In the past few months, a wave of tech corporations have announced significant staff cuts and attributed them to efficiency gains driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

Companies such as Atlassian, Block and Amazon have announced they would lay off thousands of employees due to increased reliance on AI.

The narrative these companies offer is consistent: AI is making human labour replaceable, and responsible management demands adjustment.

The evidence, however, tells a more nuanced story.

The automation story is partly true

Genuine disruption is visible in specific corners of the labour market, though the scale of that disruption is commonly overstated. Research from Anthropic published earlier this month shows that although many work tasks are susceptible to automation, the vast majority are still performed primarily by humans rather than AI tools.

Moreover, some occupations are more exposed to displacement than others: computer programmers sit at the top of the list, followed by customer service representatives and data entry workers. Yet even within the most exposed occupations, AI use is still limited.

The aggregate economic data reflects this reality. A 2025 Goldman Sachs report estimated that if AI were used across the economy for all the things it could currently do, roughly 2.5% of US employment would be at risk of job loss.

That’s not a trivial number. However, the report notes that workers in AI-exposed occupations are currently no more likely to lose their jobs, face reduced hours, or earn lower wages than anyone else.

The report does note early signs of strain in specific industries. Goldman Sachs identifies sectors where employment growth has slowed that align with AI-related efficiency gains. Examples include marketing consulting, graphic design, office administration and call centres.

In the tech sector, US workers in their 20s in AI-exposed occupations saw unemployment rise by almost 3% in the first half of 2025. Anthropic’s research also found that job-finding rates (the chance of an unemployed person finding a job in a one-month period) for workers aged 22–25 entering AI-exposed occupations have fallen by around 14% since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. This is a tentative but telling signal about where the pressure is being felt first.

These are meaningful signals, but they are sector-specific and concentrated – not the evidence of sweeping displacement that corporate announcements often imply. That gap between the evidence and the rhetoric raises an obvious question: what else might be driving these decisions?

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