Paul Roetzer's Linkedin Analytics

My belief is that “quiet AI layoffs” have been happening for the last 6-12 months (e.g. masked under a return to work policy). And they are accelerating. Companies have been replacing staff with AI, or, at minimum, not hiring new staff due to AI. But, they just don’t want to admit it because it’s bad PR. This article from The Information confirms that: > Executives at more than half a dozen companies said AI has affected their hiring plans, though most were careful to avoid saying AI was effectively replacing existing employees. > “I expect, and our customers expect, a slowdown in their hiring or reduction in net new demand for labor across the vast majority of their business functions, if not an actual reduction in head count,” said EY principal Sameer Gupta, who leads the firm’s AI consulting for financial services firms. > Roles in HR, customer support and IT that can be “put in a box and written down as a set of rules” will be automated first. And companies will adopt the technology faster in the event of a recession when they come under pressure to reduce costs. > Many companies may do so without explicitly admitting it. “It’s bad PR to say, ‘We’re using AI to replace people,’ but if instead of hiring five junior analysts, you’re hiring three and using AI for the rest, you’re hiring at a lower rate, and that’s another way of replacing people.” > Cybersecurity firm Sysdig over the past year has been using AI to respond to emails from potential customers, automating the work that entry-level salespeople, known as sales development reps. > United Wholesale Mortgage built an AI tool over the past four years using Google’s AI to automate most of the work of filling out documents required for mortgages. Each title agreement previously took UWM’s 2,400 underwriters an average of 45 minutes but now takes less than 5 minutes. > Citigroup has been using AI to reduce its operating costs as part of a two-year plan to cut 20,000 jobs by 2026, or roughly 8% of its workforce. > Dutch bank ABN Amro has been using AI to automate customer service roles. It said last month it would pause hiring to reduce its operating expenses. The company has been using Copilot Studio from Microsoft to handle more than half of the several million customer support tickets it receives annually. > ServiceNow is pitching customers on software that replaces IT teams entirely, though it might take a year or longer for AI to be able to do that, said Chris Bedi, its chief customer officer. “The concept is a zero head count support operations team.” The uncertainty and anxiety of AI’s impact on jobs will be felt by everyone. The people who choose to embrace it, experiment with it, and constantly expand their understanding of it have the greatest opportunity to thrive.

The new “futurist” in business is someone who knows how to use Gen AI tools and platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini now. If you can build custom GPTs, run Deep Research projects, generate realistic images / video, create Audio Overviews in NotebookLM, etc, you have superpowers the average business person can’t comprehend. To them, it feels like looking into the future. The good news for everyone else is it's still early. It may not feel like it, but you have time to catch up and become a "futurist" in your department, company and industry. The even better news is that you don't have to go back to school, or even spend years learning new skills. You just have to start experimenting every day. Yes, you can (and should) take AI courses, listen to podcasts, read books, attend conferences, etc to continually advance your AI literacy. But, in a matter of days or weeks, you can become competent and confident with AI simply through using the tech. You can just do things with AI.