Learning to work with AI
With AI being credited for doing more than half the work at Salesforce by chief executive officer, Marc Benioff, a growing number of companies have been firing teams in response to the rise in AI adoption. Here’s a running list of layoffs.
Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos space venture, is axing 1,000 jobs, nearly 10% of workforce, to restructure for automation.
Bumble is laying off 30% of its team, about 240 people, to better compete with AI-powered dating apps, like Hinge.
Business Insider is cutting 21% of its team as it goes all-in on AI to respond to the decline in Google search traffic.
Dropbox reduced staff by 20% at the end of last year in its pivot to AI offerings.
Google, which AI summaries are accelerating the demise of search traffic, has offered early retirement to its Search, Ads and Commerce teams.
IBM slashes nearly 9,000 jobs, mostly in human resources as AI agents automate administrative tasks.
Intel plans to layoff up to 20% of its factory workers as it pivots to AI. The company had over 100,000 employees as of the end of last year.
JP Morgan Chase is expecting a 10% reduction in operations staff as the company tells managers to do more with less, lean into AI, and focus on efficiencies.
Meta which has been poaching talent from OpenAI and just hired Github cofounder Nate Friedman to head its Super Intelligence Labs with Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, has been cutting 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce.
Microsoft eliminated 15,000 jobs this year, nearly 7% of its workforce, despite strong earnings with chief executive officer Satya Nadella citing 20% to 30% of its code now written by AI tools. Reductions are being made across sales, marketing, product and engineering teams, gaming division, and management layers.
More coming
Ford chief executive officer Jim Farley said AI will wipe out half of all white collar jobs in the coming years. Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei said AI could spike employment by 20%.
Backlash has been significant against companies announcing they’re going AI first, including Duolingo, Klarna and Shopify.
Amazon, which just celebrated deploying its one million robot across its fulfillment centers, told Fast Company that despite widely-reported rumors, it has not put 14,000 positions on the chopping block. And although Block, formerly known as Square, is eliminating 1,000 jobs, about 8% of staff, its co-founder and chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, said the move is not to replace workers with AI.
The outlier
Despite mass layoffs, one engineer, Soham Parekh, managed not only to land several tech jobs, but work them simultaneously. He became a meme last week when he got caught and his ability to beat recruiters–often powered by AI–went viral.
Box chief executive officer Aaron Levie chimed in, “If Soham immediately comes clean and says he was working to train an AI Agent for knowledge work, he raises at $100M pre by the weekend.”
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