#workforce-cuts

#workforce-cuts

Hays has unveiled deep workforce cuts as it intensifies cost-saving efforts amid a prolonged downturn in the global jobs market, reducing consultancy headcount by 14%.

My husband has just been let go from his fourth job in five years. The first time it happened was during Covid when he was laid off, but it seemed to start a pattern.

The work, however, didn't vanish with them. Tasks once handled by junior engineers-like writing and testing code, fixing bugs, and contributing to development projects-were absorbed by senior staff, often with the assumption that AI would make up the difference.And while AI has sped up the velocity of shipping code and features, there are fewer people to do tasks like designing, testing, and working with stakeholders, which AI has zero grasp on.

Using this methodology, they have determined that "AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: Actual coverage remains a fraction of what's feasible." Researchers at Anthropic have introduced a whole new way to analyze AI's impact on work, arguing that there's still a huge gap between what large language models (LLMs) are capable of, and real-world deployment.

Will AI lead to layoffs? Are people already losing their jobs to AI? While overall employment in the U.S. is still relatively low, there is considerable speculation that the adoption of generative AI was a cause of recent layoffs and slowed hiring, particularly in the tech industry, for entry-level workers, and in customer service and programming jobs. More may be coming: Leading CEOs-including those from Ford, Amazon, Salesforce, and JP Morgan Chase-have proclaimed that many white-collar jobs at their companies will soon disappear.