Tech layoffs surge past 80,000 in early 2026 as AI reshapes the industry workforce

Tech industry lays off nearly 80,000 employees in the first quarter of 2026 -- almost 50% of affected positions cut due to AI

Some experts argue that AI was just used as an excuse for poor business decisions. 78,557 workers in the tech industry have reportedly been laid off from January 1 to April 2026, with more than 76% of the affected positions located in the U.S. Nikkei Asia reports that 37,638 of these cuts, or 47.9%, have been attributed to the reduced need for human workers because of AI and workflow automation. Despite that, Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat says that it will still take more than a year before we completely see the impact of modern AI technologies on the workforce. "I don't know if they are directly related to actual productivity gains," Hodjat told Nikkei in reference to the job cuts. "Sometimes, you know, AI becomes the scapegoat from a financial perspective, like when a company hired too many, or they want to resize, and it gets blamed on AI." Despite that, he said that AI-driven layoffs could still happen, but that it would take another six months to a year "before companies start seeing real productivity gains from AI," and that "it will be painful for all of us as we're going through it, and simply because it's a transition." This does not bode well for the industry, which has already been reeling from layoffs. Oracle has quietly cut more than 10,000 positions recently, with the savings purportedly allocated to data center funding. Many institutions and industry leaders have already been warning about AI-driven layoffs, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Ford CEO Jim Farley saying that the technology will wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs in the U.S. A Stanford study saw many entry-level coding and customer service jobs are already being affected, with an MIT simulation showing that AI can replace nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce, amounting to nearly $1.2 trillion in lost salaries. Despite all these analyses, some experts are pushing back against this narrative, pointing out that AI-driven layoffs were just being used as an excuse for poor business performance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the India AI Impact Summit, "I don't know what the exact percentage is, but there's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there's some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs." While they say that some of these layoffs would still happen with or without AI, there's still a consensus that the technology would have an impact on jobs and that we should be ready for a disruption. Still, there are a few companies that are bucking the trend. IBM has reportedly tripled its entry-level hiring in 2026, saying that while AI can do many entry-level jobs, it still needs a human touch. Furthermore, while cutting entry-level jobs would deliver short-term savings for any organization, it comes with the risk of erasing the pipeline needed to train future experienced workers and mid-level managers. This is backed up by data from the EU, which showed that companies that deployed and invested in AI are likely to hire more people. Even Cognizant, whose business process outsourcing operations rely mostly on people, have started working on AI technologies. It built AI labs in San Francisco and Bengaluru and have started developing custom AI agents for its clients, especially as many of them found that off-the-shelf services do not work well in the corporate setting due to performance or security issues. Despite the development of more capable and suitable AI agents, Hodjat said that the company does not expect to lay off staff. Instead, it will train them in the use of these tools, and there are even plans to hire more junior roles. "There's going to be a ton of people that are coming out of school that can't find a job and don't have the domain expertise," Hodjat told Nikkei. "You have to bring them in. You have to have them learn on the job, on how to use AI within the various domains." Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

US Job-Cut Announcements in Tech Keep Rising With AI Adoption

Layoff announcements at technology companies continued to mount in March, leading other industries in overall US job-cut plans as investment in artificial intelligence catalyzes leaner staffing levels. Employers in the technology sector announced 18,720 job cuts, up more than 24% from March 2025, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. That brought the industry total to more than 52,000 so far this year, the most first-quarter cuts since 2023. Overall, US-based employers announced 60,620 job cuts last month, up more than 25% from February. For all industries, AI accounted for a quarter of layoff announcements. "Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs," Andy Challenger, the company's chief revenue officer, said in a statement. "The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions. Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can't replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs." The figures underscore growing concerns that AI will lead to large-scale labor market disruption, especially for white-collar workers. In the tech industry, AI models promise to make coding far easier and less labor intensive. Tech companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Oracle Corp., and Jack Dorsey's Block Inc. are undertaking workforce reductions as resources get redirected to investment in AI. Still, overall layoff rates have remained low, with the labor market still in a "low-hire, low-fire" state. Total layoff announcements were down 78% in March from the same month last year. The report Thursday also showed that hiring intentions almost tripled from the previous month. Still, hiring plans so far this year are down from the same period in 2025, consistent with soft labor demand. Data out Wednesday from ADP Research showed payrolls at US companies increased by 62,000 in March after a similar increase a month earlier. While AI topped the list of reasons for layoff announcements, employers also cited closings and restructures, as well as market and economic conditions, according to Challenger.

Tech layoffs are piling up: 80,000 jobs cut in early 2026, and AI is getting the blame

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Bottom line: The first quarter of 2026 has already delivered one of the most turbulent job cycles the global tech industry has faced in recent years. Nearly 80,000 people have been laid off worldwide between January and April, with more than three-quarters of those cuts occurring in the United States. What stands out is that almost half of them - about 37,600 positions - are tied to automation and artificial intelligence, according to reports. But industry experts say it may be too early to conclude that modern AI systems are directly responsible for most of these job losses. Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat told Nikkei Asia that companies often cite artificial intelligence as a convenient explanation during restructuring. "I don't know if they are directly related to actual productivity gains," Hodjat said. "Sometimes, you know, AI becomes the scapegoat from a financial perspective, like when a company hired too many, or they want to resize, and it gets blamed on AI." Hodjat added that the real wave of AI-related labor shifts may still be ahead. "It will take another six months to a year before companies start seeing real productivity gains from AI," he said, noting that the transition "will be painful for all of us as we're going through it, and simply because it's a transition." In the meantime, layoffs continue across major players. Oracle has reportedly cut more than 10,000 jobs, with the savings redirected toward data center investments and AI infrastructure. Other executives have also warned of broader structural change ahead. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Ford CEO Jim Farley have both predicted that AI could eliminate as many as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the United States. A Stanford study has already found that entry-level coding and customer service positions are being affected, while an MIT simulation estimated that automation could replace 11.7% of the US workforce - equivalent to roughly $1.2 trillion in salaries. Amid these projections, some executives are urging caution in blaming AI outright. "I don't know what the exact percentage is, but there's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there's some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at the India AI Impact Summit. Some firms are already showing a different outcome. IBM, for example, has tripled entry-level hiring this year, saying that while AI may perform much of the routine work, human oversight remains essential. The company's position aligns with broader findings from European data, showing that businesses investing heavily in AI often expand their workforce rather than shrink it. Cognizant - whose operations rely heavily on people - has also taken a measured approach. The company has established AI labs in San Francisco and Bengaluru to develop custom AI tools tailored to client needs. But Hodjat said Cognizant does not plan to cut staff. Instead, he said, employees will be trained to work alongside AI systems, and the firm even expects to hire more junior workers. He said many new graduates will struggle to find work because they lack practical, domain-specific skills, so companies will need to hire them anyway and train them on the job to use AI effectively in different fields. For now, the tech industry sits in a state of transition - one where the impact of AI on employment is real but not yet fully settled. Whether it results in a long-term contraction or a redefinition of work may depend less on automation itself and more on how companies choose to adapt.

Nearly 80,000 tech workers have already lost their jobs in 2026 -- and AI impact means more could be to come

* 70,000-80,000 tech workers have lost their jobs already in 2026 * Some see AI as the cause, others as the scapegoat * Likelihood is that job losses are set to continue New Nikkei Asia reporting has claimed around 78,000 to 80,000 tech jobs were cut globally during the first quarter of 2026 - around three-quarters of which occurred in the US alone. Though the data only focuses on the tech industry specifically, the data suggest that major firms and startups were all affected by ongoing layoffs. As for the 'why', the report suggests that nearly half of the job cuts were attributed to AI or automation, though this may be an underestimation due to reporting differences, with many companies simply citing cost-cutting measures. Tech layoffs continue well into 2026 Layoffs.fyi shows similar data, with 70,474 estimated job losses occurring during the first three months of 2026 - a considerable increase over the 29,845 during the same period of 2025 and 57,269 during Q1 2024, but significantly less than the 167,674 tech job losses during the first quarter of 2023. The sudden sharp increase is likely the result of AI being used to replace or reduce the need for human roles. Nikkei Asia suggests the job cuts could be freeing up money for companies to invest in their own AI plans, rather than being a result of any proven productivity gains, showing that the long-term benefits are still largely unknown. However, while many believe AI's impacts could be underestimated, some (including Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat, cited in Nikkei Asia's report) also see the tech as a scapegoat for general restructuring and over-hiring corrections in response to post-pandemic overexpansion and general business shifts. Whatever the cited reasons and actual reasons may be, it's clear that 2026 is shaping up to be another heavy-hitting year for tech workers, and with studies pointing at further impacts on white-collar and entry-level jobs in the future, the trend shows no sign of stopping. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Tech companies are cutting jobs and betting on AI. The payoff is far from guaranteed

Sign up for the Breaking News US email to get newsletter alerts in your inbox Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don't look as bright as they did a decade ago. As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they've slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi. "At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech," said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. "And that's really sad because I love tech." The anxiety extends beyond Silicon Valley. Because tech companies are seen as innovators of the corporate world, as they reduce their headcounts - in anticipation of AI efficiency gains, or to prioritize AI investments - the moves could set a precedent for other businesses to make similar cuts. But even though AI has helped to accelerate coding, analyze large datasets and aid with research, many AI experts say we're still a long way from AI being able to replace large swaths of the workforce, if it ever can. So what is really going on? In interviews over the last month, AI researchers, economists and tech workers said that essentially, we're all living through an experiment. Over the next few years, tech companies' experimentation with AI will probably lead to several critical outcomes: more job cuts across industries, unforeseen consequences from overreliance on AI and a fundamentally different model of work. "The maximum hype you have right now, which is that AI is replacing people, is not true," said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies AI. "But it's also not true that AI will never threaten jobs. It's going to be complicated." OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have promised that their generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, will change the way people do their jobs, automating time-consuming tasks and shifting humans to more complex work. Agentic AI, or bots that complete tasks without human intervention, takes that promise further, potentially automating entire roles or business functions. On the ground floor, tech workers are facing the first phase of the AI experiment, as they're pushed to use the tech more often. But the outcomes don't always align with leaders' expectations. For technical workers, using AI has become a baseline expectation for employers across the tech industry, said a former Block engineering supervisor who got laid off in February. AI helps generate code faster, but this makes keeping up with code reviews more difficult, he said. Human reviews are important to think through any potential conflicts the code may have with other parts of the system and spot bugs that AI makes look legitimate, he added. "Now there's three times as much code because it's producing faster," he said. "We were falling behind on reviews." A recently laid off senior user-experience designer at Amazon Web Services, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said his team was experimenting with two internal generative AI tools core to their jobs, both of which were in early testing phases. Neither was fully functional or useful for workers' jobs yet, he said. So when cuts hit his team, he was surprised and confused. "It felt like, 'None of this is ready yet,'" he said. "How is all this work going to get done?" Amazon employees felt a veiled threat that if they did not use AI, their jobs could be next, he said, echoing earlier reporting from the Guardian that employees say the tech company pressures them to use AI even when it slows them down. Amazon stressed in previous statements that AI use was not mandatory. As more tech workplaces center AI and urge employees to embrace it - sometimes that push comes with surveillance and enforcement. A former worker at Microsoft said when it came to his and his colleagues' AI use, he had the "feeling of being watched" and felt pressure to "adopt the tech whether we like it or not". He also requested anonymity for fear of retribution. He felt he could voice concerns about AI at work if it helped protect the company from a bad outcome, but larger societal worries were less welcome. "I can't bring up environmental or job concerns," the worker said. "You don't want to be known as the person against AI." Microsoft said it maintained system‑level oversight of AI usage for security and risk but didn't use individual usage as a performance metric. The company also said it offered multiple channels for employees to anonymously raise concerns about how the tech was used. Some companies are already touting the gains they've seen from AI. Google, for example, credited AI for 50% of its code in its latest earnings report. Block's head of engineering, at the company's November investor day, said 90% of the company's code submission was authored "partially or fully with AI support". However, in its current form, AI is not as capable as some of the hype suggests, said Stephan Rabanser, a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University who has co-written a white paper about the reliability of AI agents. While the output of generative tools has been improving over the years, the tech still has problems consistently producing the same correct answer, even when the same prompt is used. That especially gets messy when there are different users or conditions, Rabanser said. "This is the barrier to job transformation," he said. "Reliability will be a key limiting factor." More companies will probably experience failed AI deployments or problematic results, Rabanser said. AI systems need huge amounts of data to become even acceptably good at a task, said Stuart Russell, a University of California, Berkeley, professor and an AI researcher, , and high-quality training data is becoming scarce. Often, even when a chatbot lacks the necessary data, it will respond confidently anyway, producing wrong answers that can lead to faulty transactions and deleted databases, he added. AI also struggles to learn continually and remember what it did previously, Mollick, of Wharton, said. Nevertheless, some companies are already adopting advanced-use cases, relying on AI to write all their code and then shipping those products without human review, despite the risk from AI's limitations, he said. He called them "dark factories", since they operate largely without human supervision. Betting on AI like this is risky. It creates exposure to financial losses, reputational harm, and negative customer or client outcomes, according to AI and business experts. In some cases, over relying on AI can cause critical consequences far beyond the business. "We don't want to move fast and break things in high-risk situations, like in healthcare or judicial fields," Rabanser said. "There are high stakes involved" that in some cases could mean life or death, he added. While the drumbeat of companies that say AI will help them do more with less is getting louder, it's unclear whether AI is actually driving cuts. Some companies may be "AI-washing" layoffs, using the technology as a convenient excuse for a slowing labor market, lagging consumer demand or rising costs, researchers and AI experts said. Just this week, the prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a bona fide AI booster who has written that "AI will save the world," said on a podcast that large tech companies were culling workers because they were overstaffed, and "now they all have the silver-bullet excuse: ah, it's AI." "It's easy to confuse the effects of something like generative AI with a weakening of the labor market," said Ryan Nunn, director of research at Yale University's Budget Lab, which researches AI's impact on jobs. "We really don't see anything differentially happening with the AI-exposed labor market." If a company is struggling financially, saying AI drove cuts definitely makes for a better story, said Thomas Malone, professor of information technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. There's also a long history of overshooting predictions of the impact and adoption rate of new tech, he said. It happened in the dot-com era and with autonomous driving. "I do think many people are overestimating the rate at which jobs will change," Malone said about AI projections. When Pinterest announced an almost 15% cut of its workforce in January, it cited reasons including reallocating resources to teams focused on AI and prioritizing AI‑powered products and capabilities. But a Pinterest employee, who asked for anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the press, said she believed the layoffs were more about fixing the company's business than anything else. "While I know that AI was one of the reasons cited, I don't think it was the real reason," she said, adding that cuts were related to optimizing operations. "They did a thorough review of the entire business, and what you see now is a sort of leaner, meaner Pinterest." Pinterest called this a mischaracterization. The potential savings and competitive advantages of AI are compelling for Wall Street investors. Headcount reductions can imply greater productivity per employee, which then leads to higher profits, said Joseph Feldman, analyst at Telsey Advisory Group. After Jack Dorsey, Block's CEO, connected his company's layoffs directly to AI productivity gains, the company's stock price increased by 20%. But cuts alone don't always satisfy the market, which is also watching for signs of sustainability, several analysts said. Two weeks after the initial pop in price, Block's stock was down 6%, signaling that the market recognized the execution risk, said Matthew Coad, analyst at Truist Securities. "A big part of it is the uncertainty around, 'Did [Dorsey] cut into bone?'" Coad said, referring to the engineering staff. And in the day after Oracle's layoff news, the company's stock popped up by 7.5%. But the boost was short-lived, as days later the stock had retreated to near pre-layoff levels. Amazon similarly experienced a stock pop after its latest cuts in January, though stock has since dropped in the months following as the market questions its AI spending plans. Even the markets are trying to make sense of the hype surrounding AI. For those seeking a clear answer on exactly how this tech will transform work and the economy, the answer is yet to be determined. This tech is changing some jobs, but the greater impact will take years to play out. "We will see changes over the next couple of years as a result of AI," Mollick said, referring to anticipated improvements in the tech. "It's already changing programming. So it will change jobs and transform them, but we just don't know the job consequences yet."

AI drives Indian IT companies to cut US jobs

Indian IT firms are increasing job cuts in the US, with layoffs expected to accelerate due to AI's growing influence and slowing deal-making. Companies are restructuring, impacting onsite employees, especially those tied to large transformation deals. Regulatory filings reveal a significant rise in layoffs in early 2026 compared to the previous year. Job cuts by Indian IT firms in the United States are rising, and analysts expect layoffs to accelerate, especially for contracts tied to large $1-billion-plus deals, as artificial intelligence becomes more pervasive. Onsite employees are increasingly at the front of the line in a restructuring as deal-making slows and clients push for lower costs amid rising AI adoption, they noted. An analysis of regulatory filings shows that Indian IT and business process outsourcing firms may have laid off more people in the US in the first three months of 2026 than in all of 2025. Under US law, companies with more than 100 employees must provide 60 days' notice before large layoffs of over 50 employees or closing a plant location under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. These filings, posted on states' websites, offer a window into job cuts. Hinduja Global Services, Infosys and HCL Technologies have filed WARN notices in Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania between January and March. In 2025, Genpact was the only Indian heritage services company to file such a notice -- in Wisconsin, covering 51-100 employees in January 2025. In 2024, Indian IT firms filed four WARN notices -- two by Genpact, one by HCL Americas and one by Tata Consultancy Services. Hinduja Global, HCL Tech and Infosys did not respond to an email seeking comment on the cuts. Most layoffs are of people who joined these firms as part of $1-billion-plus transformation deals, experts said. "What happens in the large deals...is that there is always rebadging of employees (from the client to the service provider)," Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting and EIIR Trend, told ET. "This is a risk that companies take... How will you redeploy these employees in other projects? In the past, it was possible to redeploy, but now with the macro-environment and AI, there is not so much demand. So, you are seeing these notices," he explained. In some cases, WARN notices do not signify a straight layoff. In February, Infosys' BPM arm filed a WARN notice for 248 employees, most of whom were moving back to its client Vanguard as part of a reworking of a multi-billion dollar deal signed in 2020. "They took back some US onsite workers and outsourced some more work in India and the Philippines to Infosys to meet the contract clauses but because there is no 'rebadging' filing, the only appropriate filing was a WARN notice," a person aware of the matter told ET. EIIR Trend's Jain said such filings will come on a case-by-case basis as projects ramp down and that there wouldn't be big layoffs over here, as seen in the case of Oracle. Earlier this month, technology giant Oracle fired about 30,000 employees -- including 10.000 based in India. Oracle's termination email to employees, sent at 6.00 am IST, was accompanied by a slew of WARN notices filed across US states.

AI pushes 2026 tech layoffs past 50K in just three months, employers reveal

US tech employment had its worst start to the year since 2023, with AI blamed for tens of thousands of brutal job cuts, according to a new report. The first three months of 2026 saw 52,050 tech layoffs -- a 40% jump from the same period last year, executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report published Thursday. Artificial intelligence is increasingly being blamed for the cuts. In March, AI led the list of reasons employers gave for tech layoffs -- accounting for 15,341 of the firings, or 25% of the total. Just a month earlier, the figure was 10%. Also last month, Meta planned sweeping layoffs -- with 20% of its workforce, or about 15,000 employees, on the chopping block, according to Reuters. The drastic cuts were reportedly intended to offset the company's massive investments in AI. In January, Amazon said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, with the company suggesting AI will do their work, instead. That came on top of news in October that the online retailer was axing 14,000 corporate workers. Dell in the first three months of the year cut 11,000 jobs, accounting for the biggest tech bloodbath at one company while layoffs at other firms were still unfolding, according to Challenger. "Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs. The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions," said Challenger, Gray & Christmas chief revenue officer Andy Challenger. "Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can't replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs." Tech leaders have been sounding the alarm for months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in January that AI would wipe out about half of all white collar jobs within one to five years. Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas recently landed in hot water after he argued on a podcast last month that people should embrace being replaced by artificial intelligence since they don't like their jobs, anyway. At Block, CEO Jack Dorsey blamed a recent round of 4,000 layoffs on the emerging technology -- warning of more to come. "We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," he wrote on X. "And that's accelerating rapidly." The first quarter of the year saw 217,362 job cuts across all industries -- the lowest quarterly total since 2022, according to challenger. The tally was down 16% from the final quarter of 2025 and down 56% from the first quarter of 2025. Other than AI, employers citing closings, restructurings and economic conditions as the reasons for layoffs so far this year. Across all sectors, U.S.-based employers announced 60,620 job cuts in March alone, up 25% from February, according to challenger.