AI is already nibbling away at the white-collar workforce: shaving off entry-level jobs, disappearing software engineers, and thinning HR departments. All along, tech executives have hedged their bets when asked about the impact of AI on their workforces, often noting optimistically that innovation creates jobs that did not previously exist.
Now, the very CEOs responsible for ushering in this glorious future are beginning to admit that AI may cause deep disruptions and could upend the labor market entirely. And while layoffs continue, tech leaders are passing down a new diktat to their employees: Hypercharge your productivity with AI — or else.
“If you’re an AI skeptic, you are at risk of losing your job,” said Lexi Lewtan, CEO of Leopard.FYI, a San Francisco-based professional network and hiring platform for software engineers.
Lewtan advises job hunters — and there’ve been a lot in recent months — to go all-in on AI during recruiting and show that they’re many times more efficient than applicants who aren’t ready adopters. But even for candidates who land jobs in Big Tech, anxiety about AI follows them to work every day.
“You have to sound like an AI enthusiast to even be considered for a job,” Lewtan said. “Meanwhile, you kind of know that companies may want to replace you with AI in a few years.”
Estimates of how many jobs will be lost to AI vary wildly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday that AI will eradicate entire job categories like customer service. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 20% in one to five years. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has argued that AI will change the kinds of tasks workers do and will create many more jobs than it will take.
But even Huang admitted last week on CNN that jobs will be lost, and he’s encouraging his employees to use AI, “to the point of mandating it.” At Shopify and Duolingo, managers have to prove that AI can’t do a job as well as a human before putting up a job posting.
“100% of new hires must be fluent in AI,” Wade Foster, CEO of workflow automation company Zapier, wrote on X in May. At Zapier, it’s been deemed unacceptable to call AI coding tools “too risky” and to distrust AI hiring tools. Workers are expected to build their own AI systems that transform how their jobs are done, according to a framework shared with employees.
While many employees rise to the challenge and experiment with a suite of AI tools, they’re worried about what’s around the corner. AI advancement is unlikely to slow down, especially given President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled AI Action Plan, which pushes for accelerated innovation and decreased regulation.
“Fear is everywhere,” said Daivik Goel, a startup founder who organizes monthly events for tech workers in San Francisco. “Everyone is worried their job is going to be eaten up by GPT-5 or GPT-6.”
In the crosshairs
As CEOs slim down their workforces while juicing productivity with AI, employees feel squeezed and stressed. It’s a far cry from the golden age of tech, when low interest rates drove hiring sprees and companies showered workers with promotions and perks.
“Sentiment among tech workers has remained subdued over the last few years as the low-hiring environment blocks pathways for laid-off workers to find a new job and for new grads to get their foot in the door,” said Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s lead economist. The workplace community’s surveys show that employee confidence in the information sector, which has historically outpaced the overall job market, fell below 50% in 2023, for the first time since Glassdoor began collecting data in 2016, and has hovered around that mark ever since.
“The tech sector has long been attractive for its high rewards, but the recent tech job market demonstrates the high risk that comes with the volatile industry,” Zhao said.
Hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has fallen by more than 50% since 2019, according to VC firm SignalFire, as the companies prioritize bringing in more experienced talent who can effectively use AI.
Meanwhile, companies are hiring fewer workers for roles that AI can do, according to an analysis of job postings by workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs.
“Workers who thought they were safe are now in the crosshairs,” said Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs who found that for roles highly at risk of replacement by AI — database administrators, IT specialists, and data engineers — job openings have declined 31% since 2023.
Managers, too, are being forced out as companies like Microsoft and Scale AI flatten their corporate structures in favor of doing more with less. Employees are being handed AI coding assistants like Cursor and Claude Code and are told to adopt AI or be rendered dinosaurs.
“Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote to employees last month in a memo about how generative AI will impact the company.
The incorporation of AI into everyday work is increasing. In the past two years, the percentage of U.S. employees who say they have used AI in their role a few times a year or more has nearly doubled, from 21% to 40%, according to Gallup.
At the same time, more than half of U.S. workers say they’re worried about the impact of AI in the workplace, and nearly a third believe AI will lead to fewer job opportunities in the long term, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Among all workers, there are persistent signs that AI is becoming sophisticated enough to replace them — and that their CEOs are welcoming it.
“In the next few years, we expect [generative AI and agents] will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy wrote to Amazon employees, sparking outrage in company Slack channels.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI writes more than 30% of new code at the company, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI could soon do the work of a midlevel software engineer making a mid-six-figure salary.
At Salesforce, Marc Benioff said AI is already doing 30% to 50% of all work — a figure that will rise as the company scales up its AI agent offerings to other firms.
“This is by far the fastest growing, most exciting thing we’ve ever done,” Benioff said.
‘AI displaced’ workers
For workers who cite AI as a factor for being laid off, there’s emerging evidence that landing the next role takes longer than it does for those laid off for other reasons. This is birthing the first cohort of “AI-displaced” workers, who are more than twice as likely to face unemployment of longer than 12 months, according to new research by global talent firm LHH.
“AI is accelerating change at a pace many workers can’t yet see but feel all the same,” said John Morgan, president of LHH. “Organizations are evolving faster than people are being prepared to adapt.”
Of 200,000 people surveyed who lost their jobs in 2024, 12.4% cited AI as a factor in their layoff, and 1.4% said AI directly replaced their role. Just over a third of candidates who were laid off due to AI were reemployed within three months, compared with almost 50% for workers laid off for reasons unrelated to AI.
“People displaced by AI are reemployed more slowly,” said Morgan. “They’re more likely to chase roles that no longer exist.”
The impact of AI on the workforce is showing up more clearly in other kinds of data. A survey of more than 2,000 C-suite leaders found that 46% have reduced headcount due to AI, and 54% expect to employ fewer people within five years, signalling that companies might be blaming AI-related layoffs on other factors.
“There’s a lot of hedging and implying going on right now,” Munyikwa said. “But I expect within the next year that CEOs will be more explicit.”
Experts expect the job market to remain volatile for the next few years. Lewtan of Leopard.FYI said she’s already seeing “blips back and forth” as companies experiment with AI, cut jobs, then hire new employees.
In 2022, the fintech company Klarna began shrinking its workforce to cut costs, replacing 800 full-time employees with AI.
But in May, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg that his AI push had gone too far. The company was recruiting customer service agents so that Klarna customers always have the option to speak to a real person.
“What you end up having is lower quality,” Siemiatkowski said. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”