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SAN FRANCISCO ù Top executives at some of the largest American companies
have a warning for their workers: Artificial intelligence is a threat to
your job.

CEOs from Amazon to IBM, Salesforce and JPMorgan Chase are telling their employees to prepare for disruption as AI either transforms or
eliminates their jobs in the future.

AI will ôimprove inventory placement, demand forecasting and the
efficiency of our robots,ö Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a Tuesday
public memo that predicted his companyÆs corporate workforce will shrink
ôin the next few years.ö He joins a string of other top executives that
have recently sounded the alarm about AIÆs impact in the workplace.

Economists say there arenÆt yet strong signs that AI is driving
widespread layoffs across industries. But there is evidence that workers
across the United States are increasingly using AI in their jobs and the technology is starting to transform some roles such as computer
programming, marketing and customer service. At the same time, CEOs are
under pressure to show they are embracing new technology and getting
results ù incentivizing attention-grabbing predictions that can create additional uncertainty for workers.

ôItÆs a message to shareholders and board members as much as it is to employees,ö Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies the
impact of AI, said of the CEO announcements, noting that when one
company makes a bold AI statement, others typically follow. ôYouÆre
projecting that youÆre out in the future, that youÆre embracing and
adopting this so much that the footprint [of your company] will look different.ö

Some CEOs fear they could be ousted from their job within two years if
they donÆt deliver measurable AI-driven business gains, a Harris Poll
survey conducted for software company Dataiku showed.

Tech leaders have sounded some of the loudest warnings ù in line with
their interest in promoting AIÆs power. At the same time, the industry
has been shedding workers the last few years after big hiring sprees
during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and interest rate hikes by
the Federal Reserve.

At Amazon, Jassy told the companyÆs workers that AI would in ôthe next
few yearsö reduce some corporate roles like customer service
representatives and software developers, but also change work for those
in the companyÆs warehouses.

IBM, which recently announced job cuts, said it replaced a couple
hundred human resource workers with AI ôagentsö for repetitive tasks
such as onboarding and scheduling interviews. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested on Joe RoganÆs podcast that the company is building
AI that might be able to do what some human workers do by the end of the
year.

ôWe, at Meta as well as the other companies working on this, are going
to have an AI that can effectively be sort of a mid-level engineer at
your company,ö Zuckerberg said. ôOver time weÆll get to the point where
a lot of the code in our apps à is actually going to be built by AI
engineers instead of people engineers.ö

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, boldly
predicted last month that half of all white-collar entry-level jobs may
be eliminated by AI within five years.

Leaders in other sectors have also chimed in. Marianne Lake, JPMorganÆs
CEO of consumer and community banking, told an investor meeting last
month that AI could help the bank cut headcount in operations and
account services by 10 percent. The CEO of BT Group Allison Kirkby
suggested that advances in AI would mean deeper cuts at the British
telecom company.

Even CEOs who reject the idea of AI replacing humans on a massive scale
are warning workers to prepare for disruption. Jensen Huang, CEO of AI
chip designer Nvidia said last month, ôYouÆre not going to lose your job
to an AI, but youÆre going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.ö

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at BloombergÆs tech conference this month
that AI will help engineers be more productive but that his company
would still add more human engineers to its team. Meanwhile, Microsoft
is planning more layoffs amid heavy investment in AI, Bloomberg reported
this week. Other tech leaders at Shopify, Duolingo and Box have told
workers they are now required to use AI at their jobs, and some will
monitor usage as part of performance reviews.

Some companies have indicated that AI could slow hiring. Salesforce CEO
Marc Benioff recently called AmodeiÆs prognosis ôalarmistö on an
earnings call, but on the same call chief operating and financial
officer Robin Washington said that an AI agent has helped to reduce
hiring needs and bring $50 million in savings.

Despite corporate leadersÆ warnings, economists donÆt yet see broad
signs that AI is driving humans out of work. ôWe have little evidence of layoffs so far,ö said Columbia Business School professor Laura Veldkamp,
whose research explores how companiesÆ use of AI affects the economy.
ôWhat IÆd look for are new entrants with an AI-intensive business model, entering and putting the existing firms out of business.ö

Some researchers suggest there is evidence AI is playing a role in the
drop in openings for some specific jobs, like computer programming,
where AI tools that generate code have become standard. GoogleÆs Pichai
said last year that more than a quarter of new code at the company was initially suggested by AI.

Many other workers are increasingly turning to AI tools, for everything
from creating marketing campaigns to helping with research ù with or
without company guidance. The percentage of American employees who use
AI daily has doubled in the last year to 8 percent, according to a
Gallup poll released this week. Those using it at least a few times a
week jumped from 12 percent to 19 percent.

Some AI researchers say the poll may not actually reflect the total
number of workers using AI as many may use it without disclosing it.

ôI would suspect the numbers are actually higher,ö said Ethan Mollick, co-director of Wharton School of BusinessÆ generative AI Labs, because
some workers avoid disclosing AI usage, worried they would be seen as
less capable or breaching corporate policy. Only 30 percent of
respondents to the Gallup survey said that their company had general
guidelines or formal policies for using AI.

OpenAIÆs ChatGPT, one of the most popular chatbots, has more than 500
million weekly users around the globe, the company has said.

It is still unclear what benefits companies are reaping from employeesÆ
use of AI, said Arvind Karunakaran, a faculty member of Stanford
UniversityÆs Center for Work, Technology, and Organization.

ôUsage does not necessarily translate into value,ö he said. ôIs it just increasing productivity in terms of people doing the same task quicker
or are people now doing more high value tasks as a result?ö

Lynda Gratton, a professor at London Business School, said predictions
of huge productivity gains from AI remain unproven.

ôRight now, the technology companies are predicting there will be a 30% productivity gain. We havenÆt yet experienced that, and itÆs not clear
if that gain would come from cost reduction à or because humans are more productive.ö

The pace of AI adoption is expected to accelerate even further if more companies use advanced tools such as AI agents and they deliver on their promise of automating work, Mollick said. AI labs are hoping to prove
their agents are reliable within the next year or so, which will be a
bigger disrupter to jobs, he said.

While the debate continues over whether AI will eliminate or create
jobs, Mollick said ôthe truth is probably somewhere in between.ö

ôA wave of disruption is going to happen,ö he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/20/ai-ceos-predict-kill-j
obs/

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