


AI and the Ax: Corporate Leaders Brace for Cuts While Workers Hope for the Best
An increasing number of top executives now openly admit what many workers have long feared: the rise of artificial intelligence could mean sweeping job cuts. Ford CEO Jim Farley has suggested that up to half of U.S. workers could be displaced. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicts a mass replacement of white-collar roles, with unemployment potentially rising to 20 percent.
Some companies aren’t waiting to find out. IBM has already replaced hundreds of HR positions with AI systems. Microsoft links its recent layoffs to internal AI automation. At Shopify and JPMorgan, new hires are expected to perform tasks that can’t easily be handed over to an algorithm. At Amazon, robots roam warehouses with growing confidence, and leadership is preparing for headcount reductions.
Yet not all voices in tech are sounding the alarm. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Brad Lightcap maintain that AI won’t cause mass unemployment but will instead enhance human productivity. Some companies, like IBM, are offsetting cuts by hiring in IT and sales. Others are merging roles, turning product managers into part-time coders.
The outlook for the labor market remains murky. Companies are quietly automating jobs while publicly extolling the virtues of “efficiency” and “new opportunities.” What’s clear is that personnel strategies are shifting. For workers, this means mounting pressure to prove they bring more to the table than an algorithm ever could.