AI Jobs Paradox: Same Roles See Both Cuts and Hiring Gains as Automation Reshapes Work

AI job paradox: Occupations seeing greatest losses also see greatest gains - here's why

IT operations, software development, and cybersecurity are seeing both cuts and gains. A new industry survey shows a range of cuts across several IT job categories -- but also a boost in hiring for the same types of positions. The survey of 2,050 executives across the globe, released by Snowflake, reveals job losses due to AI, while also showing that the same occupations are benefiting from the AI trend. For example, 40% of executives surveyed report cuts to IT operations due to automation, but 56% report additional hiring for these positions. Another 26% are seeing cuts in software development jobs, but 37% also report increased hiring. For data analysts, the split is 37% and 37%. Also: Job hunting? 5 ways you can stand out in 2026 - and beat AI screening tools For jobs outside of IT, the picture is more straightforward -- and for most, less dramatic, with the exception of customer service and support staff. The customer service workforce declined by 37% among the organizations surveyed; while only 15% were increasing hiring, (You could blame AI, but outsourcing may be another culprit behind the cuts.) For manufacturing and supply-chain operations, 6% were cutting, while 13% were hiring. For marketing staff, 16% were cutting versus 12% hiring. The comparisons among these rising and declining job roles are not exactly apples-to-apples. "What we're seeing is a reorganization of work, not a simple expansion or contraction of headcount," Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, told ZDNET. "AI is taking over repetitive, manual tasks inside these roles. At the same time, it's creating entirely new responsibilities around AI integration, governance, data engineering, security, and performance oversight. In that sense, it's not as black-and-white as companies just cutting or adding jobs. They are reshaping the jobs themselves to support new AI workflows." Asked whether generative AI had driven job creation, job loss, or both at their organizations, 42% replied only that jobs have been created by gen AI, while 11% indicated that jobs have been lost. Another 35% report that jobs have both been created and lost due to AI. The remaining 13% said that AI had not affected their employment one way or the other. Overall, 77% reported some job creation, with or without accompanying job loss, the research finds. "That finding indicates that this is less about elimination of roles, and more about evolution," Gultekin said. Also: Need a new job? These AI roles are the fastest growing in the US, says LinkedIn "As soon as AI moves beyond experimentation, the skill requirements shift," he explained. "Running a pilot is one thing. Operating AI at scale inside an enterprise is something else entirely. It requires strong data foundations, clear governance models, infrastructure expertise, and people who understand how to monitor, evaluate, and optimize model performance over time." The survey shows that 35% of organizations cite skill gaps as a major barrier to AI success. "That's a clear signal that the constraint is no longer just AI technology, but the expertise needed to ensure its success in the enterprise," Gultekin said. "As companies move toward more advanced agentic use cases, the need for oversight grows. Someone has to ensure data quality, manage risk, and make sure these systems are acting responsibly. In that sense, AI does not remove the need for people, but it does change expectations around what those people need to know." The data suggests that the current story around AI usurping technology jobs "is more complex than many think," he continued. "Historically, major technology shifts change the composition of work more than they reduce total employment. We are seeing a similar pattern with generative and agentic AI. Some task-based roles are being automated. At the same time, demand is growing in higher-skill areas such as AI operations, cybersecurity, data engineering, and governance." Also: The biggest AI threats come from within - 12 ways to defend your organization In addition, greater experience with AI translates into job growth. "Organizations that are further along in AI adoption are more likely to report a net positive employment impact, Gultekin notd. "That is an important data point. It suggests that instead of an outright collapse in jobs, what we're actually seeing is talent reallocation toward more strategic, technical, and AI-enabled roles." Among other topics, the Snowflake survey explored the leading business and technical concerns associated with agentic AI development and deployment. Leading concerns include interoperability issues (42%), legacy system incompatibility (39%), providing real-time data processing for agent decision making (42%), job displacement (29%), maintaining human oversight/preventing rogue actions by agents (29%), and concerns over data storage and use (29%).

AI creates jobs, data from bank survey shows -- companies with wide AI deployments and investments are more likely to be hiring than those that don't

European data suggests the firms making the most use of AI are actively hiring more people, too. It was just last week when Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, laid off 4,000 workers from his Block financial services provider, shedding around 40% of the global workforce in one stroke. The given reason? AI. "We're already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better," Dorsey said at the time. "And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week." "To those staying...i made this decision, and i'll own it," he said. The buck may stop with Dorsey, but it also comes coated in "AI washing," as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly called it. Block had an enormous exposure to Bitcoin, which has lost around half its value over the past six months; Block's share price has fallen by 35% since October. That stock price reversed sharply after the layoff announcement, jumping over 20% in the days that followed. Other major American tech companies have also laid off thousands of employees over the past year, with AI efficiency and productivity improvements often cited as the main reason. Amazon has shed tens of thousands of workers, and Microsoft thousands of its own. Salesforce also cut 4,000 customer support staff in 2025, after the CEO suggested AI was doing close to half their work. But is that accurate? Big excuses with little evidence The fears over AI job market decimation may be overblown, according to economists working at the European Central Bank. Despite a claimed 1,110 increase in AI-driven layoffs in 2025, the technology isn't thinning workforces -- and may even be expanding them, according to an ECB blog entry. It suggests firms that make the most use of AI in Europe are also the largest job creators, hiring more people as productivity increases. Companies that deployed AI at a large scale were 4% more likely to be hiring than those that did not, according to the post. Companies that also invest in the AI industry are 2% more likely to be hiring new staff, indicating that the AI-driven layoff narrative may be a scapegoat for other factors, something that While the figures are not enormous, they are notable, as they suggest that companies that deploy or invest in AI are finding ways to improve profitability and bring on new workers. There may not be an AI-powered wave of productivity boosts as many had hoped, the results certainly betray some of the claims made by leadership in big tech firms. The European Central Bank economists claim that if AI-related productivity boons were helping companies, they'd be building headcounts, not contracting them. A positive, if limited impact The largest takeaway from the ECB economists' research is that AI just hasn't made much of an impact: "Overall, in terms of job creation and destruction, we find no significant difference between businesses that report using AI and those that don't," they said. When digging into the data, companies with the greatest AI use and investment were slightly more likely to take on new workers, compared to those that didn't use AI. This isn't an enormous trend, but it's the absolute opposite of the story being told by many of the companies instigating recent tech layoffs. "The overall growth in employment is driven by firms that use AI to promote research and development (R&D) and innovation -- key determinants of business growth," the ECB economists argue. Although they admit they can't categorize the kind of employees that companies invested in and using AI are hiring, they are certainly hiring for AI-related R&D, and therefore are likely to be taking them on for skilled positions. This backs up a recent report that many AI layoff claims are bogus, with poor business practices and over-hiring post-pandemic being the key drivers of layoffs. Recent surveys of tech leaders also found that over 80% of companies using AI heavily have found little to no productivity gains. It's more complicated than that So why isn't AI driving the productivity explosion disruption that AI companies promise? Why aren't small teams of single individuals offering leaner, more efficient alternatives to the gargantuan software giants who are idle and sluggish in comparison? Because it's just not that simple. Sure, there are a few instances of individuals using AI to write scripts for videos, and then AI to make those videos, and AI to voice those videos: AI slop factories are running rampant. Hackers are using AI to accelerate their research and find new attack vectors to make them more effective, and the world of software development is shifting around tools like Claude Code. But for those employed at large companies looking to use AI, the technology just isn't the magic bullet it's being sold as. Vibe-coded apps and services often contain bugs and compliance issues, AI-written articles make up quotes, and AI military targeting software makes egregious errors that cost real lives, reports Nature. So, while some claim that AI tools are driving layoffs, that's just not what the data is telling us. Instead, businesses are using AI as a scapegoat to excuse poor business decisions, a reaction to global trade and economic disruption, and a desperate cover story for AI investments that have yet to pay off for anyone but Nvidia. The ECB report's conclusion is clear: "As things stand, based on firms' overall hiring plans, investment in and the intensive use of AI are not yet replacing jobs." The "Yet" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but the ECB's economists aren't the first to draw this conclusion, and there's a growing body of evidence that if the AI productivity boon was coming down the pipe, it would have started to show up by now.

Anthropic bods say AI hasn't had much impact on jobs

Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted. Take CEO Dario Amodei as one such expert. In January 2026, Amodei revisited and expanded upon his 2025 prediction that "AI could displace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next 1-5 years." "In the end AI will be able to do everything, and we need to grapple with that," he said in his epic post. Some day, robots may fold clothes and ferry idle citizens about to spend their government-allocated basic income at depopulated pop-up stores. But not today. At the moment, it appears AI has had almost no impact on those whose jobs are considered to be "exposed" to automation. "We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations," write Massenkoff and McCrory in their report [PDF] titled "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence." There are recent examples of layoffs that have been attributed at least in part to the impact of AI, such as Jack Dorsey's decision to axe around 4,000 employees from Block, or about 40 percent of staff. Given Dorsey's lack of success generating revenue at Twitter when he ran the company in its early years and Block's November 2025 earnings miss, there may be other factors in play. It does appear that software economics will have to be revisited now that sprawling software projects can be reformulated and relicensed with a bit of prompting. But overall, Anthropic's econ bods aren't ready to sound the AI alarm bell. As they note in the blog post heralding their work, "the track record of past approaches [to AI labor impact forecasting] gives reason for humility." Massenkoff and McCrory propose a new measurement that they argue can help clarify things: observed exposure. This is meant to measure how AI is actually being used as opposed to how it might theoretically be used. They concede, "AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability." When economists looked at the actual economic impact of AI on workers in Denmark about a year ago, they found no effect on jobs or wages. Anthropic's practitioners of the dismal science see the needle moving a bit, if you look really closely. But armed with this new yardstick of actual rather than theoretical AI usage, the result is ... pretty much the same. Anthropic's researchers expect that occupations deemed to have higher observed exposure to AI will grow more slowly through 2034 than other jobs based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And if that comes to pass, the most exposed roles are expected to be those filled by older, female, more educated, and higher paid workers. But we're not there yet. The average change in the unemployment gap between highly exposed workers and those more insulated from AI since the release of ChatGPT, the researchers observe, "is small and insignificant, suggesting that the unemployment rate of the more exposed group has increased slightly but the effect is indistinguishable from zero." The exception is younger workers, for whom hiring has slowed among exposed occupations. But even this draws a "meh" from Anthropic's researchers, who note that the 14 percent average estimated decline in the job finding rate between the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022 and now "is just barely statistically significant." ®

AI may be creating instead of destroying jobs for now, ECB blog argues

FRANKFURT, March 4 (Reuters) - The increasing use of artificial intelligence by firms may be creating some jobs in the euro zone rather than destroying them as many fear, a European Central Bank blog post argued on Wednesday. Economists have been debating whether AI could put white collar staff out of work, and a recent study by Germany's Ifo Institute found that more than a quarter of German firms expect ⁠AI to lead to job cuts in the next five years. But the ECB's own Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises found that companies making significant use of AI are more likely to take on additional staff in the near term. "In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire," the blog post, which is not necessarily the view ⁠of the ECB, said. Firms planning to invest in AI are also more likely to have positive expectations for future employment growth, the blog argued. "This is true regardless of the level of planned AI investment ⁠and suggests that a pause in hiring due to investment in AI technology is also unlikely over the next year," the blog, written ⁠by two ECB staff economists, said. However, the outlook may change on the longer horizon, the authors said. Most of the ⁠gloomier surveys cover longer horizons than the ECB's own question and the outlook could change once AI starts to significantly transform production processes. Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Andrew Heavens Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Don't blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say

The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment. Job analysts Challenger, Gray & Christmas said artificial intelligence was explicitly cited as the reason behind 4,680 job cuts in February, approximately 10 percent of total announced cuts for the month. So far in 2026, AI has been cited as the cause in 12,304 job cut announcements, or 8 percent of job cut plans, they wrote in a blog published the day before the employment numbers were released. The analysts said in 2025, companies cited AI as the cause of 54,836 announced layoff plans, 5 percent of total cuts during the year. Since 2023, AI has been cited in 91,753 job cut announcements, approximately 3 percent of all layoff plans announced in that period. "Tech is responding to a number of pressures right now. AI is the big story, but there are also global regulatory concerns, a slowdown in digital advertising driven by tariffs and economic uncertainty, and higher costs to both employ workers and access funding, forcing companies to make difficult decisions," wrote Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Last week, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced his company Block would lay off 4,000 workers, or 40 percent of its staff, citing AI as the culprit. Gina Bolvin of Boston-based Bolvin Wealth Management told The Register that while she felt Friday's jobs report was fraught due to a healthcare worker strike in California, and possible lingering impacts from the government shutdown, AI does appear to be dampening hiring and causing a slowdown in the job market. "I think AI disruption is still going to be a theme for this year, but I do think that the software selloff is overblown," she said. "Robots have been trying to take over the world for 20 or 30 years now, right?" Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick called the jobs report "ugly," but he felt AI had minimal impact on the overall numbers. "There are people questioning whether artificial intelligence is a part of that. I think that's a minimal impact," he said during a television appearance on Friday. "We saw information workers decline by 10,000 and we don't have reason to argue at this point that the negative impacts of AI with respect to employment outweigh the potential positive impacts where you have so much business capital expenditures going into that area of the economy, and that includes the datacenter buildout as well." Digging into the US Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers shows that between January and February, jobs in "computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" were down 300, but year over year that category has lost 4,400 jobs. US-based computer and electronic product manufacturing has also suffered losses, dropping 700 jobs from January to February and 16,900 jobs year over year. US-based semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing saw 1,000 jobs cut between January and February, but 17,200 lost year over year. As an overall industry, "professional and business services" dropped 5,000 jobs between January and February, and lost 88,000 year over year. Of those 88,000 losses, computer systems design and related services accounted for 34,600 fewer jobs between February 2025 and February 2026. Administrative and support services lost 18,800 jobs from January to February, but were off 122,100 jobs year over year, from 8,556,800 in February 2025 to 8,434,700 last month. While several categories of health care workers were down roughly 30,000 from January to February, many of those job categories were still higher than they were a year ago, and economists cited ongoing labor actions in California as a driver. ®

Opinion | An unlikely AI optimist

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde in New York on Feb. 19. (Adam Gray/Reuters) Europe fancies itself a regulatory superpower and makes a sport of hamstringing technological innovation, so a report released Wednesday by the European Central Bank is especially striking. Two labor economists conclude that businesses embracing artificial intelligence are more likely to hire new staff than those who aren't. Specifically, based on a study of 5,000 firms in the eurozone, companies that make significant use of AI are about 4 percent more likely to take on additional staff. "In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire," the authors conclude. This further undercuts the narrative, fashionable among doomers, that AI will take everyone's job. The nature of work will evolve but mostly for the better, as technological progress allows for less scut work. The ECB report differentiates between companies that use AI and companies that invest in AI, but in both cases the early signs point to a bigger hiring spree when AI is being utilized. While there's no guaranteed predictor for what will happen to the labor market in the future, especially with technology advancing so rapidly, the report found "no marked difference" in hiring plans. Instead, the study found that people investing in AI "have positive expectations for future employment growth." There aren't phone or elevator operators anymore, but more people have jobs than ever before, and fewer people are doing manual labor. It used to be popular to warn that ATMs would mean the end of bank tellers. Rarely do these kinds of doomsday predictions come true. Yet most Americans still express uncharacteristic pessimism about AI. Last month, 63 percent told YouGov they "think AI will lead to a decrease in the number of jobs available," while just 7 percent predicted AI will increase jobs. This is notably more skeptical than respondents in China, where around 40 percent worry about AI replacing jobs. Because the United States has the world's biggest economy, perhaps people feel like they have the most to lose when the world changes. But America's success in the past has always come from embracing and shaping the future, rather than recoiling from it. The ECB report is a refreshing reminder that there are life-changing opportunities, not just risks, from the AI revolution.

AI just gave you six extra hours. Your boss already took them. | Fortune

Tasks that once took six hours now take less than one. A two-week process can sometimes be finished in an afternoon. Instead, executives say companies are using those productivity gains to demand more output from the same employees -- turning what used to be an eight-hour workload into something far larger. You used to spend six hours on that. Now it takes 40 minutes. But nobody is sending you home early. The anxiety gripping corporate America about artificial intelligence (AI) isn't what you think. It's not about the machines taking over. It's about what happens to employees after AI turns their eight-hour workday into two -- and the boss still expects them at their desk until closing time. That tension is hardwired into the way companies are quietly rolling out AI tools. Now enter Google's Yasmeen Ahmad, the senior customer-facing executive for data cloud strategy as managing director of Google Cloud. She is the person that Fortune 500 companies call when they want to figure out how to put AI to work on their data infrastructure. In other words, she hears how the AI revolution is actually landing behind the scenes, rather than just in a press release. In a conversation with Fortune, Ahmad said a striking level of efficiency is already happening at scale -- but executives are keeping it quiet. Take the energy company AES, which transformed a 14-day auditing and data entry process into a task that now takes just one hour, she said. Or take Dun & Bradstreet, the data and analytics giant, which shrank number-crunching from hours to minutes. Many corporate leaders are hesitant to trumpet these wins. "Organizations are a little bit, nervous, is maybe the word," Ahmad told Fortune. In private conversations with Google, she said, executives admit they are thinking hard about the implications of what all these efficiencies are suggesting. The nervousness reflects a paradox about a giant leap forward in time savings that turns out to be very real. The question of what replaces that time is not. Economists and philosophers have been here before. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in the 1930s that by 2030, a 15-hour work week would be possible -- and then asked, with obvious unease, what people would do with all that free time. Baroness Dambisa Moyo, an economist who is a member of the Starbucks board and in the UK's House of Lords, raised that same concern in a recent conversation with Fortune. "He actually said, 'will they be contemplating God?'" she noted, adding that she shares Keynes's worry about a rootlessness enabled by AI advances. "There are countless countries around the world right now where they have a lot of young men who are doing nothing," she said, expressing her concern. "They're not contemplating God in the manner in which we would want them to." "I am perhaps more worried than Vinod Khosla about what a public policy might do and what society looks like," Moyo said, referring to the legendary venture capitalist who recently shared his predictions with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell. The Financial Times' Tim Harford, the so-called "Undercover Economist," laid out the same tension from a worker's perspective in a recent column, citing a piece of UC Berkeley ethnographic research which found AI-enabled tech workers reporting "momentum and a sense of expanded capability" -- but also feeling "busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect." This research aligned with a study published in the Harvard Business Review that found early adopters of AI were finding work more intense, which some observers note is almost vampiric in its effect. The HBR, in fact, is finding more complementary research over time, such as the Boston Consulting Group study which found that workers who constantly supervise multiple AI tools report higher levels of mental fatigue, information overload, and decision fatigue -- researchers called it "AI brain fry." Employees who spent more time monitoring AI outputs rather than letting the systems run independently experienced 12% more mental fatigue and significantly more information overload, suggesting that the tools meant to save time can also create new layers of cognitive work. Harford traced this paradox to the history of supposedly liberating technologies: email was faster than a letter, but spawned a "profusion of low-quality, low-value messages bleeding into the evenings and weekends." PowerPoint meant that "highly paid and skilled professionals started wasting time making their own slides badly." In other words, the question isn't whether AI gives you back six hours. It's whether anyone lets you keep them. Mike Manos, chief technology officer at Dun & Bradstreet, said his team is getting more done, faster. "I got the eight hours to two hours," he told Fortune, "but now I can get 20 hours of work, because the work came down ... it goes back to productivity." Instead of sending workers home early, Manos said his teams are simply getting more done. A product development cycle tracking to take 24 to 36 months was completed in six months once his team incorporated AI capabilities. Rather than reduce staff, he redeployed those developers to additional projects. "It's not so much about people are going to lose jobs, or you're going to sort of shrink that workforce," he said. "It's about becoming more efficient and, in our case, getting to market faster." More capabilities, services, and features will have to be delivered within the same historical timeframe. That mirrors the picture at Google itself. Ryan Salva, a senior product lead who helped launch GitHub Copilot before joining Google as a Senior Director of Product, Developer & Experiences in mid-2024, told Fortune that 50% of Google's code was now written by AI, resulting in "well over a 10% velocity gain" when multiplied across tens of thousands of engineers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai disclosed this figure in a podcast with Lex Fridman in mid-2025. KPMG National Managing Partner of Advisory for Strategy and Markets Patrick Ryan reported a similar shift in his own routine, telling Fortune in conversation at the consulting firm's Orlando Lakehouse facility that time spent preparing for his executive meetings -- once a "huge chunk" of his day -- dropped by around 75% after deploying Gemini at KPMG. Within two weeks of launch, he estimated that over 90% of KPMG professionals were using the tool. Tim Walsh, Chair and CEO of KPMG U.S., agreed in an interview that companies are doing the hard work of shrinking the proverbial task from six hours down to two hours, and that he doesn't see a Keynesian workweek resulting, framing the issue as a story of growth. "That means I can put more volume through my business," he said, agreeing that most CEOs are working on the same thing right now. "My business should be growing and will grow. I see the number of my employees going up, not down, because of that." Walsh acknowledged that "the mix" of workers will change, but he stressed, "this is a huge opportunity." Not everyone is seeing such clean wins. Wharton professor Peter Cappelli, who has been studying AI adoption across enterprises, previously told Fortune that the reality is "a lot of hard work, very expensive, and not an instant job killer." Take digital services company Ricoh, a firm that Cappelli studied closely. AI helped it become three times as effective while reducing the number of roles to only three, but at an elevated cost of $200,000 per month. Ricoh confirmed these numbers to Fortune, with VP Ashok Shenoy noting the project broke even within a year. The reason companies still need employees, Cappelli said, is that "lots of problems have to be chased down, and they're harder to chase down if they come off of AI... so that's the payoff, but it's not cheap, and it took a hell of a long time to do." Headlines announcing layoffs attributed to AI, he added, deserve skepticism: "If you read what they actually say, they say, 'We expect that AI will cover this work.' Hadn't done it. They're just hoping. And they're saying it because that's what they think investors want to hear." (Cappelli was talking to Fortune before the Silicon Valley fintech Block, led by CEO Jack Dorsey, announced a whopping 40% layoff, citing AI efficiencies, which is arguably another example of what he mentioned, or a leap forward in the adoption story.) Walsh of KPMG agreed with Cappelli's takeaway, saying that "embedding AI into a business takes time." Organizations have to "rework all of the process flows," which includes cleaning up their internal data, aligning all their data flows in the same direction, and doing so across the entire business, across the back office, front office, or middle office, whichever the company is focusing on. Large companies -- and those with the capital to invest -- have been doing this for the past two years already, he said, characterizing it as just a start. "There's so much work to be done around this." The catalyst for the productivity shift -- where it is actually happening -- is the evolution of what Google calls the "agentic data cloud," in which AI models no longer just answer questions but also act as planners and executors. Google's Gemini 3, for instance, has moved beyond simple Q&A to what Ahmad calls a "thinking role." She claimed that the model can first build a plan, then explore multiple approaches, evaluate them against each other, and hone in on the best answer for the customer. Google is not alone in going this direction. OpenAI has made a similar agentic push with its Operator product, which can autonomously browse the web and complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf. Anthropic's Computer Use feature, embedded in Claude, allows agents to interact directly with desktop applications. Meanwhile, Microsoft has built Copilot Studio, its own enterprise agentic layer, directly into its Azure cloud, giving it a distribution advantage across the thousands of companies already running on Microsoft infrastructure. Salva, who spent a decade at Microsoft before joining Google, acknowledged that "we all know that we're traveling west" -- meaning the entire industry shares the same vision of AI autonomy, even if the paths differ. "We're all trying to get to the same degree of automation. We have slightly different flavors of implementation and workflows for it." The sector where agentic AI is landing hardest -- and where the workforce implications are most acute -- is customer operations. Eric Buesing, a McKinsey partner who advises financial institutions and insurers on service transformation, told Fortune that the shift he's observing in just the past six months is qualitative, not just incremental. "The difference we're seeing, even from six months ago, is organizations are stepping away from small pilots and experiments with generative AI, where they were finding 5, 10, 15, 20-second savings," he said, "and seeing where an agentic agent is able to actually automate large portions of work entirely so that they can actually reimagine kind of how work is done." The back office of an insurance company, he argued, is a prime example: binding a new policy or processing a small business loan currently requires multiple customer interactions, a front-line rep capturing information, a back-office team making a decision, and then a rep communicating that decision back. "These processes generally require either very long conversations or multiple interactions," Buesing said, offering the examples of a front-facing representative capturing information while a back-office team works on the decision. "AI can perform those functions faster, run a customer history profile in real time while the customer is still speaking to the front-line rep, and help that human make a decision." A McKinsey survey of 440 customer experience and operations executives found that 60% or more of the tasks performed in customer operations today are "potentially addressable with AI." But Buesing was careful to separate the addressable from the capturable. "What is addressable versus what will be capturable, and with what time period? Humans don't necessarily adapt to change as quickly as the technology is evolving," he told Fortune. The new AI voice agents, which six months ago still sounded "tremendously robotic," have recently crossed a threshold. Latency is barely perceptible, and the agent "sounds casual, fun, friendly, even a little bit joking around." Early evidence also suggests that, in certain contexts, such as first-round job interviews or ordering sensitive medication, customers actively prefer talking to AI because they "don't feel judged." Buesing said he had independently read the same Harvard Business Review article on work intensity and largely agreed with its premise. Once building AI agents moves from "nights and weekends fun project work" to the expected baseline output an employer demands, workers will "find themselves on a wagon wheel of having to build more agents to try to keep up with the expectations of production," he told Fortune. ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson and her colleague Jay Caldwell offered another perspective during a joint breakfast with media members in New York City. AI is entering a workforce that is already, as Caldwell put it, "anxious" -- and he said that was risky. "The importance for HR professionals right now is not as much about the technology," he said. "It's more around how we lead through the technology. How do we bring our workforce alongside the transformation?" The answer, Richardson suggested, is not to hide productivity gains but to invest visibly in people so they feel equipped for the new regime. "Investing in upskilling is not just a strategy," she said. "It's a reassurance. It's a trust pact between the employer and the worker." She said companies have a lot of work to do, adjusting to the new mentality of what it means to do work in the AI age. "We need to help reframe productivity for our workers," she said, because little task completion moments will be swallowed up by AI efficiencies. "To me, it's shifting from productivity based on volume of work to value [of work], and that's a big shift within an organization." For Salva at Google, who has spent 25 years watching developer tools evolve, the better analogy for where we are isn't email or PowerPoint. It's the five stages of autonomous driving, and we've only reached stage three or four. The real promise, he told Fortune, isn't that AI does your job faster; it's that it changes which parts of the job are yours to do. He said the best developers he sees today aren't hammering at keyboards -- they're "locked into the architecture," delegating execution to "a fleet of agents" running in parallel while they hold the big picture in their heads. "That," he said, "is where productivity happens. That's where focus and flow happen." Where Salva diverges from some of his competitors is in what the future should feel like. "If we're optimizing for short attention spans," he said, "what we're really sacrificing is that delightful Zen moment that you get when you're locked in" -- the deep focus that he believes is where the most important work actually gets done. He said he spends significant time thinking about how to design tools that preserve that state even as they delegate the mechanical work to external systems. What Manos at Dun & Bradstreet found is that the real disruption isn't technical, it's cultural. "At the end of the day, the AI revolution will be successful when you've actually changed the people and the people culture to adopt this new framework," he said. He thinks his company is succeeding where others have failed in AI adoption because it approached things differently. It rolled out AI gradually, starting with small wins: automating the repetitive tasks, like quality assurance testing. "We didn't jump in and go, 'Everybody AI tomorrow,'" he said. "You've just got to be a little bit fleet of foot to be able to dance and learn what you're being shown and pay attention to what you're being shown." He also said that different teams adopt at different speeds, and making room for that allows the learning curve to unfold. Buesing said he saw the same pattern in his client work. Organizations are now overwhelmingly "in pilot to scale, scaling, or building plans to introduce agentic AI" -- but the human side of the equation is lagging the technology. "That wave is coming," he told Fortune. "And I think organizations may be a little bit slow on that right now." The job titles themselves are already in flux. Buesing said he's already heard companies experimenting with terms like "advocate" or "journey manager" to replace the old "agent" label -- partly because it's become hopelessly ambiguous in the age of AI agents, and partly because the human role genuinely is becoming something new. Venki Padmanabhan, who is currently a plant manager at a manufacturing firm in Ohio after a globe-spanning career that included several stints as a chief executive in his native India, told Fortune that he's spent decades studying human potential in the workplace, and he has a longer historical view. His favorite example is a Siemens plant in Amberg, Germany, that kept the same 1,100 employees over 20 years while technology evolved around them. Those workers went on to generate eight times the business output. (Siemens calls this its "factory of the future.") "The companies that understand how to unlock this intelligence, engage their people, deploy the tacit knowledge they already have, then use AI are going to win extraordinarily," he said. The companies that simply cut, he warned, "will milk the economic value of the knowledge that the AI had from past practice for maybe 10, 15 years. But there's no more new knowledge being developed because humans develop knowledge, and then the well will run dry." The honest answer, as Manos summed it up, is that those six free hours you just saved by using AI aren't coming anytime soon. What is coming is a widening aperture -- more problems to solve, more projects to chase, a bigger version of the job. "The work is not going to go away," he said. "Pieces and parts of the work may go away, but that just means we're going to be able to address more." Manos noted that Dun & Bradstreet traces its founding to before the Civil War and has survived through business iterations dating back to Abraham Lincoln's time. The business model of organizing data, he pointed out, used to look very different. "The way they used to do it was, get on a horse, ride into town, figure out who the blacksmith was and who the grocery store was, and then they wrote it down and put it in a book." The work is the same now as it was then, but all the horses are gone, all the locations are changed. The context has changed, but it still works. Whether that's liberation or a treadmill set to a higher speed is shaping up to be the defining labor question of the decade.

AI isn't taking people's jobs. Here's what's really happening

Oracle $ORCL co-founder Larry Ellison (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) A simple and accurate explanation for the wave of white-collar layoffs sweeping across industries is becoming increasingly clear: AI isn't replacing white-collar workers. It's displacing the cash once used to pay them, with companies cutting corporate payrolls to help fund their pushes into data centers and other AI-focused investments. Oracle $ORCL's coming layoffs reveal one of the clearest cases yet. Bloomberg reports that the company is planning thousands of job cuts -- perhaps as many as 30,000 in its largest-ever restructuring -- as management prepares to take the company cash-flow negative for the next several years. Essentially, its leadership is spending so aggressively on data centers to keep pace with Amazon $AMZN and Microsoft $MSFT that Oracle must find the money somewhere, and cutting labor costs is one way it plans to do so. This is why the question of "can AI actually replace white-collar workers" is less relevant than many people believe -- a distraction from a clearer-cut phenomenon. AI doesn't have to replace white-collar knowledge work to lead to white-collar jobs cuts. Only corporate spending priorities must change, and that trend is already widely acknowledged and documented. In The New York Times this week, former Block $SQ employee Aaron Zamost articulated the tension in an op-ed about the company's layoffs: "The question on minds everywhere: Is A.I. a terrifying new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable? Or is Block's announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing? The truth is, nobody knows the answer -- not even Block itself." Zamost's op-ed identified patterns of thinking common in Silicon Valley that appear to be contributing to companies' growing emphasis on AI: a desire to be among "first adopters," a tendency to extrapolate from breakthroughs without waiting for conclusive evidence, and making statements to please Wall Street whether statements are fully true or not. Those are all worthwhile additions to larger understanding. But Zamost offered a clearer answer without knowing it: White-collar downsizing is being driven by AI, displacing it without necessarily replacing it. What he dismisses as "standard prioritization and cost management" is the whole point. The Bloomberg story puts it plainly, with Oracle "planning to ax thousands of jobs among its moves to handle a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort." Some of those cuts will target roles the company expects AI to eventually replace, but that's a secondary rationale layered onto a primary financial one. The crunch comes first. The cuts follow. Microsoft likewise cut 15,000 people last year while simultaneously ramping data center spend to historic levels. Ditto Amazon, which has cut corporate payrolls amid explosive capex growth. The workers losing jobs today aren't losing them because ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude can do their work. They're losing them to chip orders, lease commitments, bond offerings, server farms, spades in the ground. It all points to a less futuristic and visceral explanation than the popular narrative. The displacement is real, even if the replacement isn't yet.

AI not hitting European jobs for now: ECB

Frankfurt (Germany) (AFP) - Artificial intelligence has only had minor effects on employment in Europe so far, European Central Bank economists said Wednesday, but they warned the technology's future impact was uncertain. Comparing 3,500 firms, some of which reported using AI and some of which did not, the economists overall found no difference in terms of creating or cutting jobs. Firms that use AI particularly frequently were in fact four percent likelier to hire new staff than average, the economists said in a blog post. "As things stand, based on firms' overall hiring plans, investment in and the intensive use of AI are not yet replacing jobs," they said. "In fact, some firms are hiring additional employees -- perhaps because they are looking to develop and implement AI technologies while maintaining their existing production processes, or because AI is a way to help them scale up more quickly," they added. The economists warned that firms that invested in AI with the aim of cutting jobs did indeed end up doing so, suggesting there could be profound effects on jobs as the technology matures. "However, only 15 percent of firms that use AI cite reducing labour costs as a factor, and this is insufficient to offset the overall positive effects observed to date," they said. Concern has grown that AI could have profound effects on employment, and firms including American tech giant Amazon and German insurer Allianz have cited AI-uptake as a reason for job cuts in recent months. Markets tumbled last week after a viral blog post described a gloomy scenario in which AI led to mass layoffs, depressing economic growth. The ECB economists warned that the limited effects seen to date might continue in the future. "AI has not yet significantly transformed production processes," they said. "Given that this is set to change, the longer-term impact of AI on employment remains less clear."

CEOs are using one number in the AI age to decide how many people they still need | Fortune

Tim Walsh knows the the metric that is quietly reshaping how corporate America thinks about its workforce. It isn't revenue per employee, which has anchored headcount decisions for decades. It isn't productivity. It's something Walsh, the chair CEO of KPMG U.S., calls labor cost margin -- and understanding it reveals more about where AI is actually taking the economy than almost anything else being said out loud in boardrooms right now. "For every one of my engagements," Walsh told Fortune, the question is "what is my mix of labor? What's my mix of technology? And what's the overall cost of delivering that engagement?" He said he would expect the "labor cost in the mix" to go down, and for his technology costs within that same engagement to go up. "And at the end of the day, I'm going to be able to run a lot more volume through my business in ways that I couldn't before." That logic -- lower labor cost per unit of work, more total volume, net growth -- is the quiet calculus running beneath nearly every major AI investment decision in corporate America today. And according to the 2026 KPMG U.S. CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, released Tuesday, the pace at which executives are moving toward that model is accelerating far faster than the public debate and hype around AI jobs has accounted for. It's "dizzying" to do business in a genuine economic boom, he added. The survey, which polled 100 CEOs of large U.S. companies, found that 77% agreed with a statement that generative AI was overhyped over the past year, but also that its true disruptive potential over the next five to 10 years is likely to be under-hyped. It is a distinction that doesn't much land in what Walsh called "the noise" of the broader conversation, which has oscillated between Silicon Valley triumphalism and doomsday predictions about mass unemployment. The CEOs that KPMG surveyed largely rejected both poles. What they are describing instead is something more structurally significant and harder to see coming: a gradual, then sudden, rewiring of how work gets done and who -- or what -- does it. "There is no doubt that every single layer within the labor pool is going to be disrupted," Walsh said. "But anyone who tells you what it's going to do or knows what the shape of it's going to be isn't being truthful, because it's unclear at the moment." The numbers in the survey support that uncertainty as well as the scale of the bet being made in spite of it. Nearly 80% of CEOs said they are allocating at least 5% of their total capital budgets to AI, and 41% are putting in at least 10%. Thirty-five percent are spending between 11% and 20% of their entire capital budget on the technology. For context, that level of allocation rivals what companies were devoting to cloud infrastructure at the height of the cloud transition -- and the cloud took a decade to fully reshape the economy. The workforce picture that emerges is one of deliberate, if uncertain, transformation. Fifty-five percent of CEOs said AI will lead them to increase hiring over the next year. Walsh said his own headcount at KPMG is not down, but the composition of who he's hiring has changed fundamentally. "We're hiring technologists in ways that we never did before," he said. "We're hiring people that we call orchestrators, people that are actually managing gigantic parts of our workflow to make sure they're complete, they're accurate, that they're getting to the right output." KPMG also told Fortune that it needs to hire for AI agent adoption strategists (responsible for aligning AI agents with strategy, design and workforce planning, and ensuring adoption among workers), AI agent orchestration engineers (connecting agents, tools and workflows, and defining autonomy and guardrails for agents), and AI agent operations managers (managing agents' day-to-day performance, incidents and changes). That is the new shape of white-collar work that is coming into focus: not elimination, but stratification. The jobs most at risk, Walsh said, are unambiguous. "You can look at those types of jobs that are repetitive tasks, people that are doing the same thing every single day, day in and day out. That's a scary place to be right now." But he argued that most knowledge workers are not in that bucket. Work isn't "just one thing" for this breed of white-collar worker. "It's about building relationships. It's about building business. It's about taking judgments on what work I do ... Not all of that just fits nicely into an automated solution." Still, two-thirds of CEOs surveyed by KPMG admitted they have not yet actually redefined roles or career paths to account for AI, a striking admission given the scale of investment underway. The survey also found that 31% of CEOs cited their top concern about AI's impact on leadership development as reduced opportunities for early-career employees to build judgment through real-world experience. The worry, in plain terms, is that companies may be training a generation of managers who have never had to figure anything out for themselves. The metric Walsh is watching -- labor cost margin -- is essentially the financial expression of all of this. It captures the substitution of technology for labor, the expansion of capacity without proportional headcount growth, and ultimately the productivity gains that every CEO is under pressure to deliver. And that pressure is real, he agreed, as every CEO is under the microscope, expected to increase that labor cost margin. "It's stressful if you're not investing, if you're not keeping up," Walsh said. "Because if you're not keeping up, you have the risk of losing market share." That competitive pressure -- to automate faster than your rivals, to find productivity gains before investors demand to see them, to retrain a workforce for jobs that don't fully exist yet -- is the hidden texture of the AI moment that this survey captures. Sixty percent of CEOs identified the pace of AI innovation and risk management as the single biggest factor impacting their organization's prosperity over the next three years. Not tariffs. Not interest rates. Not geopolitics. "It's dizzying," Walsh acknowledged, adding that he sees CEOs as very resilient in the mid-2020s. The machines aren't taking over. But the people running the largest companies in America are quietly, methodically, recalculating exactly how many humans they need, and the number they're arriving at looks very different from the one they started with.

The unexpected 92,000 drop in payrolls is a clue we might be reading the AI jobs narrative all wrong | Fortune

The shocking news that U.S. payrolls dropped by 92,000 in February -- market watchers were expecting a 50,000 gain -- trained the spotlight on what's probably today's most worrisome issue for everyone from money managers to Main Street shareholders to office workers: What's the looming impact of AI on jobs? The widely accepted view, of course, holds that AI has already started generating gigantic efficiency gains empowering enterprises to do everything quicker and better while deploying far fewer people. But is that what's really going on? Or is it possible there's another explanation? We know there's been a huge jump in global capital spending on AI, a number that Gartner expects to reach $2.5 trillion this year, up 44% over 2025. And that money's got to come from somewhere. So some experts are starting to theorize that the narrative is backwards: Companies aren't curbing headcount because AI's accelerating their processes right now. Instead, they're offsetting a lot of those lavish AI outlays by tightening the biggest expense item on their income statements, labor costs. That's the view of Brad Conger, chief investment officer at Hirtle Callaghan, a firm that manages $25 billion on behalf of such clients as charitable institutions and college endowments. He's not buying the "AI's doing all those peoples' jobs right now or soon" argument. "You see it at our company," he told Fortune. "We've bought five different AI software products in the past six months. AI is better at little functions, but doesn't replace people overall. A job does 100 things in a day, and that's a lot more than a single AI workflow can perform. It replaces activities that are just pieces of jobs. We have programmers who have to de-bug what AI produces." Conger avows that at his shop, AI's adoption hasn't cost a single job. On the other hand, he views Jack Dorsey's explanation for Block's recent decision to cut 10,000 employees, 40% of the total, as pure camouflage. Dorsey avows that "This decision comes from a position of strength. Intelligence tools have changed what it means to run a company. A significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better." Conger theorizes instead that Block way over-hired by more than doubling its workforce since 2019. "Block is an incredibly inefficient business," he argues. "Now they say AI made them more productive and therefore they can lay off people. They had no choice but to pivot. AI's an excuse for the inevitable." Conger contends that for the big spenders on the technology, including Block, "AI's not replacing jobs, but job cuts are funding AI expenditures." Several sprinters in the race are indeed implying that workforce reductions help pay for their AI outlays. In unveiling layoffs of 1,700 or 8.5% in February, Workforce CEO Carl Eschenbach declared that the cuts were necessary to prioritize AI investment and free up resources. Between October and January, Amazon announced that it's slashing 30,000 positions. The cuts coincide with an explosion in the internet giant's capex, which more than doubled from $53 billion in 2023 to $133 billion last year. In 2026, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pledging a blowout reaching $200 billion. Beth Galetti, SVP for people experience and technology, stated that Amazon's "shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers" in a campaign "to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership." Other leaders who've cut workers big time don't explicitly cite shrinking payrolls as a way to save cash they can re-channel into AI. Rather, they trumpet that AI is already substituting for people. Microsoft's mass layoffs of 15,000 last year came as its AI-driven capex followed a soaring trajectory resembling Amazon's. CEO Satya Nadella explained that the Windows and Azure titan needs to "reimagine its mission for a new era" via AI. Following layoffs of 4,000 in September and 10,000 in February, Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff asserted that AI is already performing 50% of all the work at the top CRM platform. In May, CrowdStrike chief George Kurtz pointed to AI in announcing cuts a cut of 500. "AI flattens the hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," Kurtz contended. As Conger acknowledges, we simply don't know if AI will eventually allow companies to work just as well, or even significantly better, using far fewer employees. But he doesn't see it now. Instead, Conger finds that what's regarded as totally transformative technology is often getting trotted out as a ruse for cuts to bloated workforces that had to happen anyway, or as a wager on the miracles to come. Unfortunately, America's workers may be paying for that wager.

AI Job Creation: European Central Bank Blog Reveals Positive Employment Trends

Economists have been debating whether AI could put white ⁠collar ⁠staff out of work, and a recent study by Germany's Ifo Institute found that more than a quarter of German firms expect AI to lead to job cuts in the next five years. The increasing use of artificial intelligence by firms may be creating some jobs in the euro zone rather than destroying them as many fear, a European Central Bank blog post argued on Wednesday. Economists have been debating whether AI could put white ⁠collar ⁠staff out of work, and a recent study by Germany's Ifo Institute found that more than a quarter of German firms expect AI to lead to job cuts in the next five years. But the ECB's own Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises found ⁠that companies making significant use of AI are more likely to take on additional staff in the ⁠near term. "In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire," the blog post, which is not necessarily the view of the ECB, said. Firms planning to invest in AI are also more likely to have positive expectations for future employment growth, the blog argued. "This is true regardless of the level of planned AI investment and suggests that a pause in hiring due to investment in AI ⁠technology is also unlikely over the next year," the blog, written by two ECB staff economists, said. However, the outlook may change on the longer horizon, the authors said. Most of the gloomier surveys cover longer horizons than the ECB's own question and the outlook could change once AI starts to significantly transform production processes.

ECB blog suggests AI may create jobs rather than eliminate them By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Artificial intelligence may be creating jobs in the euro zone instead of eliminating them, according to a European Central Bank blog post published Wednesday. The ECB's Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises found that companies making significant use of AI are more likely to hire additional staff in the near term. "In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire," the blog post said. The post does not necessarily represent the ECB's official view. Firms planning to invest in AI are also more likely to have positive expectations for future employment growth, according to the blog written by two ECB staff economists. "This is true regardless of the level of planned AI investment and suggests that a pause in hiring due to investment in AI technology is also unlikely over the next year," the economists said. The findings contrast with concerns about AI's impact on employment. A recent study by Germany's Ifo Institute found that more than a quarter of German firms expect AI to lead to job cuts in the next five years. The blog post noted that the outlook may change over a longer time horizon. Most surveys with more pessimistic findings cover longer periods than the ECB's survey, and the employment picture could shift once AI begins to significantly transform production processes. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

AI may be creating instead of destroying jobs for now, ECB blog argues

FRANKFURT, March 4 (Reuters) - The increasing use of artificial intelligence by firms may be creating some jobs in the euro zone rather than destroying them as many fear, a European Central Bank blog post argued on Wednesday. Economists have been debating whether AI could put white collar staff out of work, and a recent study by Germany's Ifo Institute found that more than a quarter of German firms expect AI to lead to job cuts in the next five years. But the ECB's own Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises found that companies making significant use of AI are more likely to take on additional staff in the near term. "In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire," the blog post, which is not necessarily the view of the ECB, said. Firms planning to invest in AI are also more likely to have positive expectations for future employment growth, the blog argued. "This is true regardless of the level of planned AI investment and suggests that a pause in hiring due to investment in AI technology is also unlikely over the next year," the blog, written by two ECB staff economists, said. However, the outlook may change on the longer horizon, the authors said. Most of the gloomier surveys cover longer horizons than the ECB's own question and the outlook could change once AI starts to significantly transform production processes. (Reporting by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Andrew Heavens)