Companies that have suggested replacing workers with AI: IBM, HP, Amazon

HP said it is reducing the size of the company’s workforce as a result of its AI efforts. The company said in its earnings call Tuesday that it plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, and estimates the changes will save about $1 billion.

HP’s earnings call said part of its strategy is to reduce costs through “headcount reductions, platform simplification, program consolidation, and productivity measures” and increase customer satisfaction, innovation, and productivity through “implementation and enablement of artificial intelligence.”

Earlier this year, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told the Wall Street Journal that the company had replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI.

Most recently, the company announced in November that it would cut thousands of employees in the fourth quarter of 2025, impacting “a single-digit percentage of its global workforce.” CEO Arvind Krishna said the company is changing its priorities to hire more talent around AI and quantum. He also said the company plans to hire more college graduates over the next year.

Krishna also said that the adoption of AI has led to increased hiring of employees in programming and sales departments.

In 2023, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM had stopped or delayed hiring for back-office positions, such as human resources, that could be replaced by AI.

“I could easily imagine that 30% of that would be replaced by AI and automation in five years,” he told the outlet at the time.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AI will improve efficiency. Retail giant downsizes workforce But when the company announced 14,000 layoffs in October, Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.

“The announcement we made a few days ago is not really financially driven, and it’s not really AI driven, at least at this point,” Jassy said on the company’s latest earnings call. “It’s really a culture.”

An Amazon spokesperson also reiterated to Business Insider that the reductions were not due to AI.

When the layoffs were announced, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology wrote in a blog post that the move reflected the company’s continued efforts to run “like the world’s largest startups.” SVP Beth Galetti also mentioned the need to be leaner in the age of AI.

“This generation of AI is the most revolutionary technology since the Internet, allowing companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote in the post.

In an episode of “The Logan Bartlett Show” released in August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff The company said it is using AI agents to replace humans in its customer support department to help it respond to more sales leads.

“With my support, we were able to restore balance to the population,” he said in an interview. “We needed fewer animals, so we went from 9,000 to about 5,000.”

A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider that Benioff was referring to organizational changes that took place over several months to rebuild the company’s customer support function.

After implementing Agentforce, the company no longer has to “aggressively fill support engineer roles,” the spokesperson said, adding that it has successfully redeployed hundreds of employees to other areas of the company, including professional services, sales and customer success.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said it could operate efficiently with half its current workforce in 2024.

A company spokesperson said the AI ​​assistants can now handle the same workload as 853 full-time agents, up from 700 at launch. This will result in an estimated annual savings of $58 million, a spokesperson said.

The buy now, pay later company redeployed employees to customer support roles after its CEO admitted that previous cost-cutting measures had gone too far. However, a spokesperson said Siemiatkowski’s comments were about the quality of outsourced support, not the limits of AI. The recent in-house hire was a “small pilot” of less than 10 people aimed at improving the quality of outsourced agents rather than replacing AI, a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that the company has not completely eliminated human support and is still working with an outsourced team of about 2,000 people.

Mika KaufmanFiverr’s founder and CEO announced in September that the company would cut about 30% of its workforce. The cuts will affect approximately 250 team members, and the freelance platform will have 762 full-time employees as of 2024, according to an SEC filing.

The CEO said the job cuts were necessary to transform Fiverr into a leaner, faster “AI-first company.”

Kaufman said in an April staff memo that AI “is coming for your job,” and in May he told Business Insider that Fiverr would only hire people who know how to use AI.

“If you don’t make sure you sharpen your knives, you’re going to be left behind. It’s that simple,” Kaufman said.