In September and October, Salesforce, Bosch, Nestle, Target, UPS, and Amazon (among others) announced layoffs totaling nearly 100,000 positions. The rationales most often given were workforce reduction and AI.
The 14,000 cuts at Amazon got particular attention. After all, Amazon is considered a technology leader and a bellwether of technology industry trends. The company cited a need to become leaner, reduce bureaucracy, and reallocate resources toward key strategic areas. One of those key strategic areas is generative AI.
Many have assumed that those jobs were lost to AI. Some of the headlines have been unfortunately ambiguous on this point, like this one from Reuters: “Amazon to cut about 14,000 corporate jobs in AI push.” It’s not hard to interpret that headline as saying that AI is replacing corporate jobs.
That’s not the whole story. Or even the majority of the story. For one thing, that’s not what Amazon is saying. For another, it’s too early in the adoption curve to impact that many people. That’s not to say that companies aren’t taking advantage of the “AI will replace humans” narrative. Sometimes it’s genuine, but right now it seems more like a convenient excuse for simply reducing cost and headcount.
However, it won’t be long before we do see widespread displacement. It has already started in the customer service area. Concern elsewhere is understandable and increasing. Nearly all companies are anticipating increased reliance on AI to get greater efficiencies and productivity. As a result, companies are laying off more and hiring fewer employees. A link? Yes. Direct replacement? Not yet.
But soon.
A survey published in September by Resume.org found that nearly 30% of companies have already replaced jobs with AI this year, and 37% expect to replace roles with AI by the end of 2026.
In a memo sent to Amazon employees in June 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years. He was very clear that it is a result of the adoption of AI tools and agents:
“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
It’s easy to draw a straight line from that statement to the 14,000 released last week, even if it might not be totally accurate.
Nevertheless, this trend is only going to accelerate, impacting other roles and other industries. Everybody is looking for ways to use AI to increase efficiency and gain competitive advantage.
Some of these are going to stick. And spread.
Corporate roles that are highly structured, predictable, and repeatable are prime candidates for being replaced by AI. We’ve already seen adoption of AI in customer service and office support. Other roles at risk include bookkeeping, paralegals, project management, and entry-level positions in coding, business intelligence, and analytics. If you’re in one of those positions, you need to take action immediately to adapt.
On the other hand, the consensus is that jobs that require complex reasoning, decision-making (especially with incomplete or ambiguous information), creativity, emotional intelligence, leadership, and adaptability will be most resilient. At least for a little while. IT-related positions like data engineering, AI modeling, prompt engineering, risk management and audit, and communication are also cited as being safe. For the time being. AI is already gaining ground in many of those roles.
A cottage industry appears to be emerging, coaching people toward “AI-proof” or “future-proof” careers. It’s easy to find articles with titles like “6 Degrees That AI Can’t Replace” or “7 Roles That Will Outlast Automation.” Take the advice, though, with a grain of salt. Several of the “12 Occupations AI Can’t Replace in 2025” are already being replaced. Maybe it won’t be in 2025, but 2026 is almost here. The Resume.org survey identified the characteristics of employees most at risk of being laid off. These include: high salary employees, employees lacking AI-related skills, most recently hired employees, entry-level employees, younger employees, older employees, and H1B visa holders.
Unfortunately, you don’t have control over whether you’re a H1B visa holder, older, younger, entry-level, recently hired, or high-salary (unless, I suppose, you voluntarily depress your wages, but I wouldn’t recommend it). There is one characteristic, though, that you can do something about: employees lacking AI-related skills.
Top Takeaway #1: Get some AI-related skills, regardless of position, industry, or department.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned a whole lot in these conversations is the importance of domain knowledge. We’ve talked before about how the AI can get you 80% of the way there, but it generally won’t get you all the way there. AI isn’t going to be right 100% of the time. Perhaps not even 90% of the time. Somebody has to validate the results. Failure to do that, or at least to put up high guard rails, puts your organization at tremendous risk.
So far, it appears that the importance of business domain knowledge has not been recognized by those making the layoff decisions. In most cases it’s just a numbers game. It’s only after those long-time employees with deep business knowledge are let go that the company realizes that there’s nobody left that understands the programs, processes, or data.
Top Takeaway #2: Become a recognized domain expert, learning everything you can about the business.
You need to be good at the details of your job and the way it’s done at your particular company, but that’s not enough anymore. You need to understand context. You need to understand the business. You need to establish networks, both inside and outside your company.
Furthermore, domain expertise is a portable skill. If you’re a domain expert and your company makes the mistake of letting you go, you can take that expertise elsewhere.
It is unlikely that AI will replace 100% of the workers in any of these roles, but only a fraction of the current workforce will be needed, and they will be augmented by a much broader array of AI capabilities.
I take a positive view of these developments. We see this pattern in all major technology advances. Certain jobs will no longer be needed, and will be replaced by others. Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer summarized it this way in his address at the recent Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo:
“AI is not about job loss. It’s about workforce transformation. CIOs should start transforming their workforces by restraining new hiring (especially for roles involving low-complexity tasks) and by repositioning talent to new business areas that generate revenue.”
We’re only at the beginning of this shift. Mass replacement of roles by AI will happen, but it won’t happen all at once and it won’t happen overnight.
The time to prepare is now.
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