The trend: Increased AI adoption has introduced both fresh challenges and new opportunities across workplaces, affecting everything from hiring and layoffs to internal workflows.

In 2025, over 122,000 tech employees were laid off from 257 companies, per Layoffs.fyi, compared with more than 152,000 from 551 companies in 2024. (Note that the total layoffs don’t include numbers from companies that only provided a percentage of cuts.)

Several Big Tech companies—and many smaller players—enacted sweeping layoffs and hiring policy changes tied to AI adoption.

• HP plans to lay off between 4,000 and 6,000 by 2028 as it reorganizes for AI-driven operating models.
• Accenture cited the potential for AI to automate human-driven work when it cut about 11,000 roles.
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI has helped the company cut about 4,000 customer service roles.
• Duolingo reduced reliance on human workers by avoiding contractors for tasks AI can complete and only hiring when automation isn’t possible.

The large-scale, highly visible layoffs are adding to public stress about the future of work, which is increasingly rooted in reality. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of US adults expect AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, and just 5% expect more jobs, per Pew Research.

The challenge: Outcomes are mixed on whether AI saves employees time or requires more time. Either way, it poses the risk of “work slop,” which occurs when AI-generated content looks high-quality but takes extra time to create, understand, or finalize.

• 15% of marketing and sales professionals say AI has had little or no impact on their day-to-day work, and 18% say it has created more work and pulled them away from strategic priorities, per General Assembly.
• However, a survey by The Harris Poll–QuestDIY found that half (56%) of US market researchers save at least five hours per week using genAI.

The problem: As companies trim staff and scale back hiring to lean on AI, they risk weakening their long-term talent pipelines. Overautomation can erode institutional knowledge, reduce diversity of experience on teams, and shrink the mix of skills needed for future innovation. It can have an outsized impact on teams where broad viewpoints are needed, like product design, or where strict oversight is crucial, such as cybersecurity.

The opportunity: Despite turbulence around workforce restructuring, AI presents a once-in-a-generation chance for companies to reimagine roles and unlock new efficiencies.

Benefits include:

• Productivity growth without headcount increases. AI-assisted workflows let teams scale output, test more ideas, and speed up development timelines.
• Emerging specialties. Demand is rising for prompt engineers and AI governance leads, fields that didn’t exist just a few years ago—the number of job postings for employees with agentic AI skills spiked 985% between 2023 and 2024, per McKinsey.

Looking ahead: As companies raise capital expenditure expectations for AI infrastructure, chips, and server spending, the pressure is on to cut spending in other areas. In 2026, we can expect layoffs to continue and demand for AI-skilled workers to grow. Without internal training, some companies may lose a competitive edge and need to backhire roles to maintain expertise on staff.

What brands should do: As AI is embedded deeper into day-to-day workflows, the gap widens between employees who can effectively manage AI systems and those who can’t. The organizations that invest in thoughtful adoption, employee training, and strategic use of AI—rather than cost-cutting alone—stand to gain the most.