Laying off workers for AI is a more fashionable excuse than actual business mandates, research suggests

The reality is more complicated, and businesses are trying to let Wall Street know that they are making themselves more efficient in preparation for the wider changes that AI brings.

A new report from the career website on Wednesday said that technical job postings in July actually fell 36% since early 2020, but AI 1 wasn’t the most obvious factor in stalling rebounds.

The ChatGpt debut in late 2022 also addresses the end of employment during the pandemic era, making it difficult to isolate the role of AI in the subsequent employment slump.

“We are in this period of weaker tech job markets, but other areas of the job market are cooling at a similar pace,” says Brendon Bernard, an economist at the actual employment lab. “High-tech job offers have evolved quite a bit like other economies, including links to jobs that don’t actually have that much exposure to AI.”

The 2025 Tech CEO Layoff Notification template includes AI Pivot

The nuance is not necessarily clear from technology layoff emails over the past six months. This often leads to a nod to AI in addition to expressing sympathy.

When he announced the massive layoffs earlier this year, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach invited employees to consider larger photos.

Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explained that the need to shift resources to “accelerate investment” for AI is one of the reasons the company had to cut 1,350 workers or about 9%.

The “Why are you doing this” section of Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz’s 5% employment cut announcement states that cybersecurity companies need to “accelerate implementation and efficiency” AI investments.

“AI helps flatten the adoption curve and innovate faster from ideas to products,” writes Kurtz.

It’s not just US companies. India’s leading tech company Tata Consultancy Services Recently, 12,000 layoffs, or 2% of the workforce, have been characterized as part of a transition to a “future-preparable organization” that will readjust employees and “deploy AI at scale for clients and ourselves.”

Even the Japanese parent company of Endy and Glassdoor cited AI shifts in 1,300 layoff notifications on job hunting and workplace review sites.

Not an alternative, but AI spending is a more common factor

Microsoftannounced on Wednesday that it plans to release its fourth quarter revenues. Layoffs of approximately 15,000 workers Even if those profits have skyrocketed this year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees last week that the layoffs “has been heavy” on him, but positioned them as an opportunity to rethink the company’s mission in the AI era.

The promise of a more lean approach is welcomed by the technology giants who are trying to justify the enormous amounts of capital spending to pay Wall Street, particularly the data centers, chips and other components needed to power AI technology.

“I think that restructuring of this kind of double-edged sword is something that many high-tech giants have encountered in this age of AI. There, we have to find the right balance between maintaining the right personnel, but artificial intelligence can also come to the forefront.

Google Last week, he said he would raise the capital expenditure budget by another $10 billion to $85 billion. Microsoft will soon outline similar guidance.

Tracking the role of AI in job exchange is difficult

One thing is clear to Hayes. Microsoft job openings will improve our profit margin outlook for fiscal year 2026, which began in July.

However, it can be difficult to measure what these broader tech industry layoffs mean for the employment outlook for tech workers.

“Will AI replace some of these jobs? Absolutely,” Hayes said. “But it’s also going to create a lot of work. Employees who can leverage artificial intelligence and help businesses innovate and create new products and services will be in high demand.”

He pointed out Metaplatform, the parent company of Facebook. Instagramwhich is enough to offer a lucrative package to recruit elite AI scientists from competitors such as Openai.

The reports actually released Wednesday show that AI experts are better than standard software engineers, but even those jobs aren’t where they were.

“Even though machine learning engineers, a type of standard AI job, are actually falling over their peak in 2022, those jobs are still markedly outweighing their pre-pandemic locations,” said economist Bernard. “They are also affected by the cyclical ups and downs of the sector.”

Economists watch the impact of AI on entry-level technology jobs

In fact, high-tech employment has fallen particularly sharply in AI hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston and Seattle.

However, looking at the least likely tech workers to be hired in more detail, we found that people with at least five years of experience have actually had the deepest impact on entry-level jobs in the tech industry, and are better.

The decline in employment was the most sharpest in entry-level high-tech industry jobs, including marketing, management assistance and HR. All of these involve the strength and overlapping tasks of modern generation AI tools that help you create documents and images.

“The sudden tech adoption eruption began before the new era of AI, but the requirements for shift experiences have been something that has happened recently,” Bernard said.

Microsoft is betting its future with AI at work, There was a unique researcher Find out what jobs are most vulnerable to the current strengths of AI technology. At the top of the list are knowledge work such as language interpreters and translators, as well as representatives of historians, passenger crews, salespeople, writers and customer service.

On the other hand, it was followed by LB physicians or healthcare workers of blood, followed by nursing assistants, workers who remove dangerous materials, painters and embalmers.