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AI job loss: Fiverr CEO says AI will replace humans, Duolingo and Shopify are already doing that

AI job loss: Fiverr CEO says AI will replace humans, Duolingo and Shopify are already doing that

India Today08-05-2025
There has long been a conversation that AI will soon do a lot of mundane tasks that humans have to do right now. This includes some of the daily tasks at work, including coding, research, etc. India Today Tech interviewed the former HCL CEO Vineet Nayar in March 2024, who had then predicted that IT companies will soon need 70 per cent fewer people because of AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has on a number of occasions prophesied that AI will replace coders in the future. Earlier this week, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman was a little more blunt in his prediction when he said that 'AI is coming for your jobs'. advertisement"It doesn't matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support, salesperson or a finance person - AI is coming for you," he said in an email he shared with his employees. In line with the predictions of other tech leaders, Kaufman also says that AI will soon be taking over the 'easy tasks' and turn them into automated processes. And the harder tasks will also be simplified with the help of AI.
While these predictions sound like they are in a somewhat distant future, looking at the industry trends, that future is much closer than we realise. The recent update to Duolingo and Shopify's hiring policy is the best Aexample of that. Last month, Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke shared an internal memo setting up a new direction for the company. Lutke said that going forward, AI will be central to the company's work. Lutke said, here on, if anyone in the company hires a human employee, they will have to first prove why AI can not do that job. 'Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,' he wrote. 'What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?' advertisementLutke wrote in his memo that AI has led to a shift in how work is done faster than anything he has seen before. And to keep up with it, he asked his employees to look at AI as a partner for everything, whether it is writing code, doing research or in case they need an assistant. In fact, Lutke told his employees that AI usage will also be used as a factor in employee performance and peer reviews. He wants his employees to show how they are using AI, what they are doing to get better at it, etc. Duolingo recently did a similar thing. 'Duolingo is going to be AI-first', announced the company's CEO Luis von Ahn. 'We'll gradually stop using (human) contractors to do work that AI can handle,' he said. 'AI use will be part of what we look for in hiring.'While the Duolingo CEO insists that the shift in strategy is not about job cuts in order to save cost, but to overcome creative bottlenecks. However, the fact of the matter is that the practice will eventually lead to lesser number of human employees being hired, which will in turn lead to job loss. 'Headcount will only be (increased) if a team cannot automate more of their work,' Ahn said.The solution? The common solution offered by almost all leaders is that professionals need to rapidly adapt, reskill, and adopt AI into their workflows. Replit CEO Amjad Massad recently said that with 'AI agents getting better, it would be a waste of time to learn how to code'. He suggests that to combat the new trend in the job market, employees need to 'learn how to think, learn how to break down problems. Learn how to communicate clearly [with AI], as you would with humans,' he said.
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