AI's Impact on Tech Jobs: More Hype Than Reality?

These jobs face the highest risk of AI takeover, according to Microsoft

Physical laborers, on the other hand, are secure for the time being. In 1988, the Austrian roboticist Hans Moravec pointed out that machines were able to easily handle many complex cognitive tasks (like playing chess and solving mathematical proofs), whereas they struggled to master even the most rudimentary motor skills (picking up a glass or walking across a room, for example). Nearly 40 years later, Moravec's Paradox -- as it's now known -- is truer than ever: Modern AI systems can perform a dazzling range of intellectual feats, yet we're still a long way away from roads filled with autonomous vehicles. This dichotomy is reflected in a recent report from Microsoft, which highlights the 40 job categories that are most likely to be replaced by AI. According to the report -- which has yet to be peer-reviewed -- the most at-risk jobs are those that are based on the gathering, synthesis, and communication of information, at which modern generative AI systems excel: think translators, sales and customer service reps, writers and journalists, and political scientists. Also: You've heard about AI killing jobs, but here are 15 news ones AI could create The most secure jobs, on the other hand, are supposedly those that depend more on physical labor and interpersonal skills. No AI is going to replace phlebotomists, embalmers, or massage therapists anytime soon. The Microsoft researchers used a metric called the "AI applicability score," which was calculated by assessing the different ways in which workers across job categories are currently using AI, while factoring in the usefulness of the technology in assisting with tasks that are essential to particular roles. Before you start panicking about losing your desk job to an algorithm, there are some critical caveats about Microsoft's new paper to bear in mind. For one, the research didn't analyze the use and impact of AI in general (which would've been far too broad of a goal), but focused rather on a dataset of 200,000 anonymized US user conversations with Copilot, the company's proprietary AI assistant. As the researchers admit, this provides a skewed picture of the potential for AI to disrupt the job market, since there are many other popular AI tools currently in use that aren't accounted for by the study. "Different people use different LLMs for different purposes," they wrote. At the same time, their method of breaking down each job category into a set of responsibilities doesn't necessarily fully capture the full complexity of each role, which more often than not includes a complex combination of technical and "soft" skills that will vary from person to person. (AI will likely be able to write clickbait journalism in the not-so-distant future, for example, but it probably won't be able to rush to the scene of a recent terrorist attack or earthquake and interview people at the scene.) Also: Don't be fooled into thinking AI is coming for your job - here's the truth The researchers also note that their measurements of AI applicability scores shouldn't be interpreted as a foolproof prediction for how the job market will evolve as AI advances and spreads. They compare the adoption of AI tools across industries to the rise of ATMs in the banking industry, which, counterintuitively, led to an increase in human bank tellers as banks were able to open new branches at a lower cost and started prioritizing more personal customer interactions. "It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss, and that occupations with activities AI assists with will be augmented and raise wages," the Microsoft researchers note in their report. "This would be a mistake, as our data do not include the downstream business impacts of new technology, which are very hard to predict and often counterintuitive." The report also echoes what's become something of a mantra among the biggest tech companies as they ramp up their AI efforts: that even though AI will replace or radically transform many jobs, it will also create new ones. Also: Is AI making it harder for new college grads to get hired in tech? In his 2018 book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," the writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari argued that in the age of AI, when algorithms are increasingly able to perform the cognitive tasks that were once the sole reserve of human intelligence, the most valuable skill a person can have is adaptability. A job to which you devoted yourself wholeheartedly during one decade of your life might be taken over by AI in the next, forcing you to adjust course, learn a new skillset, and embark on an entirely new career path. It's possible that AI could play a role in helping people practice that skill. About one in three Americans are already using the technology to help them navigate a shift in their career, a recent study found. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Is AI causing tech worker layoffs? That's what CEOs suggest, but the reality is complicated

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." The template for tech CEO layoff notices in 2025 includes an AI pivot That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement, is a more common factor Microsoft, which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. The role of AI in job replacement is hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers -- which is kind of the canonical AI job -- those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Economists are watching for AI's effects on entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said.

Silicon Valley's Dream Tech Job Is Disappearing

Kate Conger has covered labor dynamics in Silicon Valley since 2017. When Rachel Grey started working at Google as a software engineer in 2007, it was a good time to be a Noogler, or what the search giant called new employees. At a two-week orientation at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Ms. Grey discovered a utopia of perks. The company's cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices and gyms offered free workout classes. Workers received stock grants on top of their salaries, a 50 percent match on their retirement contributions and a Christmas bonus that came in the form of $1,000 tucked in an envelope. What also made an impression on Ms. Grey during orientation was that Google revealed how many machines were in its data centers. "I saw how transparent things were in the company," she said about the normally hush-hush information. Over the years, though, her experience changed as she became a software engineering manager. The Christmas bonus shrank. Employees were no longer provided a fire hose of corporate information. The company abandoned a pledge that its artificial intelligence would not be used for weapons. The budget for promotions dried up, pressuring Ms. Grey to lower performance ratings, which she said was "stunningly painful." In April, just shy of 18 years, the 48-year-old quit what was once her dream job. Life for workers at Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies is different. Very different. Gone are the days when Google, Apple, Meta and Netflix were the dream destinations for tech workers, offering fat salaries, lush corporate campuses and say-anything, do-anything cultures. Now the behemoth firms have aged into large bureaucracies. While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. It's the shut up and grind era, workers said. "Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary," Ms. Grey said, but "the level of fear has gone way up." "I suppose it's better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death, but I don't know if it's good for you to be there," she added. A Google spokeswoman said that many employees had been promoted and that the company had changed its performance management system to better reward high performers. The company has introduced policies meant to encourage employees to focus on their work while also staying true to Google's goals and culture, she added. As the tech companies became hulking entities with work forces larger than many towns -- and costs to match -- scrutiny increased, too. Meta, Google, Apple and others were driven to make changes as workers and the public questioned their power. The turning point came in 2022 and 2023, when Elon Musk bought Twitter (renamed X) and shed three-quarters of its employees, while Meta's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, cut thousands of jobs during what he called "a year of efficiency." Google and Amazon also conducted mass layoffs. Many of the companies blamed the pandemic for their overhiring during lockdowns as more people turned to digital services. Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. "This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics," Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said in a blog post last year. Some would say the changes have simply aligned tech workers with the rest of corporate America, where employees are accustomed to fulfilling corporate priorities. But the shift in tech was compounded by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, which executives say has already made some jobs redundant. In January, Mr. Zuckerberg said he believed A.I. would replace some midlevel engineers this year. Mr. Musk went further, predicting last year that A.I. would eventually eliminate all jobs. "The tide has definitely turned against tech workers," said Catherine Bracy, the founder and chief executive of TechEquity, a nonprofit that pushes for economic inclusion in the industry. "Companies have even more leverage to use against workers, and A.I. is supercharging that." Liz Fong-Jones, the field chief technology officer at Honeycomb, a San Francisco company that helps engineers find and debug problems in their code, said A.I.'s effect on jobs was overblown. But that could change five years from now, she cautioned. Tech workers could stop A.I. from taking hold, said Ms. Fong-Jones, a former Googler, adding, "but we're all afraid enough to go along with training our own replacements." For some tech workers, the change in the workplace was abrupt. Adam Treitler, 32, a human resources strategist who worked at Twitter's New York office before and after Mr. Musk's acquisition, said the company's moves under its new owner were startling. "From the day before Elon to the day after Elon, it pivoted overnight from 'how do we improve H.R. management' to 'what are the fewest number of steps involved and the fewest number of people needed to pay our employees,'" said Mr. Treitler, who joined Twitter in 2021 and left in January 2023. He now works for the music streaming service Pandora. X did not respond to a request for comment. Others said the shift had played out more slowly. Ava Sazanami, a designer in her 40s in Seattle, joined Meta in 2022 to make tools to help users with their privacy settings. The mother of two said she had felt empowered to help solve some of the tech concerns that worried her as a parent. Meta also allowed a flexible schedule so she could accompany her children to appointments, and L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly policies made her feel welcome because she had gay family members, she said. But over time, Meta curtailed its family benefits, Ms. Sazanami said. In January, the company killed its diversity programs and social media policies against hate speech targeting L.G.B.T.Q. people. A month later, she was laid off when Meta cut 5 percent of its work force. "We're seeing right now why tech needs unions," said Ms. Sazanami, who is looking for a new job. "The current culture has disempowered workers." A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment. In an earnings call in January, Mr. Zuckerberg said, "We operate better as a leaner company." Some workers are leaving big tech companies to join the A.I. fray. Jason Yuan, 28, started as a designer at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in 2021. It felt like a lucky break to work for a company that he revered for its design, he said. Yet after the A.I. boom arrived with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, Mr. Yuan said, he yearned to get involved. In 2023, he left Apple to start New Computer, a company that makes a personal companion chatbot. He hopes to work more speedily and make more money, as A.I. is likely to replace him in his lifetime, he said. "We're reaching the end of our economic life span," he said, adding, "There's a feeling of, I have to make whatever I do now count." Apple declined to comment. For Ms. Grey, Google's exhilarating early days seem like another lifetime. The work was not always easy, she said, but the company's culture made it easier to power through. One day, she recalled, she and her co-workers arrived to find Nerf guns on their desks. When a power outage hit, shutting down computers, they grabbed their Nerf guns and broke into a friendly fight. "Google had such a glow about it then," she said. "There was an institutionally approved playfulness to it all. I loved that." Now "the future of the whole industry seems very shaky," said Ms. Grey, who is taking time off from tech.

Is AI causing tech worker layoffs? That's what CEOs suggest, but the reality is complicated

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." The template for tech CEO layoff notices in 2025 includes an AI pivot That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement, is a more common factor Microsoft, which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. The role of AI in job replacement is hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers -- which is kind of the canonical AI job -- those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Economists are watching for AI's effects on entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said. Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or health care workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.

Laying off workers because of AI is more of a fashionable excuse than a real business imperative, study suggests

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. Microsoft, which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers -- which is kind of the canonical AI job -- those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said. Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or healthcare workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.

Is AI causing mass layoffs at tech companies? Kind of, experts say

Large tech companies have laid off staff, citing advances in AI. Experts say reality is more complicated. If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence (AI) cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. Tech job postings are down 36 per cent from 2020, according to a new report from the job listing site Indeed. But that isn't only because companies want to replace workers with artificial intelligence (AI). A new report from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36 per cent from their early 2020 levels, with AI representing only one factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in 2022, for example, also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI". That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach, for example, said in an email announcing mass layoffs earlier this year that "companies everywehre are reimagining how work gets done," citing the "increasing demand" for AI at his company as the reason behind the layoffs. The same rhetoric is being used internationally, for example by India's tech giant Tata Consultancy, which justified the 12,000 cuts to its organisation by saying that it is getting ready to deploy "AI at scale for our clients and ourselves". What's more common than AI replacing jobs, though, is the need for more dollars to implement AI throughout the company, experts said. Tech companies are trying to justify huge amounts of spending to pay for data centres, chips, and the energy needed to build AI systems. Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research, said there is a "double-edged sword," of restructuring in the AI age. Companies are trying to "find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront". Hayes said broader tech layoffs have helped improve profit margins, but what it means for the employment prospects of these workers is hard to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs". Those tech employees that are able to show that they can "leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand," he added. Hayes pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The Indeed report shows that AI specialists are faring better than software engineers, but postings for those jobs have also gone down. Bernard said that is because of the "cyclical ups and downs of the sector". The Indeed report found that AI is having the deepest impact on entry-level jobs across sectors, including marketing, administrative assistance, and human resources. That's because those jobs have tasks that overlap with generative AI tools. Postings for workers with at least five years of experience fared better, the report found. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said. On the other end of the spectrum, some types of jobs appeared more immune to AI changes. That included health workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters, and embalmers.

Tech CEOs may point to AI for layoffs, but the reality is complicated

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed.

Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?

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 recently said 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 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. Disruption debated 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. 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. 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 advisers, 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. Worker bots 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 midlevel 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% of hours currently worked across the U.S. 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. "A large part of that work involves skills, which are routine, predictable and can be easily done by machines," said Anu Madgavkar, a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute. 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 work flows 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. The San Francisco company cited geopolitical and macroeconomic factors along with its efforts to invest more heavily in AI as reasons for the cuts, according to a regulatory filing. Other companies such as Oakland fintech company Block, which slashed 8% of its workforce in March, told employees that the cuts were strategic not because they're "replacing folks with AI." Diana Colella, executive vice president, entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, said that it's scary when people don't know what their job will look like in a year. Still, she doesn't think AI will replace humans or creativity but rather act as an assistant. 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. "The skills are still key and important," she said. "They just might be used for a different product or a different service."

Is AI causing tech worker layoffs as CEOs claim? Reality is complicated

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36% from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." AI pivot That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about 9%, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of 5% job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement Microsoft, which released its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last month the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate head count, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last month it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. Hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers -- which is kind of the canonical AI job -- those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said. Microsoft, which is staking its future on AI in the workplace, has also had its own researchers look into the jobs most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work jobs such as language interpreters or translators, as well as historians, passenger attendants, sales representatives, writers and customer service representatives, according to Microsoft's working paper. On the other end, leading in work more immune to AI changes were phlebotomists, or health care workers who draw blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove hazardous materials, painters and embalmers.

Big Tech has cut over 100,000 jobs this year -- and the AI...

Since the start of the year, Big Tech has shed over 100,000 jobs. Sure, some of these layoffs are just standard corporate belt tightening, but it is now clear that AI is impacting the job market -- and entry- and mid-level workers are being hit the hardest. This underscores a defining question of our time: Will AI lead to widespread unemployment, or will it create new opportunities and industries that we can't yet imagine? So far, AI is displacing jobs faster than new ones are being created. The displacement of workers through automation is nothing new. Emerging technologies upend legacy companies and industries, and usher in new organizations with better jobs with higher pay. It's a cycle that's been dubbed "creative destruction" by economist Joseph Schumpeter. Throughout history, that has meant short-term pain for long-term gain -- at least for some. On the one hand, the automobile put farriers and stage-coach drivers out of business but created millions of good-paying jobs for automotive assembly workers and truck drivers. On the other, the internet replaced many department-store clerks, travel agents, taxi drivers and journalists with Amazon fulfillment center workers, Uber drivers, content creators and others who often work more hours for less pay with fewer benefits. And in the Rust Belt and factory towns, automation has eliminated countless workers with no obvious replacement in sight. The disruption from AI could make this look like kids' stuff. Historically, technology has automated workers at the periphery -- those with low skills that can easily be substituted. AI will automate everything, everywhere, all at once, displacing knowledge workers and managers in every industry. Ironically, tradespeople like welders, electricians, plumbers and carpenters who were told "learn to code" may be the last to get automated away. Already, engineers at Amazon are complaining that their role has been degraded as they're asked to do more with AI. There is an added concern that AI will kill many careers before they begin. In a recent interview with Axios, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI darling Anthropic, said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs -- and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years. A LinkedIn executive echoed this sentiment in a recent New York Times essay with the alarming title "The bottom rung of the career ladder is breaking," citing at-risk entry-level jobs such as paralegals and call center operators. Tech CEOs seem unfussed by the potential of a looming cataclysm -- if anything, they're doing what they can to usher it in. Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan this year that AI will replace most of Meta's mid-level engineers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that AI already writes 30% of the company's code. In the last few months, Microsoft has fired more than 15,000 people. Shareholders are rewarding executives that adopt AI and slash headcount: Microsoft's stock just hit an all time high. Not all tech workers are suffering. In fact, a few super-engineers are reaping unprecedented windfalls from the AI revolution, commanding pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stock that would make hedge-fund managers or superstar athletes blush. Not all tech workers are suffering. In fact, a few super-engineers are reaping unprecedented windfalls from the AI revolution, commanding pay packages of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stock that would make hedge-fund managers or superstar athletes blush. As he's musing about mass cuts to his workforce to Rogan, Zuckerberg is also poaching the top AI minds from competitors like OpenAI and Apple with eye-popping pay packages. Ruoming Pang was lured away from Apple with an offer worth $200 million -- triple what Apple CEO Tim Cook made last year. Is AI exposing yet another fault line between haves and have-nots? Is this a harbinger of what we can come to expect from an AI economy? So far AI has created huge wealth for founders, investors and the top 0.01% of tech talent. But what about the rest of us? This goes beyond business with implications for governments and society. President Trump initially rose to popularity by tapping into the anger and fears of an aging blue-collar work force who felt left behind by globalization and automation. He sustained his appeal by broadening his coalition to include a more diverse and younger part of the electorate, namely Gen Z men, who are among the most at-risk groups when it comes to being replaced by AI. An economy where young people can't find work could deepen Gen Z's economic pessimism into existential nihilism. New technologies are always greeted with a mixture of hope, trepidation and outright pessimism. Ultimately, technology has no agency. It is not morally good or bad. It is a tool, created and wielded by people. Human beings learned to make fire, and cook food, stay warm and clear land for agriculture -- or burn down a rival's hut.

Is AI causing tech worker layoffs? That's what CEOs suggest, but the reality is complicated

If you read the typical 2025 mass layoff notice from a tech industry CEO, you might think that artificial intelligence cost workers their jobs. The reality is more complicated, with companies trying to signal to Wall Street that they're making themselves more efficient as they prepare for broader changes wrought by AI. A new report Wednesday from career website Indeed says tech job postings in July were down 36 per cent from their early 2020 levels, with AI one but not the most obvious factor in stalling a rebound. ChatGPT's debut in late 2022 also corresponded with the end of a pandemic-era hiring binge, making it hard to isolate AI's role in the hiring doldrums that followed. "We're kind of in this period where the tech job market is weak, but other areas of the job market have also cooled at a similar pace," said Brendon Bernard, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. "Tech job postings have actually evolved pretty similarly to the rest of the economy, including relative to job postings where there really isn't that much exposure to AI." The template for tech CEO layoff notices in 2025 includes an AI pivot That nuance is not always clear from the last six months of tech layoff emails, which often include a nod to AI in addition to expressions of sympathy. When he announced mass layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider the bigger picture: "Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday." Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that a need to shift resources to "accelerate investments" in AI was one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350, or about nine per cent, of workers. The "Why We're Doing This" section of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's announcement of five per cent job cuts said the cybersecurity company needed to double down on AI investments to "accelerate execution and efficiency." "AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz wrote. It's not just U.S. companies. In India, tech giant Tata Consultancy Services recently characterized its 12,000 layoffs, or two per cent of its workforce, as part of a shift to a "Future-Ready organization" that would be realigning its workforce and "deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves." Even the Japanese parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor has cited an AI shift in its notice of 1,300 layoffs at the job search and workplace review sites. AI spending, not replacement, is a more common factor Microsoft, which is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, has announced layoffs of about 15,000 workers this year even as its profits have soared. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week the layoffs were "weighing heavily" on him but also positioned them as an opportunity to reimagine the company's mission for an AI era. Promises of a leaner approach have been welcomed on Wall Street, especially from tech giants that are trying to justify huge amounts of capital spending to pay for the data centers, chips and other components required to power AI technology. "It's this sort of double-edged sword restructuring that I think a lot of tech giants are encountering in this age of AI, where they have to find the right balance between maintaining an appropriate headcount, but also allowing artificial intelligence to come to the forefront," said Bryan Hayes, a strategist at Zacks Investment Research. Google said last week it would raise its budget for capital expenditures by an additional US$10 billion to US$85 billion. Microsoft is expected to outline similar guidance soon. The role of AI in job replacement is hard to track One thing is clear to Hayes: Microsoft's job cuts improve its profit margin outlook for the 2026 fiscal year that started in July. But what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment prospects of tech workers can be harder to gauge. "Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely," said Hayes. "But it's also going to create a lot of jobs. Employees that are able to leverage artificial intelligence and help the companies innovate, and create new products and services, are going to be the ones that are in high demand." He pointed to Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which is on a spree of offering lucrative packages to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as OpenAI. The reports published by Indeed on Wednesday show that AI specialists are faring better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs are not where they have been. "Machine-learning engineers -- which is kind of the canonical AI job -- those job postings are still noticeably above where they were pre-pandemic, though they've actually come down compared to their 2022 peak," said Bernard, the Indeed economist. "They've also been impacted by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector." Economists are watching for AI's effects on entry-level tech jobs Tech hiring has particularly plunged in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as Boston and Seattle, according to Indeed. But in looking more closely at which tech workers were least likely to get hired, Indeed found the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, with those with at least five years of experience faring better. The hiring declines were sharpest in entry-level tech industry jobs that involve marketing, administrative assistance and human resources, which all involve tasks that overlap with the strength of the latest generative AI tools that can help create documents and images. "The plunge in tech hiring started before the new AI age, but the shifting experience requirements is something that happened a bit more recently," Bernard said.

Big tech layoffs amidst top AI talent hunt: Tech job market gone crazy?

Workforce shift favours AI skills, leaving many unprepared for new demands Something doesn't make sense to me, thanks to a strange paradox unfolding in the world of tech right now. One side of the equation reads like a pink slip factory, where more than 80,000 tech jobs have been lost in the US alone this year, with another 20,000 slashed across Indian IT giants like TCS and Infosys. On the other side, is a bidding war for AI talent so unbelievably bonkers that it's making Wall Street bonuses look like peanuts in comparison. Meta's reportedly dangling $100 million offers to poach the best AI minds out there. Ditto Microsoft, Amazon, Google - everyone's recruiting like there's no tomorrow. It's a tale of two job markets. One collapsing. One exploding. Can both be true at once? Or are we witnessing a tech industry that's racing blindly into the future, in their FOMO to paint the town red with AI, leaving behind not just people... but logic? Let's start with the bloodshed, in a manner of speaking. In the first seven months of 2025, over 100,000 tech workers globally have been laid off, including more than 80,000 in the US alone. Just Microsoft by itself has let go of 15,000 employees - Intel, twice that globally. India's usually resilient IT sector wasn't spared either, with TCS's 12,000 layoffs marking its largest-ever cull, even as silent layoffs are happening below the radar. Also read: Meta layoffs: Thousands lose jobs as Mark Zuckerberg-led platform bets big on AI talent Much of the damage has come dressed in euphemisms like "realignment," "operational efficiency," "right-sizing." But make no mistake, what's happening is structural. Repetitive coding, IT support, QA, customer service, basically jobs and roles that once formed the engine room of tech operations are now being gutted. Simply because generative AI is now doing those jobs faster, cheaper, and, in some cases, better. A crude form of Darwinism is at play within the broader tech industry, where companies are shedding skin and muscle in pursuit of a leaner, AI-powered future. But this is what's adding insult to injury of sorts. Even as thousands are being let go, another, smaller group is being chased with blank cheques and private jets. AI researchers, LLM engineers, generative AI specialists - they're not just being hired, they're being hunted, and for over a year now. In March 2024, Microsoft scooped up Mustafa Suleyman and most of Inflection AI in what industry watchers called a "reverse acqui-hire." Amazon followed suit, snagging top talent from Adept. Meta, meanwhile, is hoovering up PhDs like it's pre-2008 Google all over again - other than poaching top talent from big AI startups with hundreds of millions of dollars for their signature. Salaries are surging too. AI-focused roles in the US are offering up to 43% more than their non-AI counterparts, with premiums averaging $18,000 annually. Some high-stakes recruits are being offered packages north of $100 million - yes, you read that right. This is not hiring, it's akin to warfare. Also read: Meta offered billion-dollar deals to poach AI talent from Mira Murati's startup, but failed: Report India presents a more complicated picture. On one hand, global tech firms are ramping up AI hiring here, as Capgemini alone plans to hire 45,000 in 2025, many into "AI-ready" roles. On the other, there's a growing mismatch - while demand for AI skills is skyrocketing, less than 20% of India's IT workforce is currently AI-proficient. Fresh graduates with the right AI credentials are commanding 3-4x the usual entry-level salaries, even as mid-level engineers without these skills are being laid off. NASSCOM estimates India needs 1 million AI professionals by 2026. We're nowhere close. The gap between those who can build the future and those being displaced by it is widening dangerously. All of which brings me back to the central absurdity I outlined at the top of this article. That tech's current labour market is acting like a zero-sum game where the winner takes all. AI is far from just automating jobs, as it reshapes the value of labour itself. The problem isn't that companies are investing in AI. It's that they're doing so while simultaneously offloading tens of thousands of employees without an adequate bridge in place. No meaningful upskilling. No realistic career transition programs. Just a guillotine on one end and a golden staircase on the other. Also read: Top Meta engineers are joining xAI without massive compensation, claims Elon Musk It's hard to overstate how bizarre this looks. Imagine a hospital laying off all its general practitioners to hire neurosurgeons, and then wondering why the waiting room is on fire. That's how it seems to me, reading all the hiring and firing headlines in tech over the past few weeks and months Yes, AI is a productivity miracle. There's no understating that. It can code, write, design, summarize, analyze. But AI's also still flawed, and it needs human supervision, guardrails, context, and ethics. Not just cruel, the current approach - lay off your base to fund your moonshot - seems short-sighted. More importantly, it reveals a deeper ideological shift in tech. Away from the old ethos of team growth and toward simply hiring the winner. Startups that once wore their hiring sprees as a badge of honour now view talent as modular, disposable. Meanwhile, big tech players are busy reshuffling their workforce like a poker deck, betting big on a few hands to fulfill their AI ambitions. As audacious as the current AI-fuelled hiring wave is, where companies are paying crazy money to attract a handful of brilliant AI minds, you have to ask who's building the scaffolding that holds the rest of the company up? Until then, the headlines will keep playing this split-screen drama: engineers losing their jobs one day, only to read about their peers being poached for millions the next. And we'll keep asking the same question. Why does any of this make sense? Also read: Bill Gates says AI is moving at "great speed" on the jobs market: Here's why