Latest news with #techCEOs
Gizmodo
a day ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
CEOs Are Quietly Telling Us the Truth: AI Is Replacing You
The fear is real. In meetings, Slack chats, and after-work drinks, one question is quietly eating away at millions of employees: Will AI take my job? In public, CEOs like to sound reassuring. They say generative AI will 'enhance productivity' or 'streamline operations.' But when you actually read what they're telling their own employees, or what slips out in investor memos, the message is chilling: virtual workers are here, and they're not just assistants. They're replacements. Let's take a closer look at what some of the world's most powerful tech CEOs are saying. Not in hype videos, but in official internal messages, blog posts, and investor updates. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently published a company-wide message that sounds reasonable, until you actually read it. 'As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… We expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.' The key phrase? 'Next few years.' That's corporate speak for 2026 to 2028. Not ten years away. This is soon. Jassy is not talking about automating only simple or repetitive tasks. He's preparing employees for a reality where AI replaces entire job categories across the board, and where hiring slows or stops altogether for roles that machines can now do. In a memo posted to LinkedIn, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn was even more blunt. 'Most functions will have specific initiatives to fundamentally change how they work… Headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.' Translation: No more hiring unless your job is impossible for AI to do. The company is betting that most teams will soon need fewer humans. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke shared a similar directive on X: 'Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI… What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?' Lütke is openly asking managers to reimagine teams as if AI agents are already integrated, and to justify why any humans are still necessary. — tobi lutke (@tobi) April 7, 2025The message from these CEOs is clear: human employees are now the last resort. The new default is automation. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently stated that AI is already doing 50% of the work within his company, shortly before announcing another 1,000 job cuts. The CEO of Klarna, a major fintech company, was even more blunt, revealing that AI has already allowed the company to reduce its workforce by 40%. These aren't future scenarios. This is already happening. The reason for this sudden shift is the rapid evolution of AI technology. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained in a recent podcast, the latest 'reasoning models' have made a critical leap. In simple terms, these AI systems can now do more than just find information; they can 'think' through complex, multi-step problems. Altman suggested these models can reason on par with someone holding a PhD, meaning they are now capable of performing the high level analytical tasks once reserved for highly educated humans. This capability is being actively harnessed. Three sources working at major AI labs told Gizmodo that they are training powerful models to perform real world tasks in nearly every 'knowledge work' profession, including banking, financial analysis, insurance, law, and even journalism. These sources, who requested anonymity as their contracts prohibit them from speaking publicly, described how their work is used in side by side comparisons with AI models to refine the technology until it can produce professional grade output with minimal errors. Virtual employees are already doing our jobs; the current phase is simply about making them more perfect. The 'next few years' Jassy spoke of may be closer to two years at most. Consider the tech industry's recent layoff trends. In 2024, 551 tech companies laid off nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. In just the first six months of 2025, 151 tech companies have already laid off over 63,823 people. On average a tech company cut 277 workers in 2024. If that rate is maintained for the rest of the year, the average number of layoffs per tech company in 2025 would soar to 851, roughly three times the 2024 average. While there is no direct evidence linking all these layoffs to AI, the trend is happening during a period of record economic strength. The Nasdaq just closed at an all time high, and eight of the world's ten largest companies are in the tech sector. Profitable, growing companies are shedding workers at an alarming rate, and the quiet implementation of AI is the most logical explanation. Tech CEOs won't tell you outright that you're being replaced. But the memos speak for themselves. AI is already here, and your company is likely building a roadmap to automate you out of your role. One internal pilot project at a time. One chatbot at a time. One hiring freeze at a time. If you want to understand what's next for the American workforce, don't listen to the marketing. Read the footnotes in the CEO's blog. Because they're already telling you the truth.
Coin Geek
09-06-2025
- Business
- Coin Geek
AI isn't taking your job—CEOs are
Homepage > News > Business > AI isn't taking your job—CEOs are Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Since the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), companies of all sizes have been laying off employees en masse. Many say they need fewer workers because AI can now handle jobs once done by humans at lower cost and with greater efficiency. To make matters worse, a growing number of tech CEOs and industry reports are projecting that this trend will only accelerate, with AI sweeping across industries and leaving mass unemployment in its wake. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said that AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years—but is that the current reality? Although AI is undeniably useful and can replace parts of certain jobs, most AI systems just aren't that capable yet. In many cases, they still need a human in the loop. While it's easy to get caught up in the headlines, the actual data, both quantitative and qualitative, suggests that AI is being used more as a scapegoat than a legitimate driving factor for these layoffs. Layoffs didn't start with AI Many of these layoffs have less to do with AI and more with what companies desperately need to do in this economic environment: cut costs and increase their bottom line. We're no longer in the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era, where growth was measured by vanity metrics like headcount and cheap access to money obfuscated the true financial health of a company. But now, with interest rates much higher and access to capital tightening, those same companies are under pressure to show profitability and real growth. That being said, the trend of mass layoffs didn't start with ChatGPT. It started with the end of easy money. As interest rates began rising in 2022 and 2023, and the venture capital that once fueled growth started to dry up, many companies were left scrambling to clean up their balance sheets. They were overstaffed, overvalued, and under pressure to correct their mistakes. We saw this play out publicly with X (formerly Twitter), Meta (NASDAQ: META), and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Musk bought Twitter in late October 2022 and slashed half the workforce within a week—about 3,750 people. Meta laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022, and Amazon followed with over 10,000 layoffs in the same month. Although these layoffs often removed a significant percentage of the companies' workforce, all of these platforms kept functioning as if thousands of people had never been removed. This is a page out of the Elon Musk playbook, particularly when he acquired Twitter. Regardless of how people feel about Musk, it is undeniable that he proved it is possible to massively gut a company by significantly reducing headcount without affecting company operations. With that one example in place, many corporations especially those in tech followed in Musk's steps and executed the same strategy. At first, companies framed the cuts as necessary steps for the company's financial health. However, as generative AI became the hot trend in late 2022 and early 2023, the messaging shifted. Suddenly, companies weren't reducing headcounts in the name of efficiency or better margins; layoffs were being labeled as AI-driven transformations. However, if we stop and look at what AI is capable of today, most of it doesn't support the idea that entire job categories are being replaced by AI armies. What's happening is that executives are leveraging the hype around AI to soften the blow of layoffs and reframe cost-cutting as innovation. Is AI replacing workers? For starters, AI didn't just show up in 2022. Many of the companies doing layoffs have had AI systems in place for over a decade; they just called them machine learning or deep learning projects back then. But now that 'AI' is trendy, they've rebranded and leaned into the buzz. However, when people talk about AI today, they're mostly referring to generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs). These tools have proven to be great assistants capable of speeding up repetitive, structured work: helping draft content, summarizing data, researching, and completing other formulaic tasks. But there are very few instances where they have proven to be replacements for most white-collar, skilled labor jobs. To get useful output from generative AI, a human still has to sit there, think through prompts, tweak the results, and guide the process, essentially having what feels like a conversation with the AI to refine its outputs and inch closer to something usable in real-world work scenarios. Most AI platforms aren't exactly turnkey just yet; they require collaboration between a human and a machine to produce a desired output. Beyond that, there seems to be a disconnect between what technologists preach about the technology and how the general public is interacting with it. According to Pew Research, 43% of Americans say they interact with AI less than once a week. Only 27% use it several times a day. If AI is so good and capable, why hasn't the general public, including employees at the same companies threatening to replace workers with AI, started using it in their jobs to save time and energy? Why isn't it being used as a tool that could save the employee from being made redundant? What we're really seeing is an AI narrative that is outpacing our AI reality. A handful of tech leaders and influencers are pushing the idea that AI is everywhere and doing everything, but most of the world hasn't caught up. And it's not because a majority of people are Luddites, but rather because, in many instances, the AI tools just aren't up to par yet. Even in roles allegedly being 'eliminated by AI,' there are still tasks that require human intuition, judgment, and context. Things like managing relationships, navigating office politics, and understanding nuance in communication are still outside AI's capabilities right out of the box—unless the AI is being prompted…by a human. How companies use AI to justify downsizing Of course, AI is capable of one day replacing humans in several jobs, we just don't seem to be there yet. At the moment, only a handful of companies, really just tech giants, mega-corporations, and a few other publicly traded firms, have the resources to pull this off. But for the rest of the world, the closest we've gotten to full-on AI job replacement is through the hype around AI agents: software systems that can supposedly take a task and run with it from end to end. But even those haven't materialized the way they were promised. This raises the question: if companies don't even have access to these superpowered AI agents yet unless they have the resources to build them internally, what exactly is replacing the workers? This reveals the true story: AI has become a narrative that is being used for leverage. Companies are using it to reframe painful decisions that could potentially get them bad press, like layoffs, restructuring, and downsizing, as forward-thinking innovation. It's a way to make workforce reductions sound less harsh and more like a strategy. In reality, what we're seeing is the fallout from an economic reset. The post-ZIRP era is here. Capital is more expensive, investors want returns, and companies are being forced to operate like real businesses again, which means they are actively trimming the fat…which means layoffs. But instead of just owning that, it's easier and more media-friendly to say, 'We're investing in AI' because that phrase alone boosts stock prices and makes the decision look visionary. In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek's coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI . Watch: AI is for 'augmenting' not replacing the workforce title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen=""> AI Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning Generative AI Layoff Machine Learning
