AI probably won’t take your job anytime soon, at least not all of it, but companies are already using it to cut headcounts and squeeze more labor out of fewer people. As businesses integrate AI more deeply into their operations, the people who actually do the work are being told to absorb the disruption while executives and consultants recast the same old hierarchy as “productivity.” AI was the top reason companies cited for job cuts in April for the second month in a row, according to the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Who Pays for the Upgrade
Microsoft said in a report released last week that “The anxiety around AI at work is real—from fears of job loss to the pressure to keep up with rapidly evolving technology.” That pressure lands on workers, not on the companies deploying the tools. Experts said the reality of AI in the workplace is not black-and-white and that companies are using AI to automate certain parts of jobs rather than replace entire positions. Business leaders are recalibrating existing jobs around responsibilities that can only be done by a human, and thousands of jobs have been cut in the process, with Cloudflare and Coinbase among the latest companies to announce staff cuts.
Alexis Krivkovich, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company who helps lead the company’s People and Organizational Performance Practice, said, “It’s very few jobs that are actually entirely automated away by the current AI and robotics technology that’s out there.” Krivkovich said AI is technically capable of automating 57% of work-related activities, but that percentage is spread across “pieces and parts” of various jobs and responsibilities across an organization. In other words, the machinery is not replacing whole lives so much as breaking work into fragments and handing the fragments to software, while the human side is left to absorb the rest.
Nitin Seth, the cofounder of digital services and consulting firm Incedo, said his company helps clients boost productivity using AI by at least 20% to 25% without reducing staff at the same scale because AI only handles certain parts of different roles. Seth said, “You can’t take one quarter of Lisa, one quarter of Jessica, one quarter of Nitin and one quarter of somebody else and make it one person.” The line is meant to sound technical, but it also describes the logic of the workplace apparatus: slice up labor, keep the bosses in control, and call the result efficiency.
The Tech Sector as Test Lab
The fear that AI will take jobs has disrupted the tech industry the most. Software engineers have increasingly embraced the technology to help write code, with 90% of tech workers using AI in their jobs, according to a September survey from Google’s research arm. Stack Overflow found that 84% of respondents either use AI tools in the software development process or plan to. But a software engineer’s job involves much more than coding, including reviewing code, designing systems, troubleshooting problems and deciding what to build.
Companies may adjust job titles to reflect that, according to Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic. Cherny said in March, “I think by the end of the year, we’re going to start to see the idea of software engineering go away.” He said the term “builder” might be a more fitting title as the job expands and writing lines of code becomes a smaller part of it. The rebranding is tidy enough, but the power relation stays the same: the work changes, the title changes, and the people doing it are expected to keep pace.
Sujata Sridharan, who most recently worked at the fintech firm Bolt and has spent roughly a decade as a software engineer, said that although she uses AI, her work still requires problem solving and critical thinking. She said the difference is that the execution now involves a mix of writing code and prompting AI. Sridharan said, “With AI being used more and more, the skills that are actually required on the job have shifted to, are you able to recognize what is the right code quality? Are you able to problem solve?”
Layoffs, Metrics, and the Next Round
AI has been cited in more than 49,000 job cuts so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Block, the financial tech company behind Square and Cash App, laid off 40% of its staff this year because AI has allowed it to do more with smaller teams. Coinbase is reducing its staff by about 14% in part because AI is enabling engineers to “ship in days what used to take a team weeks,” its CEO said Tuesday. Cloudflare said the way the company operates has completely changed and that its AI use has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone.
Dan Priest, PwC’s US chief AI officer, said it’s possible there will be “some job disruption on the horizon,” but he said he isn’t seeing mass layoffs at most companies and whole categories of jobs aren’t currently at risk. Microsoft said in its report, which surveyed 20,000 workers using AI across 10 countries, that most companies haven’t yet adjusted employee metrics and incentives to fit with how AI is changing work. Instead, many are grappling with which skills are needed from human workers.
Anthropic on Tuesday announced new AI agents built for financial work, including building pitchbooks and crafting credit memos. Umesh Ramakrishnan, cofounder and chief strategy officer at executive search firm Kingsley Gate, said, “It starts at the bottom, and it keeps going up. And I don’t know where it stops.” That uncertainty is being managed from above, while workers are left to adapt to a system that keeps reorganizing labor around the needs of capital and the latest machine.