CEOs want you to embrace AI. Many are also citing it as a reason for job cuts.
That disconnect is becoming harder for some to ignore.
Lis Cooper, a 30-year-old in Melbourne, recently left their job as a data analyst after growing uneasy about AI. The tools they were asked to use weren’t as effective as humans so far, Cooper said, yet every interaction felt like contributing to technology that could eventually replace them.
“It was an impossible situation to navigate,” Cooper said.
Across industries, execs are encouraging workers to embrace AI via hackathons, trainings, and performance reviews that score AI use.
Yet many tech companies leading the AI push are also announcing layoffs, reorgs, and hiring slowdowns, often while pointing to efficiency gains or funneling resources toward AI. Those moves could backfire by making employees more fearful and less willing to embrace the technology, workplace observers told Business Insider.
This year, major companies including Snap, Block, and Cisco have tied job cuts to AI.
This month, Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, saying the cuts would offset “other investments” it was making. The message was clear: Funding tech spending would require trimming workers. Meta also said that it was shifting more than 7,000 employees onto AI-focused projects.
The changes “include layoffs, open role closures, and moving thousands of employees to business critical priorities across the company,” a spokesperson said.
While employers are pushing workers toward AI, there is bubbling pessimism about the tech’s potential to reshape the workforce. In an Economist/YouGov survey of about 1,500 US adults released in May, about three-quarters said they were at least somewhat worried about AI taking jobs.
Workers are often far more skeptical about AI than executives are, largely because staffers fear it could put their jobs at risk, said Mark Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business.
Ma was part of a research team that analyzed more than 20 million Glassdoor reviews and thousands of corporate earnings calls to compare how workers and C-suite bigwigs talk about AI. The takeaway: Employers that pair AI rollouts with job cuts risk undermining the productivity gains they hope to achieve because workers’ layoff fears can discourage them from embracing the technology.
“The job security concern really dominates,” Ma said. “It is so big that even with such significant benefits, most employees are still resisting actually using AI or learning AI.”
That resistance was on full display at several commencement addresses this month, as speakers drew boos from students facing a tough job market.
The perceived threat of AI can be particularly intense for people who closely tie their identities to their work, said Wendy Turner-Williams, cofounder and chief data & AI officer at SymphraAI, an AI consulting firm.
“People are rejecting the tone-deafness of leaders who talk about AI like it’s a productivity miracle, while it’s the workers who experience job loss,” she said.
‘This new world’
The pushback comes as some leaders are getting frank about the reshuffling underway at their companies.
This month, Standard Chartered said it would cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, as the UK bank seeks to replace what group CEO Bill Winters described as “lower-value human capital,” with technology.
The message rankled some workers, and Winters later apologized on LinkedIn for his word choice.
Winters “has long been clear about the need to transform our workplace into a skills-led organization that offers our people future opportunities in higher skill, long-term employment,” a spokesperson said.
He’s hardly alone in thinking AI could take on some work people now do. In a global survey of 825 execs by the consulting firm Mercer in October, 99% of C-suite leaders said they expect AI to translate to at least some job cuts in the next two years.
Lately, some executives have tempered the AI doomsaying. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he was “delighted to be wrong” about the effect AI has had on entry-level desk jobs. And Nvidia chief Jensen Huang recently dismissed some CEOs’ take that AI will cause a bloodbath in the job market.
Most leaders don’t set out to swap workers for AI, said Larry Gadea, CEO and founder of workplace software company Envoy. The goal, especially for venture-backed companies, is instead to win in the marketplace, he said.
Companies are trying to determine “who’s going to fit in in this new world,” he said, and that will be defined by how willing people are to embrace AI.
Surveillance, scrutiny, and AI pressure
At some companies, the pressure to adopt AI is showing up in workers’ check-ins with managers and performance reviews. There are more tools to track AI use and public dashboards to rank top performers.
At Meta, some criticized the company’s decision to install software on its US workers’ computers that tracks keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI, Business Insider previously reported.
The Meta spokesperson said that AI agents need real examples of how people use computers and that the company has safeguards to protect sensitive content.
Companies’ push to get workers using AI comes as many of the dramatic productivity gains executives expected from the technology have yet to materialize, said Swagatam Basu, a senior director analyst at the consulting firm Gartner.
He said many companies underestimated how difficult it would be to integrate AI effectively into daily workflows.
The challenge of getting AI to work is creating friction inside some companies. A little over half of respondents to a recent survey by Writer and Workplace Intelligence, which included 1,200 business leaders in five countries, said adopting AI is “tearing their company apart.”
One bright spot for worried workers is that not all companies are looking to cut staff. At many firms — especially midsize ones — leaders are often hesitant to make deep workforce reductions because growth still depends on experienced employees and institutional knowledge, said Jivka Batchvarova, a managing principal at advisory firm Baker Tilly.
“You’re still going to need the humans,” she said.
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