For anybody who's looking for a job or afraid that AI will take away their livelihood, the news from a tech summit convened by The Wall Street Journal should depress you: expect even more restructuring due to AI.
Several tech leaders at the Tuesday conference in New York City also talked about "reimagining workforces around skills and capabilities rather than mere head count," according to the WSJ. There may be fewer middle managers, and tech and human resources departments may even merge together.
These all sound like euphemisms for fewer people getting hired in the future and employees being made redundant; indeed, companies may have to decide if they want to allocate money for engineers or just buy more GPUs for AI, according to conference speaker Apoorv Agrawal, a partner at investment firm Altimeter Capital.
Already, businesses in America have shed more than 10,000 jobs since the start of 2025 due to the introduction of AI into the workplace, amidst wider turmoil from a tough job market.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has crowed loudly that jobs like customer service and support will be on the chopping block. Other jobs that are potentially endangered from AI include software development and finance.
News on the conference didn't mention entry level hires, but there's growing evidence that they're under particular threat from AI.
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell fretted earlier this week that AI has negatively impacted the job market for new college graduates, for instance.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that half of all entry-level office jobs may be gone within five years and increase unemployment to 10 to 20 percent. (The irony is that his predictions comes as a warning to governments and companies to prepare for this situation, while he shills his AI model to potential customers.)
But all these moves seem remarkably shortsighted, because AI tech doesn't seem to be profitable — and lots of businesses that do adopt AI end up abandoning those efforts, which implies that these programs aren't quite ready for prime time.
Not to mention that companies lose out bigly if they don't hire young people for entry level jobs; failing to impart institutional knowledge to the next generation might bring short-term cost-cutting, but in a long term sense, the risks are formidable.
More on AI and jobs: AI Is Making It Nearly Impossible to Find a Well-Paying Job. Is This the World We Want?