Trend of AI Driven Job Shedding Growing
In a not to astonishing announcement yesterday, The CEO of e-commerce giant Shopify, Tobi Lutke has announced a new hiring policy to employees. In a company memorandum, Lukte said that before making new hires, teams must first prove that the job can’t be done using AI.
The internal memo written by Lutke, noted that teams must consider how they would perform if autonomous AI agents were a part of the team.
He went on to add that AI usage is an essential expectation from employees at the company now, and that questions around the technology would be included in their performance peer reviews.
Lutke said that using AI “reflexively” is now a common expectation at the company and using it well is a skill that can be built if people keep using it.
Last year, Shopify laid off 20% of their workforce and in January this year, it was reported that the company had again fired customer support staff quietly.
Future Workforce Predictions:
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Future of Jobs Report 2025 forecasts AI to trigger the most significant labour transformation since the industrial revolution. The report anticipates that by 2030, AI and other information processing technologies will transform 86% of businesses, sparking a redundancy of 92 million jobs.
The report also indicates the possible creation of 170 million new roles worldwide, however this number is simply speculative without any concrete foundation other than projections.
Many of the new jobs anticipated simply do not even exist today and while there will no doubt be new jobs created, the scope and scale of these jobs is very difficult to determine accurately.
It is not like the scenario encountered when main-frame computers were developed and people had no idea about the scope or function of the thousands of new positions and specific job functions that would be developed from the outset.
Years later we can look back and see where these have flourished with approximately 50 million jobs globally in the IT and IT related sectors.
IT Sector Not Immune to AI Impact
However, even the IT sector has not been shielded for AI job losses with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost over the past few years. These have mainly been driven by job cuts in low level coding and software development jobs as well as IT security where AI has made a big impact.
Here’s a breakdown of the tech layoff data from Layoffs.fyi:
- 2025 (as of April 8): 27,762 tech employees laid off across 100 tech companies.
- 2024: 152,472 tech employees laid off across 549 tech companies.
- 2023: 264,220 tech employees laid off across 1,193 tech companies.
- 2022: 165,269 tech employees laid off across 1,064 tech companies.
It does appear to be a diminishing number, with many tech companies now having reached a point of optimisation on staff levels.
The big areas that undoubtebly will see job cuts is in the contact center and customer services field where much of what is currently done by humans cane easily be duplicated and optimised via AI tools and AI agents.
Where Are Jobs Safe?
At this point in AI development, there are still large sectors that even with developments in robotics and AI, are a long way from being impacted by AI.
Trades such as electricians and plumbers and specialist installers such as Solar, have much scope for growth with many markets short of skills inthese sectors.
Biotech, Fintech, healthcare, teaching and medical research, while all embracing AI processes still require humans directly and will provide growing numbers of new jobs, particularly in the healthcare sector.
Education Critical:
The recent announcement that China will include that AI instruction in all education programs from this year, and will commence in junior school level, is an indication of how important it is to provide skills training and instruction in AI.
This is the new industrial revolution and both individuals and companies need to take the future impact of AI seriously and plan ahead.
The innovators of the next decade with companies and inventions that do not even exist today, will be those who embrace and enhance the potential of this technology, while those who want to ensure they have jobs in the future would be well advised to start learning and upskilling themselves now.
Economic Impact:
For now corporations are bound to benefit from AI integration efficiencies and job cuts bringing their cost down, assuming AI related costs remain stable. However a longer tern viewpoint has to be considered if the developments result i massive lay-offs with no reciprocal growth in new jobs being established.
The longer term impact would be fewer consumers and lower consumer spend with decreased tax revenues that will drive a economic crises that would impact all companies.
What is certain is that one cannot ignore these advances, however it should also be approached in a manner that takes longer term risks into account to ensure there is sufficient job creation to replace those that are likely to be lost.
