More and more companies now seem to be saying that they’ll reduce their workforces with the advent of AI.
British Telecom CEO Chief Executive Allison Kirkby has said that advances in artificial intelligence could deepen significant job cuts under way at the company. Kirkby told Financial Times that BT’s plans to cull more than 40,000 jobs and strip out 3 billion pounds ($4 billion) of costs by the end of the decade “did not reflect the full potential of AI”.
“Depending on what we learn from AI . . . there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade,” the FT quoted her as saying.
There are other companies that have been saying that AI could reduce their workforce in the coming years. Amazon has recently said that it expects its workforce to shrink over the next few years because of AI. “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had told employees last week in a memo.
Other companies too have indicated AI-related job cuts. Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman has warned his employees that AI is coming for their jobs. InMobi has said that 80 of the coding at the company will be automated with AI, and this will lead to people losing jobs. Salesforce and Klarna have already made changes to how they hire based on the gains they’re seeing from AI.
All this while, AI experts have been saying that while AI will take away many jobs, it could also create many more. But thus far, there are few tangible new jobs that AI has created. It remains to be seen if AI can actually create new kinds of jobs and roles, but unless AI job creation keeps pace with how AI will be able to eliminate roles, it could cause a serious job crisis in the coming years.