You’ve probably heard the speculation about this idea at some point over the last year or two. As AI gets more competent at specific tasks, some observers are becoming worried that the fears of AI job losses may indeed come true. In fact there may be some signs that it’s already happening.
Software company Salesforce started laying off thousands of people last year due to its increased use of artificial intelligence. The company quietly started laying off hundreds more earlier this month…
“It’s been eight of the most exciting months of my career,” Benioff said on a podcast, according to Business Insider. “I was able to rebalance my head count on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”
In case you don’t speak Silicon Valley executive jargon, Benioff was celebrating the fact that he was able to fire nearly half of his customer support division, thanks to artificial intelligence agents.
It’s a small example but it’s not the only place where employees are being encouraged to lean into AI. The question is where does that end?
Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next—a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive…
In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, estimated that it would eliminate “literally half of all white-collar workers” in a decade. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, revealed that “my little group chat with my tech-CEO friends” has a bet about the inevitable date when a billion-dollar company is staffed by just one person… Other companies, including Meta, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS, which have recently announced layoffs, have framed them more euphemistically in sunny reports to investors about the rise of “automation” and “head count trending down.” Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.
Short answer, YES