Lest you forget that many CEOs are more than willing to fire you and replace you with a shoddy AI model with sociopathic glee, here are the words of one such executive at the forefront of displacing human labor.
"CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings," Elijah Clark, a chief executive who advises other head honchos on using AI at their companies, told Gizmodo in an interview. "As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I'm extremely excited about it. I've laid off employees myself because of AI."
"AI doesn't go on strike. It doesn't ask for a pay raise," he added, parroting cliched talking points, much like a certain over-hyped technology. "These things that you don't have to deal with as a CEO."
Clark is one of many executives who've been strikingly honest about their intentions to cast aside their flesh and blood workers in favor of AI. One tech startup is even advertising its AI "sales agent" by putting up billboards that read "Stop Hiring Humans" in cities like San Francisco, and recently New York.
Not all are quite so glib, but most seem to be in agreement that the tech will wipe out loads of jobs. And AI CEOs including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have repeatedly warned that their tech will put millions of people out of work, perhaps in an attempt to manifest a self-fulfilling prophecy while appearing to care about the plight of their fellow humans.
Still, the jury's still out on whether the tech will get effective enough — anytime soon, at least — to genuinely supplant a meaningful amount of human labor. At present, evidence suggests it's not: AI chatbots are still dangerously prone to fabricating information and breaking their own guardrails, and autonomous AI agents remain frustratingly slow and limited in what they can do.
On the other hand, AI doesn't necessarily need to be that good. If it can help automate certain tasks, then bosses can fire some workers and make the ones that they kept on use to the tools to do more work than they did before, often in the form of half-heartedly checking the AI's work for mistakes.
This may come back to bite AI-adopting companies — more on that in a moment — but the bottom line, according to Clark, is efficiency and profitability.
Recalling how he fired 27 of the team of 30 student workers in a sales enablement team he was leading at the time, Clark told Giz that the group now gets more "done in less than a day, less than an hour what they were taking a week to produce."'
"In the area of efficiency," he added, "it made sense to get rid of people."
Sometimes, these plans blow up in executives' faces. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company Klarna, proudly boasted that AI could "do all the jobs that we as humans do," after partnering with OpenAI to replace its customer service team with hundreds of AI agents. He recently changed his tune after customers quickly lost their patience with the rookie bots. (Related: during this period of AI adoption, Klarna's first-quarter losses doubled from the year before.)
"Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this," Siemiatkowski ruminated. "What you end up having is lower quality."
Reversing course, however, may be difficult: Klarna had already sacked some 40 percent of its entire workforce.
As it happens, that's the same seemingly arbitrary percentage that many companies are planning to reduce their headcount by, according to Peter Miscovich, global future of work leader at real estate firm JLL. "Today, 20 percent of the Fortune 500 in 2025 has less headcount than they had in 2015," he told Giz.
Clark added that a lot of CEOs know "they're going to come up in the next six months to a year and start laying people off. They're looking for ways to save money at every single company that exists."
However sustainable this is, the fact of the matter is that it's already happening. And that's pretty sobering.
"I am hired by CEOs to figure out how to use AI to cut jobs," Clark told Giz. "Not in ten years. Right now."
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