00:00Today on Forbes, you're not imagining it. AI is already taking tech jobs.
00:07Between meetings in April, Misha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr,
00:12fired off a memo to his 1,200 employees that didn't mince words, writing, quote,
00:18AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job, too. This is a wake-up call.
00:24The memo detailed Kaufman's thesis for AI, that it would elevate everyone's abilities,
00:28easy tasks would become no-brainers, hard tasks would become easy, impossible tasks would become
00:35merely hard, he posited. And because AI tools are free to use, no one has an advantage.
00:41In the shuffle, people who didn't adapt would be, quote, doomed.
00:46Kaufman tells Forbes now, quote, I hear the conversation around the office. I hear developers
00:51ask each other, guys, are we going to have a job in two years? I felt like this needed validation
00:56from me, that they aren't imagining stuff. Already, younger and more inexperienced
01:03programmers are seeing a drop in employment rate. Ruyu Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at the
01:08Digital Economy Lab of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, said that the total number
01:13of employed entry-level developers from ages 18 to 25 has dropped, quote, slightly since 2022,
01:20after the launch of ChatGPT. It isn't just lack of experience that could make getting a job extremely
01:26difficult going forward. Chen notes, too, that the market may be tougher for those who are just
01:31average at their jobs. In the age of AI, only exceptional employees have an edge.
01:38Chen and her colleagues studied large-scale payroll data in the U.S., shared by the HR company ADP,
01:43to examine generative AI's impact on the workforce. The employment rate decline for entry-level developers
01:50is small, but a significant development in the field of engineering in the tech industry,
01:55an occupation that has seemed synonymous with wealth and exorbitant salaries for more than a
02:00quarter century. Now, suddenly, after years of rhetoric about how AI will augment workers rather
02:06than replace them, many tech CEOs have become more direct about the toll of AI.
02:11Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei has said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs
02:18and spike unemployment up to 20% within the next five years. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last month
02:25that AI will, quote, reduce our total corporate workforce over the next few years as the company
02:31begins to, quote, need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today
02:35and more people doing other types of jobs. Earlier this year, Shopify CEO Toby Lutka also posted a memo
02:43that he sent his team, saying that budget for new hires would only be granted for jobs that can't be
02:48automated by AI. Tech companies have also started cutting jobs or freezing hiring explicitly due to
02:55AI and automation. At stalwart IBM, hundreds of human resources employees were replaced by AI in May,
03:02part of broader job cuts that terminated 8,000 employees. Also in May, Luis Van Ahn, CEO of the
03:10language learning app Duolingo, said the company would stop using contractors for work that could be done
03:15by AI. Sebastian Simietkowski, CEO of buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna, said in May that the company had slashed
03:24its workforce 40%, in part due to investments in AI. Microsoft made its own waves earlier this month,
03:31when it laid off 9,000 employees, or about 4% of its workforce. The company didn't explicitly cite AI
03:38as a reason for the downsizing, but it has broadly increased its spending in AI and touted the savings
03:44it had racked up from using the tech. CEO Satya Nadella said in April that as much as 30% of code at
03:50the company is being written by AI. One laid-off Microsoft employee told Forbes, quote,
03:56This is what happens when a company is rearranging priorities.
04:01It's difficult to pinpoint the exact motivation behind job cuts at any given company. The overall
04:07economic environment could also be a factor, marked by uncertainties heightened by President
04:11Donald Trump's erratic tariff plans. Many companies also became bloated during the pandemic,
04:17and recent layoffs could still be trying to correct for overhiring. For full coverage,
04:23check out Richard Nieva's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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