Is the Irish economy sleepwalking into an Artificial Intelligence driven jobs recession as several of the global tech giants based here announce thousands of redundancies?<\/p>\n
Although no new losses for Ireland have been mentioned, it seems to be only the first of a series of lay offs \u2013 both voluntary and otherwise \u2013 that have the potential to slash their workforces.<\/p>\n
Yesterday<\/a>, Meta announced that around 10% of its worldwide \u2018team\u2019 of close to 80,000 will be shed from May 20. Microsoft also said on Thursday that it is going to offer voluntary redundancy to 8,750, equal to 7%, of its American staff. There are 125,000, which is just under half of Microsoft\u2019s global payroll of 228,000.<\/p>\n What is alarming about the layoffs is that they are not connected \u2013 as was once almost invariably the case \u2013 to the company being in difficulties.\u00a0 Quite the opposite, for as Bloomberg<\/a> reported yesterday Meta is at the start of a massive $120+ billion programme to expand its AI capacity.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta and others clearly see huge potential and dividends in AI, and Bloomberg notes that its redundancy package is \u201cdriven by infrastructure costs and employee compensation, particularly for the artificial intelligence experts it\u2019s been hiring at eye-popping pay levels.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg, who has previously referred to the \u201cflattening\u201d impact of AI on Meta and tech operations generally has openly stated that this means replacing \u201cbig teams\u201d with \u201ca single very talented person.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Which is grand if you are the single talented person, not so much if you are a latte-sipping laptop jockey who now finds him or herself in the same place as the cottage weaver replaced in 19th century England by the Spinning Jenny.<\/p>\n Mustafa Suleyman<\/a>, who is the Microsoft CEO in charge of its AI transformation, has forecast that almost ALL tech jobs from marketing to project management to accountants and even lawyers will be replaced by AI before the middle of 2027.\u00a0 If this does not scare the pants off you, then it should.<\/p>\n There has been no specific reference in the announcements of the redundancies to either Meta\u2019s current Irish workforce of around 1,800 or to the approximately 6,000 employed here by Microsoft and its major subsidiary LinkedIn.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta (formerly Facebook) has already reduced its staff here by around 400 since 2023. Microsoft job losses in Ireland have been a more modest 240 since 2020. One suspects that was only the warm up.<\/p>\n Overall, there have been around 2,300 lay-offs by the main tech companies here since 2023 when there was an initial wave attributed to the beginning of the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the overall tech sector and which hit employees of Google, Amazon, Stripe, TikTok, X and others.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is important of course to place all of this in the context that more than 100,000 people continue to be employed in the Information, Communications and Technology sector as defined by the Industrial Development Authority. That, however, will clearly not continue to be the case especially given the current relationship of the Irish state to the tech corporations.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have looked previously<\/a> at the likely impact of AI here \u2013 not just in the tech area \u2013 and how in 2025 it had already begun to have a noticeable impact on employment levels particularly among the youngest age cohort of 15 \u2013 24 where \u2018youth unemployment\u2019 had risen to the EU average of 14%.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I noted that Microsoft had notified the Department of Enterprise last year of a \u2018collective redundancy\u2019 plan and that the replacement of direct human jobs was being reflected in a noticeable fall in the number of work permits issued to companies in the ICT sector. The number of issues was down by 50% in 2025 compared to 2024.<\/p>\n If we take one example, Meta, we can see that the number of permits issued fell from 253 in 2022 to a low of 83 in 2025 and that just 22 permits were issued to Microsoft in the first quarter of this year.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the past ten years Meta\/Facebook were issued with 1,586 work permits for persons coming to work for them here from outside of Ireland and the EU.\u00a0 That is equal to almost 90% of their current workforce.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While not all of those who have come here have stayed in Ireland it is indicative of the trend by overseas tech companies to recruit almost exclusively from overseas. That continued even through the travel restrictions imposed during the Covid Panic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While the state was supposedly mostly in lock down for the greater part of 2020 and 2021, Microsoft was issued with 443 work permits for people travelling here to work for them from outside of the EU\/EEA.<\/p>\n Which is indicative of the unhealthy \u2013 in my humble view \u2013 dependency of the Irish state on the tech and other overseas corporations which will also be impacted by AI as we have seen this week in the announcement of redundancies at Pfizer.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet, the official strategy found in Ireland\u2019s National AI Strategy<\/a> and Skills Insights 2026<\/a> appears to be unremittingly and perhaps even naively optimistic. Allied to that is the clear evidence, as found in the business sections of the serious mainstream media, that the AI sector here is like the tech sector overall and driven by the same overseas corporate actors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If one delves into the success stories of Irish AI start ups \u2013 trumpeted by some as signposts to how AI could become a \u2018game changer\u2019 in boosting indigenous control of the Brave New World \u2013 one almost invariably finds that they are quickly bought by the big players and\/or largely dependent on overseas investment capital.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Which means that the Irish state and the financial sector are seemingly on course to miss yet another opportunity to invest in what there is of indigenous enterprise in favour of their historical reliance on property and downstream beneficiaries of the crumbs that fall from the table of Foreign Direct Investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is no doubt that AI is going to have a massive impact on every aspect of human life very quickly. The global economy is going to be turned on its head and it will result in huge numbers of job losses.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are great potential benefits from all of this and anyone, even a tech Troglodyte such as myself can already see this in day to day life. However, if the AI revolution does quickly lead to huge levels of job replacement (and only a minority will be handsomely awarded as will be the voluntarily redundant in Menlo Park) then we might be in for a rough ride.<\/p>\n How all of this plays out in the Irish economy with its peculiarly dependent economy and radically altered demographic make up largely the consequence of that, shall at the very least be \u2018interesting.\u2019\u00a0 Let us hope not in the Chinese sense of the meaning of that word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is the Irish economy sleepwalking into an Artificial Intelligence driven jobs recession as several of the global tech…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[220,218,72,61,60,1687,1226,1071],"class_list":["post-417892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-job-losses","tag-meta","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}