Between meetings in April, Micha Kaufman, executive director of the Firelancers Fiverr platform, sent a memorandum to its 1,200 employees without hair in the language: «The AI goes for its work. And what if it goes for mine too! ”, He wrote. “This is a call of attention.”
The memorandum detailed Kaufman’s thesis about AI: that would raise everyone’s abilities: easy tasks would become obvious. Difficult tasks would become easy. The impossible tasks would become simply difficult, he postulated. And since AI tools are free, nobody has advantage. In this transition, those who did not adapt would be condemned to failure.
“I listen to conversations in the office. I hear developers ask: ‘Boys, will we have a job in two years?’ Forbes . “I felt that I needed my validation: they didn’t imagine it.”
Younger and inexperienced programmers are already experiencing a fall in the employment rate; The total number of beginner developers employed between 18 and 25 years has decreased slightly since 2022, after the launch of Chatgpt, according to Ruyu Chen, postdoctoral researcher of the Digital Economy Laboratory of the Institute of the Institute of the Human Being of Stanford. It is not just the lack of experience that could greatly hinder job search in the future; Chen also points out that the market could be more difficult for those who have mediocre performance in their work. In the AI era, only exceptional employees have advantage.
“We are moving from mass hiring to the hiring of precision,” Chen said, adding that companies are starting to focus more on hiring experts in their fields. “Superstar workers are in a better position.”
Chen and his colleagues studied large -scale payroll data in the US, shared by the RR.HH. ADP company, to examine the impact of the generative AI on the workforce. The decrease in the employment rate of beginner developers is mild, but represents a significant advance in the field of engineering in the technology industry, a profession that has seemed synonymous with wealth and exorbitant wages for more than a quarter of a century.
Now, suddenly, after years of rhetoric on how AI will enhance workers, instead of replacing them, many executive directors of the technological sector have become more direct about the impact of AI. The Executive Director of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said that AI could eliminate half of all basic level administrative jobs and shoot unemployment up to 20 % in the next five years. The Executive Director of Amazon, Andy Jassy, said last month that “will reduce our total corporate staff” in the coming years, since the company begins to “need less people doing some of the works that are done today and more people doing other types of work.” Earlier this year, the executive director of Shopify, Tobi Lutke, also published a memorandum that sent his team, in which he claimed that the budget for new hiring would only be granted for works that cannot be automated with AI.
Technology companies have also begun to cut jobs or freeze hiring explicitly due to AI and automation. In the solid IBM, hundreds of human resources employees were replaced by AI in May, as part of a broader job reduction that dismissed 8,000 employees. Also in May, Luis Von Ahn, executive director of the Duolingo Language Learning Application, announced that the company would stop hiring contractors for jobs that could be carried out by AI. Sebastian Siestkowski, executive director of Klarna, an immediate purchase company and pays later, declared in May that the company had cut its workforce by 40 %, partly due to investments in AI.
We are moving from mass contracting to the hiring of precision. Star workers are in better position.
Ruyu Chen, Investigador de Stanford
Microsoft caused a sensation earlier this month by saying goodbye to 9,000 employees, approximately 4% of its workforce. The company did not explicitly mention AI as a reason for the reduction, but has considerably increased its investment in AI and has promoted the savings obtained with the use of this technology. For example, the automation of customer service in call centers saved more than 500 million dollars, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the executive director, Satya Nadella, declared in April that up to 30% of the company’s code is being written by Ia. “This is what happens when a company reorganizes its priorities,” he said a Forbes An employee dismissed from Microsoft.
Microsoft did not answer the questions about the reasons for their layoffs, but said in a statement: “We continue to implement the necessary organizational changes to better position the company for success in a dynamic market.”
It is difficult to determine the exact motivation behind employment cuts in a given company. The general economic environment could also be a factor, marked by the uncertainty accentuated by the erratic tariff plans of President Donald Trump. Many companies were also overloaded during pandemia, and recent layoffs could be trying to compensate for overcontratation.
According to a report published earlier this month for the firm of Coaching Executive Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the AI could be more an scapegoat than a true culprit of the dismissals: of the more than 286,000 layoffs planned this year, only 20,000 were related to automation, and of them, only 75 were explicitly attributed to artificial intelligence, according to the signature. In addition, it is difficult to measure the productivity profits generated by AI, said Chen, from Stanford, because although not all employees have officially at their disposal at work, they do have unauthorized versions for consumers who could be using in their work.
While technology is beginning to affect the developers of the technology industry, it has actually generated a slight demand for engineers outside the technological sector, said Chen. This is because other sectors, such as manufacturing, finance and health, are adopting AI tools for the first time, so they are incorporating engineers into greater number than before, according to their research.
Work automation also has its limits. Last year, Klarna said that their AI tools did the work equivalent to the 700 customer service agents. But a year later, the company seemed to reverse its position and announced a recruitment campaign to hire more human agents.
Executive director Siemiatkowski denied that the new contracting impulse meant that the company was reducing AI. Instead, he said that the new human agents would manage more high -level conversations that the company had previously outsourced. Siemiatkowski was not available for an interview, but Klarna’s spokeswoman, Clare Nordstrom, defended the strategy. “We depend on AI to the same extent,” he said. “However, we have observed that in a world where everything is automated,” he continued, “people prioritize human experience.”
Klarna’s experiments show that deciphering what tasks are most suitable for humans and which can be trusted to machines is an unknown. Siemiatkowski has been one of the most staunch defenders of automation: to demonstrate it, when Klarna announced the results of the first quarter in May, it did not even appear. Instead, he organized a deep falsification of himself with AI to present the financial update and boast about three months profitable.
The advantage of the shock, according to Kaufman de Fiverr, is that people seem willing to learn. (The company has not made layoffs or freezing of hiring related to AI, according to Forbes ). In his memorandum to employees, he indicated that he would organize an office schedule to talk about the changing panorama of AI with anyone who would like to chat. He reserved a conference room for 50 people. To his surprise, upon arrival he found 250 employees waiting for him.
“So we simply said: ‘Very good, let’s do it,” Kaufman said. He told employees that they should be proactive to learn new AI techniques, and not simply wait for them to teach them. “I’m going to help anyone who is motivated to help yourself.”
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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