new york
AI probably won’t take your job anytime soon. At least not all of them.
Concerns about artificial intelligence displacing human workers have simmered over the past year as companies reduce headcount, AI models improve their back-office capabilities, and companies integrate AI more deeply into their operations. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm, said Thursday that AI was the number one reason companies cut jobs in April.
“From the fear of losing your job to the pressure to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, concerns about AI in the workplace are real,” Microsoft said in a report released last week on how AI is changing work.
But experts say the reality of AI in the workplace is not so black and white. Companies are using AI to automate certain tasks parts Reduce jobs rather than replace entire positions.
Business leaders are figuring out what AI can and cannot do and realigning existing work around responsibilities that only humans can do. And thousands of jobs have been cut in the process, with web infrastructure company Cloudflare and cryptocurrency company Coinbase among the latest companies to announce layoffs.
“There are very few jobs that are actually fully automated by today’s AI and robotics technology,” said Alexis Krivkovic, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company and head of the firm’s people and organizational performance practice.
Citing a McKinsey study, Krivkovic said AI could technically automate 57% of work-related activities. However, that proportion is spread across different jobs and responsibilities across the organization.
Nitin Seth, co-founder of digital services and consulting firm Incedo, claims to be helping clients use AI to increase productivity by at least 20% to 25% without having to reduce headcount of the same size. That’s because AI handles only specific parts of different roles.
“You can’t take a quarter of Lisa, a quarter of Jessica, a quarter of Nitin, and a quarter of anyone else and make them into one person,” Seth said.
The fear that AI will take away jobs is what is disrupting the tech industry the most. Software engineers are increasingly turning to technology to help them write code, with 90% of tech workers using AI in their jobs, according to a study conducted in September by Google’s research division. Stack Overflow, a popular question and answer forum for developers, found that 84% of respondents use or plan to use AI tools in their software development process.
But software engineers do more than just code. It involves reviewing code, designing systems, troubleshooting problems, and deciding what to build. Boris Charney, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, says companies may adjust job titles to reflect that.
“By the end of the year, you’ll start to see the concept of software engineering disappear,” he told CNN in March. He thinks the term “builder” might become a more appropriate title as the job expands and writing lines of code becomes part of it.
Sujata Sridharan, who most recently worked as a software engineer at fintech company Bolt for about 10 years, is one of many engineers who have experienced this transition.
Even though she uses AI, her job still requires problem solving and critical thinking, she told CNN in an email. The difference is that execution is a mix of code writing and AI prompts.
“With the increasing use of AI, the skills required in the workplace are shifting to: Can you recognize appropriate code quality? Can you solve problems?” she said.
This is not to say that AI is not contributing to job losses. Probably just not taking over the full role. AI has been cited in more than 49,000 layoffs so far this year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Block, the financial technology company behind Square and Cash App, laid off 40% of its employees this year as AI allows smaller teams to do more. Coinbase is cutting its staff by about 14%, in part because engineers can now “ship in days what previously took teams weeks to do,” the company’s CEO said Tuesday.
And Cloudflare said it has completely changed the way it operates, adding that its use of AI has increased by more than 600% in the past three months alone.
Dan Priest, chief U.S. AI officer at PwC, said there could be “some disruption to employment in the near term.” Still, he said most companies are not experiencing mass layoffs and that not entire occupations are currently at risk.
In a report that surveyed 20,000 employees using AI in 10 countries, Microsoft said that most companies have not yet adjusted their employee metrics and incentives to how AI is changing work.
Instead, many simply address what skills are needed in human workers.
The technology landscape is also likely to continue to change as AI models evolve and may take on more administrative tasks. For example, Anthropic on Tuesday announced a new AI agent built for financial tasks such as creating pitchbooks and creating credit memos.
“It starts at the bottom and keeps going up,” said Umesh Ramakrishnan, co-founder and chief strategy officer at executive search firm Kingsley Gate. “And I don’t know where that stops.”
