Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Well, while numerous businesses have recently attributed staff cuts to AI, experts argue that something else might be happening.
“I think this idea of ‘Oh my gosh, we’re all gonna get laid off,’ – that is totally overblown,” Taylor Riggs of the Fox Business Network told Audacy Wednesday. “But in the interim, I’m watching things on the periphery just to see how this all turns out.”
Still, she noted that AI company Anthropic announced “a big new AI tool that is now automating a lot of legal tasks and things that are sort of entry white-collar jobs,” that has rocked the stock market. Riggs added that the Anthropic launch “comes as you have a lot of rising unemployment for recent college grads who are under the age of 25.”
Fox News polling numbers published this week show that 60% of Americans believe that AI development is moving too fast. Pew Research Center data from last September showed that Americans were more concerned than excited about AI.
There have also been headlines about layoffs attributed to AI, including online retail giant Amazon’s recent layoffs, as well as tech company Pinterest.
CBS News reported that Dow, Indeed and Glassdoor, Chegg, CrowdStrike, HP and Workday are other companies who have linked recent staff cuts to AI.
Audacy reported last August that AI was impacting younger workers entering software and customer service jobs, citing research out of Stanford University. By November, layoffs had reached a 22-year high, in part attributed to AI.
Challenger Gray & Christmas, an executive coaching firm, said that AI was one of the factors that caused the technology sector to lead private sector job cuts in the fourth quarter of last year. At 154,445 cuts last year, that was up 15% compared to 2024. AI was responsible for 54,836 announced layoff plans.
“Technology has been pivoting to both developing and implementing artificial intelligence much more quickly than any other industry,” the firm said. “This coupled with over-hiring over the last decade created a wave of job loss in the industry,” said Challenger.
There is another layer to AI layoffs, though. Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for the Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told CBS News that companies are under pressure to demonstrate gains from pouring money into AI in recent years.
In light of all this AI news, a report from Oxford Economics released this week had an interesting finding. It said that “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale and we doubt that unemployment rates will be pushed up heavily by AI over the next few years.”
According to the report, if labor was being replaced by AI at scale, productivity growth should be accelerating. Productivity generally isn’t showing that acceleration. However, that could change in the case of “fast take up by a wide range of firms,” of AI, the report added.
Another report released this month by Gartner, a business insights and technology company, predicts that 50% of companies that attributed headcount cuts to AI will actually rehire human staff by next year.
“While AI-driven layoffs have captured attention, the reality is more complex,” said Senior Director Analyst Kathy Ross in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice. “Most recent workforce reductions were influenced by broader economic conditions rather than automation alone. As organizations encounter the limits of AI and rising customer expectations, they will need to reinvest in human talent to sustain service quality and growth.”
Writing for the Harvard Business Review in a piece published this week, David S. Duncan offered his perspective on the realities of using AI in the workplace. He said the results haven’t been what he expected, and that they favor workers with experience.
“I assumed generative AI would help less-experienced workers punch above their weight, that it would act like a sudden infusion of capability,” he said. “Instead, I was watching the opposite happen: The tools amplified existing judgment rather than compensating for its absence.”
Duncan further explained that this creates a sort of paradox for employers. Implementing AI increases the need for judgment, he said, but it “erodes the experiences that produce it,” for less experienced workers.
Audacy covered research released by the Brookings Institution last month that came to a similar conclusion regarding the use of AI in education.
“AI’s ease of use and its reinforcing outcomes (improved grades with little effort), combined with human tendencies toward shortcuts and the transactional nature of schooling (completing assignments for grades) drive cognitive offloading and dependency, atrophying students’ learning – particularly their mastery of foundational knowledge and critical thinking,” said Brookings.
There’s also the question of whether AI is really up to taking on the many jobs it will ostensibly replace. Emily Potosky, senior director of research in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice, doesn’t think its quite there.
“AI simply isn’t mature enough to fully replace the expertise, empathy, and judgment that human agents provide,” she said. “Relying solely on AI right now is premature and could lead to unintended consequences.”
According to CBS News, Lisa Simon, chief economist at Revelio Labs, said that job loss attributed to AI might not always really be due to AI at all.
“Companies want to get rid of departments that no longer serve them,” she said. “And I think, for now, AI is a little bit of a front and an excuse.”
Going forward, she said that AI might have more of an impact in hiring than layoffs as AI tools help existing employees with their work. Gallup polling from last month found that 12% of U.S. employees already use AI on a daily basis.