This isn't a market correction from the pandemic. It's not AI. This is a severe recession, combined with inflation and it was planned as part of a huge transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the already wealthy.

If you work in advertising you've absolutely lost jobs. I'm starting to see AI adverts for real brands on Youtube not just the scams.

In programming most of the jobs are due to the recession we're pretending isn't happening though. But some people have lost jobs because CEOs are firing working people to spend that money on AI bullshit. That doesn't create other jobs, it's mostly data center investment which is expensive but not a huge driver for jobs.

Several companies, like Microsoft, have set bizarre profit goals and divisions are doing everything they can to meet them. The Xbox division (which handles all gaming for Microsoft) has a 30% profit target, for example, which means they are both squeezing customers extremely hard with price increases, and shutting down development of games and franchises expected to do well in the long term in order to cut short term costs.

They're (probably) the most extreme, but this is hitting everyone with the crazy way the market has rewarded "AI firms", and with how everyone wants in on that - both the valuation and the potential slashing of personnel costs. And seeing the "AI firms" stocks race away makes a lot of C level execs very nervous, meaning they want to reverse their own trends, meaning they use these methods as well to make a more palatable next quarter.

Of course, that valuation of "AI firms" which is propping up the markets is currently made from a slice of blue sky. There is no real value add justifying that price tag, other than in a few narrow fields. Meta, for example, use it to great effect to target and create ads much cheaper than human analysts and designers do it, and with a slightly better hit rate since statistics is one thing these tools do rather well. But apart from cases like that, it's a problem looking for a high value solution.

So yeah. AI is used as an excuse. Stock valuations are overall completely bonkers high, and there is no way companies can perform as expected from those valuations. And that makes the people whos skin is in that game nervous, so they place the skin of the employees in the game to soften their own blow.

This question is stupid.

The answer is yes and yes. We know this. Clearly some jobs producing low-rent copy of all kinds are being replaced with AI, instead of 6 people with photoshop creating images of an acceptably diverse cast of people seemly experiencing something akin to the afterglow of great sex while using your widget, one person can now make all the images you need for the marketing glossies, user manuals, and training slide decks alike. Now they write some prompts, make sure AI did not insert a competitors widget or add some 11th figures to anyone and done.

Ditto for a lot textual work. Here take these manual for version 2025, replace the specs an name for our very similar 2026 edition. Ok good now I have mostly ready to go document mostly free typographical and copy/edit problems and a human can quickly go in and make an functional changes required. Again one two people can do in a day what would have take a team of four two days.

As is always the case two things will happen. The organization will redeploy the freed-ed resources to do activities not considered profitable enough before, ie we did not produce French language materials for marketing our Canada edition in Quebec, Alberta was always the main audience but hey now that we can translate documentation cheaply maybe... The other thing companies will do is yes lay off folks they don't need. Which just leads to the next questions is the economy robust enough that new activity in other firms, start ups, or opportunities for soul proprietors is able to absorb them and can their current skills apply?

Honestly there is not deeper analysis to be done here because until the rubber meats the road and we have unemployment, wage growth, start up formation, etc numbers in the rear view nobody knows. That same hypothetical that decided to make French language documents might give up by the end of the year when it turns out their just isnt a market in Quebec for self-sealing-stem-bolts or having native language documentation and ad copy wasnt the barrier to new orders. Now they lay off the extra copy team members. On the flip side the companies that chose the lay off route might see their competitors taking share and do an about face as they realize their block buster EBIT-A numbers for FY25 having cut 20% of their staffing costs, are going to translate into a disastrous FY26 because their competitor is making a better product, offering better customer experience, and generally out performing and clients see it.

It is to early to speculate intelligently. It would be like asking what the PC meant for the economy in 1980.. Some uses and business cases were obviously but if i'd ask you then do think one of the biggest factors for success for a chain restaurant would be how quickly they can perform credit reconciliations and get money on deposit, I think most people would have said they still think the food being good was more important.

I know of many companies that have only just put in their first agent, and that isn't really even working yet but they are already announcing slashing jobs. Either the leaders of that company are really stupid or they are using it as an excuse.

Any excuse is used to cover for layoffs. The truth is, for a profitable enterprise, reducing the headcount by removing unnecessary employees is always proper and justified, unless your profit relies on excess employment.

Not many corporations provide useful services by relying on excess employment. The ones that do suffer when their clients realize they should reduce expenses.

Layoffs are not a fault, they are a reasonable response to changing circumstances; economic or other.

I suspect a lot of companies are using it as an excuse. It makes layoffs look like a "Good Thing" (R) to investors. But we also just saw Oracle is planning a big round of layoffs due to AI, not because AI is making things more efficient though. It's because they are trying to find ways to pay for their AI datacenter scale out. Which I guess is one tactic to get AI to make employees more efficient: Cut the employees because of soaring AI expenses and expect the remaining workers to do more work. Seems like s

How long are these people going to keep pretending that the elephant isn't in the room with them?

> The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed. Colleges have long had an uneasy relationship with their unofficial role as vocational pipelines. When generative AI burst onto campuses in 2022, many administrators and faculty saw it primarily as a threat to learning — the world’s greatest cheating tool. Professors resurrected blue books for in-classroom exams and demanded that AI tools added to software be blocked in their classes.

> Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.

> What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.

> First, a huge surge of undergraduates shifted to majoring in fields now being upended by AI. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a long-running survey of college freshmen by UCLA found students much more focused on going to college to “get a better job” than on what they previously wanted most: to learn more about things that interested them. That new mind-set showed up in what they picked as a major in college. Between 2010 and 2020, fields such as philosophy, history, and English saw a big drop in popularity. The latter two majors fell by one-third in that ten-year period while overall humanities enrollment declined by almost a fifth. Where did they go? A lot pivoted to computer science and related fields.

> Last year, the number of students majoring in comp-sci alone topped 170,000 — more than double the number from 2014, even as overall undergraduate enrollment fell. Many were responding to a steady drumbeat of advice from groups like Code.org and Girls Who Code, amplified by tech celebrities such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and echoed by presidents from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, all urging young people to learn computer programming. Now, ironically, many of those same students are struggling to find work, as the entry-level positions they are seeking tend to be ones that are among the most affected by AI. College graduates in their 20s with computer-science and computer-engineering majors have one of the highest unemployment rates, according to a report last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — double that of pharmacy, criminal justice, and biology . Undergrads seem already too aware of this new state of affairs: Enrollment in computer- and information-sciences programs is down nearly 8 percent this academic year compared to last.

[1]What Is College for in the Age of AI? Young graduates can’t find jobs. Colleges know they have to do something. But what? [osu.edu]

You can keep pretending that it's all just a plot by meanie corporate types, but increasingly these jobs are going away and aren't coming back.The technology is in the early stages and the bugs are being worked out, but the clerical/coder/desk work apocalypse is here. More human jobs wi

[1] https://oaa.osu.edu/news/2026/01/20/what-college-age-ai-young-graduates-cant-find-jobs-colleges-know-they-have-do