Tech CEOs Walk Back Dire AI Job Loss Predictions

Predictions about artificial intelligence-related job losses are switching from apocalyptic to optimistic, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday (July 6).

Attitudes among tech CEOs about AI’s impact on the labor force are changing, the report said.

“We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a conference in May, per the report.

There is also a change in tone from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Last May, he warned that AI could erase half of all entry-level roles. A year later, his vision for businesses that adopted AI is more positive, according to the report.

“They can do the same thing with less resources, and that leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources,” he said, per the report. “But that requires creativity.”

Meanwhile, some companies are laying off workers to boost AI spending. Meta eliminated about 8,000 jobs in May.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said if businesses concentrate on making people more productive at a faster rate than automation, “in theory there should be more jobs in the future, not less,” according to the report.

A survey by EY-Parthenon showed a drop in the number of CEOs who think AI will lead to major job losses, from 46% in January 2025 to 20% in May, the report said.

“They may have noticed that the labor market is genuinely not changing (i.e., imploding) as rapidly as they expected,” said David Autor, a professor of economics at MIT, per the report. “They may have realized it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy.”

Additionally, a study by payments FinTech Ramp and workforce-intelligence firm Revelio Labs showed that companies making the biggest AI investments expanded their staffing levels by roughly 10%.

The main pattern emerging at companies such as Google, Box and IBM isn’t displacement.

“It’s a new organizational layer sitting between foundation models and business operations, staffed by roles that require both technical depth and the judgment to make AI useful inside a specific enterprise context,” PYMNTS reported June 3. “That layer didn’t exist three years ago. It’s now one of the fastest-growing parts of the labor market.

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