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If you’re wondering about the role of AI in the flurry of layoffs we’ve seen in early 2024, why not ask a tech executive?
That’s what our colleagues at Morning Brew Daily did. In an more than 40-minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg released Feb. 16, hosts Neal Freyman and Toby Howell asked the Meta CEO about a range of topics, including the consequences of industry adoption of AI.
“I think that there will be a bunch of transformation that will mean that certain jobs, we don’t do them in the way that we’re doing them now—certain things might get automated,” Zuckerberg said.
Jobs and market. As IT Brew recently reported, the tech jobs market remained strong in early 2024 and is projected to continue to grow. In January, tech unemployment was significantly lower than the national average—2.3% versus 3.7%—and AI drove some of that job growth; positions focused on the technology went up by around 2,000 last month.
Integrating AI means greater tech investment. CompTIA chief research officer Tim Herbert noted in December that “companies hiring for AI skills inevitably need to boost adjacencies in areas such as data infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business process automation.” That means more jobs.
It’s why analysts like Wedbush Securities Managing Director Dan Ives are particularly bullish on the impact of AI on the tech economy going forward. Ives told IT Brew last month that the “AI tidal wave is about to hit the shores of tech” and will lead to a decade of market expansion.
But the integration of AI into existing tech organizations might mean layoffs and job cuts. According to data from tracker Layoffs.fyi, 159 tech companies have cut 41,793 jobs already in 2024. And experts like Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie, speaking to ComputerWorld, have said that the cuts are a result of AI “sucking the air out of almost all non-AI investments in the whole tech world.”
Striking the balance. Talking to Morning Brew Daily, Zuckerberg demurred on making an explicit connection between AI and the tech jobs outlook, instead referring to layoffs as an ongoing correction from the post-pandemic economic landscape. Freyman pushed back, noting that CEOs’ language around layoff announcements in recent earnings calls has been more narrowly centered on “a strategic reorganizing of their focus, where they’re investing more in AI.”
“They’re not saying ‘I’m laying you off because of that,’ but It’s a trimming of certain departments, and they’re hiring in others,” Freyman said. “So to me, I feel like this wave of layoffs is a little bit different than the ones coming out of early 2023.”