Predictions about artificial intelligence-related job losses are turning from apocalyptic to optimistic, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, July 6.
Attitudes among technology company CEOs toward the impact of AI on the workforce are changing, according to the report.
“While we were mostly right about the technical predictions, we were quite wrong about the social and economic impact,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at a conference in May, according to the report.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s tone has also changed. Last May, he warned that half of entry-level roles could disappear due to AI. A year later, his vision for AI-enabled companies has become more positive, according to the report.
“They can either do the same thing with fewer resources, which leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources,” the report said. “But it requires creativity.”
Meanwhile, some companies are laying off employees to increase AI spending. Meta cut about 8,000 jobs in May.
According to the report, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that if companies focus on making people more productive faster than automation, “in theory, we should have more jobs in the future, not fewer.”
The EY Parthenon survey showed that the number of CEOs who believe AI will lead to significant job losses fell from 46% in January 2025 to 20% in May, the report said.
“They may have realized that the labor market wasn’t changing (or collapsing) as quickly as they expected,” said David Orter, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “They may have realized that saying your great new product is going to destroy the economy is just bad business.”
Additionally, a study by Payments’ FinTech Ramp and workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs showed that companies making the largest investments in AI expanded staffing levels by about 10%.
The main pattern emerging at companies like Google, Box, and IBM is not replacement.
“This is a new organizational layer that sits between foundational models and business operations, populated with roles that require both the technical depth and judgment to enable AI to be leveraged within a specific company context,” PYMNTS reported on 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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