Worried about losing your job to AI?
Chill.
According to a recent study from Oxford Economics:
Companies don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale,” suggesting instead that companies may be using the technology as a cover for routine headcount reductions.
Translation: While many people thought it would be politically unpopular to layoff employees in favor of AI solutions, it appears the exact opposite has happened.
Instead, recent job losses in the US have been a result of natural economic forces. Except instead of blaming the economy or internal financial concerns, many of these companies used AI as their excuse for firing people.
Regardless of the true reason, the bigger story is that "AI job" loss is mostly fake news.
With the exception of software engineering, which the CEO of Anthropic discussed at length during his World Economic Forum speech at Davos, there is almost literally zero evidence that businesses are replacing employees with AI.
This is a point I've harped on for months now.
AI still makes way too many errors, and hallucinates way too often, to be relied up in corporate workflows.
I bring this up because whether or not you understood the reality of the job loss situation is a good indicator of your AI fluency.
If you're deep in the trenches of generative AI, odds are you know:
AI coding is good, and on par with entry-level and even medium-level software engineers
AI text generation is still highly unreliable, making it unusable for all but the most basic automation use cases
AI video is solid, and getting better, but nowhere near good enough to replace video editors, TV studios, etc.
Which is why neither of the tweets above should come as zero to surprise if you're fluent in AI.
Job loss en masse?
Not happening anytime soon.
AI replacing entry-level software engineers?
Yeah, that's quite a bit more likely.
According to this study, there are ~20 million software engineers worldwide.
Of those, it's unclear how many are entry level (versus being more experienced and therefore having more job security).
With that said, even with how good AI's code-writing skills are today, there's little data showing mass job loss in the sector.
While the software engineering space is both saturated and competitive, much of that is because of factors that have nothing to do with AI.
Especially as it relates to:
Over-hiring post-COVID
Insane stock market valuations for Mag 7 tech companies
H1-B visa holders offering cheaper labor
Employers feeling skepticism toward recent Gen Z graduates
Increasing skepticism from investors regarding the profitability of AI
Interest rates going up, exposing high-risk tech companies to a higher Cost of Capital
And more
In conclusion, there are a lot of "AI job loss" doomsday prophets.
Jason, founder of the well-known All In podcast, is one of the most famous.
In reality, however, there is zero data showing companies are laying off employees in favor of AI solutions.
In fact, according to a 2026 global survey of CEOs from PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 12% "say AI has delivered both cost and revenue benefits."
That is not the type of performance that leads to mass job layoffs.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Should software engineers be worried?
Yes.
But even then, learning how to use AI to code should provide more than enough job security.
And if you're not a coder?
It's safe to say you have nothing to worry about.
Catch you next time,
AI Society Team
