SAN FRANCISCO – Top executives at some of the largest American companies have a warning for their workers: Artificial intelligence is a threat to your job.
CEOs from Amazon to IBM, Salesforce and JPMorgan Chase are telling their employees to prepare for disruption as AI either transforms or eliminates their jobs in the future.
AI will “improve inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of our robots,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a Tuesday public memo that predicted his company’s corporate workforce will shrink “in the next few years.” He joins a string of other top executives that have recently sounded the alarm about AI’s impact in the workplace.
Economists say there aren’t yet strong signs that AI is driving widespread layoffs across industries. But there is evidence that workers across the United States are increasingly using AI in their jobs and the technology is starting to transform some roles such as computer programming, marketing and customer service. At the same time, CEOs are under pressure to show they are embracing new technology and getting results – incentivizing attention-grabbing predictions that can create additional uncertainty for workers.
“It’s a message to shareholders and board members as much as it is to employees,” Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies the impact of AI, said of the CEO announcements, noting that when one company makes a bold AI statement, others typically follow. “You’re projecting that you’re out in the future, that you’re embracing and adopting this so much that the footprint [of your company] will look different.”
Some CEOs fear they could be ousted from their job within two years if they don’t deliver measurable AI-driven business gains, a Harris Poll survey conducted for software company Dataiku showed.
Tech leaders have sounded some of the loudest warnings – in line with their interest in promoting AI’s power. At the same time, the industry has been shedding workers the last few years after big hiring sprees during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
At Amazon, Jassy told the company’s workers that AI would in “the next few years” reduce some corporate roles like customer service representatives and software developers, but also change work for those in the company’s warehouses.
IBM, which recently announced job cuts, said it replaced a couple hundred human resource workers with AI “agents” for repetitive tasks such as onboarding and scheduling interviews. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the company is building AI that might be able to do what some human workers do by the end of the year.
“We, at Meta as well as the other companies working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be sort of a mid-level engineer at your company,” Zuckerberg said. “Over time we’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps … is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, boldly predicted last month that half of all white-collar entry-level jobs may be eliminated by AI within five years.
Leaders in other sectors have also chimed in. Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s CEO of consumer and community banking, told an investor meeting last month that AI could help the bank cut headcount in operations and account services by 10 percent. The CEO of BT Group Allison Kirkby suggested that advances in AI would mean deeper cuts at the British telecom company.
Even CEOs who reject the idea of AI replacing humans on a massive scale are warning workers to prepare for disruption. Jensen Huang, CEO of AI chip designer Nvidia said last month, “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at Bloomberg’s tech conference this month that AI will help engineers be more productive but that his company would still add more human engineers to its team. Meanwhile, Microsoft is planning more layoffs amid heavy investment in AI, Bloomberg reported this week. Other tech leaders at Shopify, Duolingo and Box have told workers they are now required to use AI at their jobs, and some will monitor usage as part of performance reviews.
Some companies have indicated that AI could slow hiring. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently called Amodei’s prognosis “alarmist” on an earnings call, but on the same call chief operating and financial officer Robin Washington said that an AI agent has helped to reduce hiring needs and bring $50 million in savings.
Despite corporate leaders’ warnings, economists don’t yet see broad signs that AI is driving humans out of work. “We have little evidence of layoffs so far,” said Columbia Business School professor Laura Veldkamp, whose research explores how companies’ use of AI affects the economy. “What I’d look for are new entrants with an AI-intensive business model, entering and putting the existing firms out of business.”
Some researchers suggest there is evidence AI is playing a role in the drop in openings for some specific jobs, like computer programming, where AI tools that generate code have become standard. Google’s Pichai said last year that more than a quarter of new code at the company was initially suggested by AI.
Many other workers are increasingly turning to AI tools, for everything from creating marketing campaigns to helping with research – with or without company guidance. The percentage of American employees who use AI daily has doubled in the last year to 8 percent, according to a Gallup poll released this week. Those using it at least a few times a week jumped from 12 percent to 19 percent.
Some AI researchers say the poll may not actually reflect the total number of workers using AI as many may use it without disclosing it.
“I would suspect the numbers are actually higher,” said Ethan Mollick, co-director of Wharton School of Business’ generative AI Labs, because some workers avoid disclosing AI usage, worried they would be seen as less capable or breaching corporate policy. Only 30 percent of respondents to the Gallup survey said that their company had general guidelines or formal policies for using AI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, one of the most popular chatbots, has more than 500 million weekly users around the globe, the company has said.
It is still unclear what benefits companies are reaping from employees’ use of AI, said Arvind Karunakaran, a faculty member of Stanford University’s Center for Work, Technology, and Organization.
“Usage does not necessarily translate into value,” he said. “Is it just increasing productivity in terms of people doing the same task quicker or are people now doing more high value tasks as a result?”
Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, said predictions of huge productivity gains from AI remain unproven.
“Right now, the technology companies are predicting there will be a 30% productivity gain. We haven’t yet experienced that, and it’s not clear if that gain would come from cost reduction … or because humans are more productive.”
The pace of AI adoption is expected to accelerate even further if more companies use advanced tools such as AI agents and they deliver on their promise of automating work, Mollick said. AI labs are hoping to prove their agents are reliable within the next year or so, which will be a bigger disrupter to jobs, he said.
While the debate continues over whether AI will eliminate or create jobs, Mollick said “the truth is probably somewhere in between.”
“A wave of disruption is going to happen,” he said.
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