Amazon, Meta Tout AI Jobs Boom While Cutting Thousands

The chief executives of two of the world's largest technology companies are making optimistic claims about artificial intelligence and employment, even as their firms carry out some of the biggest workforce reductions in recent memory.

Cuts at Amazon and Meta

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has spoken publicly about AI's potential to create new categories of work, months after signalling that efficiency gains from AI would likely reduce headcount in the coming years. Amazon said in January it would lay off 16,000 workers, its second large-scale layoffs in three months, emphasising the need for efficiency. The company has maintained that the cuts are structural rather than AI-driven, though analysts have noted the timing against a backdrop of heavy AI investment. In the company's Q3 2025 earnings call, Jassy stated the cuts were "not really financially driven and it's not even really AI-driven."

Meta told a similar story. The tech company kicked off a sweeping reorganisation that will shrink its workforce and accelerate a pivot toward artificial intelligence, with the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp laying off around 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, in May. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the start of the year that the company could see workforce changes because of the technology, calling 2026 "the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work." At the same time, Meta is ramping up its investments in artificial intelligence, lifting its 2026 guidance for capital expenditures by as much as $10 billion, reaching as high as $145 billion.

The broader industry trend is stark. So far in 2026, there have been almost 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies, according to layoffs(.)fyi, after roughly 125,000 cuts all last year. Meanwhile, 275,000 AI jobs sit open while laid-off workers struggle to cross the skills divide to fill them.

Altman Walks Back Jobs Alarm

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has taken a notably more measured tone on the jobs question. Altman has dismissed claims that rapid AI advances could lead to a "jobs apocalypse", admitting that many roles will still require a human touch, and noting that a widespread upheaval in white-collar work has not quite materialised.

Altman said he and his executives had been "roughly right" on the technological predictions made by OpenAI when it launched ChatGPT in 2022, but said they were "pretty wrong" on the social and economic implications. Altman said he had realised that even though AI was taking on an increasingly active role in many industries, there was still a "human part" of employment that could not be replaced.

Still, not everyone shares his reassurance. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will dissolve within the next five years, and that unemployment could skyrocket to 10 to 20%. A 2026 Motion Recruitment study showed AI adoption is slowing hiring for entry-level and generalised IT roles, while AI positions are in high demand.

The gap between executive optimism and worker experience remains wide. For now, the companies spending most aggressively on AI are also the ones trimming their payrolls the fastest.

Sources:
CNBC: 20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft raise concern that AI-driven labor crisis is here
NPR: Meta slashes 8,000 jobs as it pivots towards AI
Business Standard: AI unlikely to lead to jobs apocalypse, says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman