As companies pour eye-watering sums into AI while automating more work, one question remains: How will it affect the number of tech jobs available?
Much has been said about whether AI will lead to leaner teams with fewer layers of management. In the past year, a number of prominent tech companies have conducted layoffs and restructuring — with some leaders explicitly tying those cuts to AI.
“The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” Block CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on X in February, when the company nearly halved its workforce.
Some leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have said AI could lead to “significant enduring job loss.” Others, like AWS CEO Matt Garman, have said doomsday AI predictions about jobs are way overblown.
The future remains murky. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report estimates that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030, while 170 million will be created.
As companies report earnings, some will disclose updated employee counts. Read on to see how head count has changed across Big Tech:
On July 22, Google’s parent company Alphabet revealed in its blockbuster earnings report that it had increased head count by 11,830 employees, from 187,103 to 198,933, between June 2025 and June 2026.
The chart below shows how Alphabet’s workforce has grown from the end of the first quarter of 2025 through the end of the second quarter of 2026.
The biggest jump in Alphabet’s staff numbers in the last couple of years came in the second quarter of 2026, when it added more than 4,000 workers, accounting for over one-third of net hiring over the past year.
Google laid off around 12,000 employees in 2023 and has since made several smaller rounds of cuts, impacting thousands of employees in total.
Meta
Meta’s head count shrank by over 2,000 employees between the first and second quarters of 2026, based on its latest earnings report released on July 29. As of June 30, Meta employed 75,472, a 1% year-over-year decrease.
The chart below shows how its workforce has changed over the last year.
Meta added in the report that the head count figure includes approximately 8,000 employees affected by its most recent layoff in May. The majority of those workers will not be reflected in its head count by the end of the third quarter of 2026, the company said.
In an email to laid-off staff at the time, the social media giant said the layoffs were part of a “continued effort to run the company more efficiently” and to help offset other investments.
The May layoffs also occurred amid organizational restructuring. Meta said at the time that it would be moving over 7,000 employees to new initiatives centered on AI.
Meta is spending billions in the AI race. In April, the company forecasted its 2026 capital expenditures to range from $125 billion to $145 billion. It updated that estimate in its July earnings to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion.
Microsoft
On July 29, Microsoft shared that it had approximately 223,000 full-time employees as of June 30. That’s 5,000 fewer employees than it had in June 30, 2025.
The tech giant announced plans to lay off roughly 4,800 employees earlier in July, following the launch of a voluntary retirement program that offered buyouts to some employees. About one-third of the nearly 9,000 eligible employees took the buyout, allowing Microsoft to cut a lower percentage of its workforce.
Microsoft’s Xbox division also announced plans to cut 20% of its workforce this fiscal year.
The tech giant is spending heavily in AI. It’s faced investor concerns that AI could upend traditional software, which helped pull Microsoft’s stock down 18% in June to its worst monthly performance since the dot-com era.
