AI eats up more jobs! Well, this is the case for millions of people working in the Tech Industry. There has been a wave of mass layoffs by Big Tech companies in the US due to the emergence of advanced AI. Billion-dollar enterprises like Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and Intel are now increasingly integrating AI to automate jobs.
Industry-Wide Trend?
Oracle and Salesforce are not the only big tech companies laying off employees in the thousands. The list includes Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, and even Alphabet(Google). All of these companies have recently or in the past year announced job cuts, layoffs, and even management shuffles. Mostly, the reason pointed by them is the automation of jobs by advanced AGI models, which have basically finished multiple job roles like coding.
Industry experts are also attributing the downsizing of the workforce to the bulk hiring that all these tech companies made prior to COVID-19 and the emergence of AI. Although a sizeable chunk of companies have been trying not to lay off employees amidst all of this, but that will not remain the case for too long.
San-Francisco and Seattle, two big American cities in the US, which are considered a hub of tech companies and employees, are the worst affected by the emergence of AI. Some examples include Salesforce laying off 262 employees in San Francisco, while Oracle laying off another 250 odd people.
What is the company's response?
At the start of this year, we deployed help.agentforce.com. Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline, and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles. We’ve successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas like professional services, sales, and customer success," a Salesforce spokesperson said.
Productivity Paradox
CEO of Major corporations are pinning the weight of layoffs on the productivity of human employees. There has been an ongoing debate about the number of hours a person remains productive in a day and what are companies doing to enhance work-life balance. Well, employees argue that increasing working hours is taking a toll on the mental, psychological health of employees, which ultimately translates to burnout.
The other side, which is corporations, argues that AI with advanced abilities can basically perform the same task a human is hired for for a tenth of the cost. Moreover, they say automating jobs converts in economic costs and higher profit margins.