Finding a job these days can be incredibly challenging. From personal experience, you probably know at least one person who has been struggling to land a new role for months and months.
What we’re seeing now is a bizarre job market. Some companies are replacing their workers due to a heavier reliance on AI tools. Other companies are claiming that they’re firing people due to AI when it’s just an excuse to downsize due to overhiring, dropping profits, or pressure from shareholders.
And within that context, it’s not quite clear what ‘skills of the future’ employees should focus on to stay relevant in an ever-changing global industry. Potentially, some mix of soft skills (emotional intelligence, leadership, etc.) and hard skills (coding, working with AI, etc.) should help you get ahead.
However, even folks working in the most elite, most cutting-edge corporations in Big Tech aren’t immune to layoffs.
As the BBC puts it, “sweeping job cuts at Big Tech companies have become an annual tradition. How executives explain those decisions, however, has changed.” There has been a shift away from talking about efficiency, over-hiring, and reducing management layers towards claiming that everything is related to AI.
Recently, companies like Amazon, Meta, Pinterest, and Atlassian have announced or warned of plans to reduce their workforce. Their perspective is that, with developments in AI tools, fewer people are able to do more work. Or at least that’s the excuse.
“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Mark Zuckerberg, the boss at Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said in January.
Since then, the company has laid off hundreds of people and plans to double its spending on AI this year. What’s more, Meta has a hiring freeze in many parts of the company while also continuing to hire in “priority areas,” the BBC reports.
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, who leads financial tech company Block, which operates platforms like CashApp, Square, and Tidal, said that he’d be reducing his workforce nearly by half. From his perspective, “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company… A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better.”
He revealed that he “wanted to get ahead” of the trend while many companies are still coming to these conclusions.
But as tech investor Terrence Rohan explained to the BBC, this might not fully reflect objective reality. “Pointing to AI makes a better blog post. Or it at least doesn't make you seem as much the bad guy who just wants to cut people for cost-effectiveness,” he explained.
That being said, some companies are genuinely relying on AI-generated code and are putting their money where their mouths are. So, it’s a mixed bag.
For instance, Anne Hoecker, a partner at consultancy firm Bain, stresses how there are shifts in the narrative as well as actual changes in productivity.
“Leaders more recently are seeing these tools are good enough that you really can do the same amount of work with fundamentally less people.”
“That is a sign of the real threat that AI tools for writing code represent to jobs such as software developer, computer engineer and programmer, posts once considered a near-guarantee of highly paid, stable careers,” the BBC writes.
The situation may get even more dire for some professionals as Big Tech firms like Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft are planning on investing a collective $650 billion into AI in the coming year.
