through legal documents. The bureau, though, still projects that employment of software developers, financial advisors, aerospace engineers, and lawyers will grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033. Companies will still need software developers to build AI tools for businesses or maintain AI systems.
Tech executives have touted AI’s ability to write code. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks AI will be able to write code like a mid-level engineer in 2025. And Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is written by AI. Other roles could grow more slowly or shrink because of AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of paralegals and legal assistants to grow slower than the average for all occupations while roles for credit analysts, claims adjusters, and insurance appraisers to decrease.
McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economics research arm of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., predicts that by 2030 “activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated.” The institute expects that demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics roles will grow in the United States and Europe but shrink for customer service and office support.
Adapting to the Changes
Although generative AI fuels the potential for automation to eliminate jobs, AI can also enhance technical, creative, legal, and business roles, the report said. There will be a lot of “noise and volatility” in hiring data, Madgavkar said, but what will separate the “winners and losers” is how people rethink their workflows and jobs themselves.
Tech companies have announced 74,716 cuts from January to May, up 35% from the same period last year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that offers job search and career transition coaching. Tech companies say they’re slashing jobs for various reasons. Autodesk, which makes software used by architects, designers, and engineers, slashed 9% of its workforce, or 1,350 positions, this year.
Companies are looking for more AI expertise. Autodesk found that mentions of AI in U.S. job listings surged in 2025 and some of the fastest-growing roles include AI engineer, AI content creator, and AI solutions architect. The company partnered with analytics firm GlobalData to examine nearly 3 million job postings over two years across industries such as architecture, engineering, and entertainment. Workers have adapted to technology before. When the job of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman was disrupted because of the rise of online search, those workers pivoted to selling other products, Colella said.