Key Takeaways
- Leaders from Amazon, Walmart, and Anthropic warn AI could shrink corporate workforces and eliminate entry-level white-collar jobs.
- Others, like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, argue AI is currently more likely to augment existing roles rather than replace them outright.
- Some executives, including Ford CEO Jim Farley and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, believe the shift could revive interest in trade schools.
CEOs and founders across industries, from technology to automotives, say artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically change how people work. Some believe AI may soon replace many office jobs, while others think it will simply help workers do their jobs better.
As investors put billions of dollars into AI and AI-related stocks, many leaders expect big productivity gains. Some are already planning to hire fewer people, betting that AI will reshape the workplace.
Why This Matters to You
AI is transforming how companies approach hiring, training, and the future of work. Whether you’re just starting your career or thinking about a midlife shift, understanding how AI may affect your job—and how to stay valuable in a changing workforce—can help you prepare.
CEOs Predict That AI Could Lead to Downsizing
In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees that generative AI could potentially reduce the company’s workforce as business needs evolve.
Generative AI creates human-like content—such as text, images, or jokes—based on the data it’s trained on. Traditional AI, by contrast, follows set rules to complete specific, often complex tasks.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy wrote.
Executives at Walmart also anticipate a changing workforce. The company plans to maintain the size of its workforce at a stable level for the next three years while it assesses which roles may be eliminated or created due to the impact of AI.
“It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job. . . Maybe there’s a job in the world that AI won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it,” said Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart.
But some CEOs have issued more dire warnings for workers more broadly.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic—the AI company that created the chatbot Claude—recommends that younger white-collar workers, in particular, buckle up for a dramatic change in the coming years.
“AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to [10% to] 20% in the next one to five years,” Amodei told Axios in May. “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen.”
Some Think AI Could Reshape What the Labor Force and Work Itself Looks Like
Ford CEO Jim Farley says renewed interest in trade schools may be needed if AI leads to major white-collar job losses—a sentiment recently echoed by Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, too.
“I think we need to go back to the basics—to trade schools. And we need to have a society that doesn’t look down on people like that,” Farley said in an interview with journalist Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July.
Some CEOs believe AI will support—not replace—human workers, enabling them to perform their jobs more efficiently.
“I keep looking around, talking to CEOs, asking: What AI are they using for these big layoffs? I think AI augments people, but I don’t know if it necessarily replaces them,” said Marc Benioff, CEO and cofounder of Salesforce, in a Fortune interview in July. He added, “Maybe there’s a future AI model that will be more accurate, but that’s not where we are right now.”
In fact, a recent Yale Budget Lab analysis found that this was the case—at least for now. The researchers found that AI has yet to have a negative impact on the labor market. They acknowledged that it typically takes many decades for a new technology to have a significant impact.
“Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy,” the researchers wrote. They added, “Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades, rather than months or years.”
One founder, however, believes that, in the long run, jobs in at least one industry will be safe from AI: his own.
“It is possible—I don’t want to be definitive—but like it is possible that [venture capitalism] is quite literally timeless,” said Marc Andreessen—cofounder and general partner of the Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—on the a16z podcast in April. “And when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing.”