By Queen Wong of the Los Angeles Times
Tech companies that cut jobs and are more leaning towards artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last month that he hopes the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get more efficient by using AI extensively.”
At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, CEO Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work.
Other tech leaders have sounded before. Earlier this year, AI startup Anthropic flashed a big warning. AI was able to wipe out more than half of the entry-level white-collar work in the next 1-5 years.
Ready or not, AI is creating restructuring, displacement, and new roles as the impact of technology on the job market across multiple sectors ripples. AI Frenzy burned a lot of anxiety from workers who feared that their work would be automated. According to a report by the Pew Research Center, about half of U.S. workers are worried about how AI will be used in future workplaces, and few believe that AI will lead to more employment opportunities in the long run.
The growing fear comes as major tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Meta Cut Worker are increasingly efficient and promoting AI tools. Tech companies have deployed AI-powered features that help them generate code, analyze data, develop apps and complete other boring tasks.
“We’re looking forward to seeing you in the future,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of Magnit, based in Folsom, California.
Confusion was discussed
It is still debated how much disruption AI will face in the job market. Executives at Openai, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGpt, have opposed predictions that large white-collar jobs are coming.
“I’m not only totally worried, but there’s a lot of real pain here,” Openai CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with The New York Times’ tech podcast, “Hard Fork.” “But in more cases, we see that the world is heavily employed. The world wants more code than we can write right now.”
New economic policies, including those surrounding tariffs, create more anxiety among businesses, making businesses stumps about who to hire while keeping costs down.
“They are trying to find what we call purple unicorns.
Before the release of CHATGPT in 2022 (a chatbot that can generate text, images, code, etc.). Tech companies were already using AI to curate posts, flagging offensive content and power virtual assistants. However, ChatGpt’s popularity and apparent superpower have launched fierce competition among high-tech companies to release even more powerful generative AI tools. They race first, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers. It is a facility that houses computing equipment, such as servers, which are used to process the information needed to train and maintain AI systems.
Economists and consultants are trying to understand how AI affects engineers, lawyers, analysts and other professions. Some say changes don’t happen immediately when some tech executives expect it.
“There have been many claims about new technology replacing jobs. Such displacements have occurred in the past, but they tend to take longer than engineers normally expect,” an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a February report.
AI develops, tests, and writes code, provides financial advice, and sifts through legal documents. However, the department predicts that the employment of software developers, financial advisors, aerospace engineers and lawyers will grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033.
Worker Bot
High-tech executives promote their ability to write AI code. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said he believes AI can write code in 2025 like a mid-level engineer. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.
Other roles may grow or shrink more slowly for AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects that employment of paralegals and legal assistants will be slower than the average for all occupations, but the roles of credit analysts, adjusters and insurance appraisers will decrease.
McKinsey & Co. is a global management consulting company. The McKinsey Global Institute, a research unit in business and economics, predicts that by 2030, “activities that account for up to 30% of the current working activities of the US economy could be automated.”
The Institute expects demand for the role of science, technology, engineering and mathematics will grow in the US and Europe, but will shrink for customer service and office support.
“Most of that job involves skills that are routine, predictable and easy to do on a machine,” said Anu Madgavkar, partner at McKinsey Global Institute.
Generic AI promotes the possibility that automation will eliminate employment, but AI can also strengthen its technical, creative, legal and business roles, the report says. Madgavkar said there is a lot of “noise and volatility” in recruitment data, but separating “winners and losers” is how people rethink their work flow and work.
The tech company announced 74,716 cuts between January and May, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that offers job hunting and career transition coaching.
Tech companies say they are cutting jobs for a variety of reasons.
Autodesk, which uses software by architects, designers and engineers, has significantly reduced positions of 9% or 1,350 people this year. The San Francisco company cited geopolitical and macroeconomic factors, along with efforts to invest in more AI as reasons for the cuts, according to regulatory filings. Other companies, such as Auckland Fintech Company Block, which cut 8% of its workforce significantly in March, said the cut was strategic, not to “replace people with AI.”
Diana Colella, executive vice president of entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, said she’s scared to not know what her job will look like in a year. Still, she doesn’t think that AI will replace humanity or creativity, but she doesn’t think she will act as an assistant.
Companies are looking for more AI expertise. Autodesk has discovered that mentions of AI in US job surged in 2025, with the fastest growing roles included AI engineers, AI content creators and AI Solutions Architect. The company partnered with Analytics Firm GlobalData to investigate approximately 3 million job openings over two years in industries such as architecture, engineering and entertainment.
Workers have adapted to technology before. When the work of door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen became confused due to an increase in online search, these workers pivoted to sell other products, Cholera said.
“Skills are still important and important,” she said. “They may be used for another product or another service.”
©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Original issue: July 9, 2025, 12:30pm EDT
