{"id":502598,"date":"2026-03-30T00:25:37","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T00:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/502598\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T00:25:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T00:25:37","slug":"why-tech-ceos-suddenly-love-blaming-ai-for-mass-layoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/502598\/","title":{"rendered":"Why tech CEOs suddenly love blaming AI for mass layoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is another way that AI is driving job cuts – and it has nothing to do with the technical abilities of coding tools and chatbots.<\/p>\n

Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft are collectively planning to pour $650bn (\u00a3485bn) into AI in the coming year.<\/p>\n

As executives hunt for ways to try to ease investor shock at those costs, many are landing on payroll, typically tech firms’ single biggest expense.<\/p>\n

Companies are not exactly hiding the connection.<\/p>\n

In February, Amazon executives said they plan to spend $200bn<\/a> over the next year on AI investments, the most out of all the major tech companies. <\/p>\n

At the same time, the firm’s chief financial officer noted that the company would continue to “work very hard to offset that with efficiencies and cost reductions” elsewhere in the company. Since October, Amazon has cut about 30,000 corporate workers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Google, which has conducted several smaller scale job cuts since shedding 12,000 people in 2023, offered similar assurances to investors in February, while discussing its AI investment plans.<\/p>\n

“The more capital we can free up within the organisation to invest, the better we can turn this flywheel of making investments to drive future growth,” chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said.<\/p>\n

Although the expense of, for example, 30,000 corporate Amazon employees is dwarfed by that company’s AI spending plans, firms of this size will now take any opportunity to cut costs, Rohan says.<\/p>\n

“They’re playing a game of inches,” Rohan says of cuts at Big Tech firms. “If you can even slightly tune the machine, that is helpful.”<\/p>\n

Hoecker says cutting jobs also signals to stock market investors worried about the “real and huge” cost of AI development that executives are not blithely writing blank cheques.<\/p>\n

“It shows some discipline,” says Hoecker. “Maybe laying off people isn’t going to make much of a dent in that bill, but by creating a little bit of cashflow, it helps.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is another way that AI is driving job cuts – and it has nothing to do with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502599,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-502598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502598\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}