A growing chorus of executives has put white collar workforces on notice: Their jobs are at risk of being wiped out by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Yet above that din is a more complicated picture of how AI is currently affecting hiring.<\/p>\n
Direct evidence of an acceleration in human obsolescence remains scant so far. In a report this week<\/a>, the job and hiring consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas said cuts spurred by President Donald Trump\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency remained the leading cause of job losses \u2014 especially for government, nonprofit and other sectors supported by federal funds \u2014 followed by general economic and market conditions.<\/p>\n Out of 286,679 planned layoffs so far this year, only 20,000 were linked to automation, the firm said \u2014 with just 75 explicitly tied to AI implementation.<\/p>\n \u201cFar less is happening than people imagine,\u201d said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president at the consultancy, referring to the impact of AI on the broader workforce in the U.S. \u201cThere are roles that can be significantly changed by AI right now, but I\u2019m not talking to too many HR leaders who say AI is replacing jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n That belies recent comments made by some of America\u2019s most prominent executives about the impact that artificial intelligence is expected to have. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned<\/a> that AI would \u201creduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains\u201d over time. However, he did not lay out what that time frame might look like. He also said more people would likely be needed to do \u201cother types of jobs,\u201d ones that AI may help generate.<\/p>\n And while The Wall Street Journal reported comments from Ford CEO Jim Farley this week<\/a> that AI would replace \u201cliterally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,\u201d a clip<\/a> of Farley\u2019s presentation offered more context. The automotive executive was speaking about beefing up America\u2019s blue-collar workforce, and appeared to be repeating the warning about a white-collar wipeout issued by the CEO of the AI company Anthropic<\/a> \u2014 a contention that is still being debated<\/a>. (A representative for Ford did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Experts say the current era of AI is affecting the job market in more roundabout ways. Many firms are currently under tremendous pressure to cut costs given the generally uncertain economic environment<\/a> spurred by the heavy cost of Trump\u2019s tariff policy and worries about rising inflation. As a result, some companies are diverting spending that would otherwise be going to hiring more employees and shifting it toward AI software.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s basically a blank check to go out and buy these AI tools,\u201d said Josh Bersin, CEO of The Josh Bersin Company workforce consultancy. \u201cThen they go out and say, as far as head count: No more hiring. Just, \u2018stop.\u2019 So that immediately freezes the job market.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the most high-profile examples is Shopify, whose CEO told employees<\/a> they must now prove why they \u201ccannot get what they want done using AI\u201d before asking for more employees and resources.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?\u201d Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke wrote in a memo sent to employees in March. \u201cThis question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.\u201d<\/p>\n The chief executive of language learning app Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, issued a similar edict in May<\/a>, writing that the firm would gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle and that a budget for new employees would only be given \u201cif a team cannot automate more of their work.\u201d<\/p>\n Enough firms hedging in this way, alongside a wider economic slowdown, may indeed be suppressing overall hiring, especially in business and professional services<\/a>.<\/p>\n But those trends do not amount to large-scale replacement of existing workers by AI agents.<\/p>\n Then there are the firms creating the AI tools themselves \u2014 the ones other businesses are ostensibly looking to purchase and deploy to automate their workforces. These AI developers, including Dell, Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, have been shedding workers not tied to AI product development and shifting resources toward those who are. If AI is causing job losses, it\u2019s not because it\u2019s doing someone else\u2019s job. It\u2019s because budgets \u2014 and demands on the bottom line \u2014 are changing.<\/p>\n The state of hiring at Microsoft is illustrative. Over the past several weeks, the tech giant \u2014 whose stock has surged 17% year to date thanks in part to the popularity of its Copilot AI tool \u2014 has announced job cuts affecting some 15,000 roles, or about 7% of its workforce.<\/p>\n In this case, some human replacement does appear to be occurring: CEO Satya Nadella said recently that as much as 30% of the company\u2019s code is now written by AI \u2014 something Bloomberg News confirmed in a report showing<\/a> software engineering roles made up more than 40% of the roughly 2,000 positions cut in one of the recent layoff rounds.<\/p>\n