Will A.I. Really Take All The Jobs ? - May 15, 2026

Tomorrow’s Leaders Need To Come From Somewhere.  

It’s common to hear about the fear people have about job losses, due to  A.I.  A November MIT study found an estimated 12% of jobs could already be automated using A.I., and surveys have shown employers are already eliminating entry-level jobs because of the technology. Globally, the share of people who say A.I. products that make them nervous increased to 52% in 2025.  Source - TechCrunch, Stanford

 But, A.I. will not eliminate all jobs for humans, no matter how much the doomsday predictors would have you believe…it’s not going to be that bad.  Here’s why…

A typical organizational structure is shaped like a pyramid.  A wide base at the bottom that has the company’s junior talent, new hires and administrative staff. This tier carries out the basic elements of revenue generating activities and takes care of the administrative functions within the organization.  On top of this is the middle tier with the company’s manager and director-level talent, that supervises the staff in the tier below, engages with customers as needed, and ensures the company strategy is executed upon.  On top of this group is the top tier with your vice presidents, C-Levels and Partners who own the relationships with the clients and who help the company leader set the organization's strategy.  At the top of the pyramid is the CEO or Managing Partner who has overall responsibility for the entire organization and is ultimately responsible for setting the company’s strategy and direction. 

From a talent development perspective, bench strength or depth of skills, and experience within the organization, a company needs their middle tier of talent to understand and have experience in the functions and skills required in the lower tier.  The same notion applies to the upper tier, as this group needs to be well versed on how the middle tier of the organization functions, and have an understanding of how the bottom tier works.  Typically those in the middle and upper tier gain this knowledge and experience by having worked in the middle and lower tiers.  This is often referred to as “working your way up the corporate ladder”.  

Specifically, entry-level roles serve three purposes beyond getting work done:

1. Skill formation: performing repetitive tasks builds pattern recognition and judgment within the workers that help them not only in their current roles, but later on in more senior roles within the organization.  

2. Cultural absorption: junior employees learn organizational norms and culture by working closely with their peers and those above them within the organization. 

3. Talent signalling: Management and leadership can observe and identify high-potential people through observed performance. 

   
   

If A.I. were to absorb all the junior positions, all of these benefits would be lost and  how would the organization develop their future talent for the middle and upper tiers?  

Approximately 59% of S&P 500 C-suite leaders were promoted from inside their companies. Source -  Hunt Scanlon Media.  The majority of top leaders are grown, not bought. If your future CEOs and COOs are supposed to come from within, and a company has eliminated the bottom rungs of the development ladder, there's a real danger that organizations optimizing for short-term efficiency will create a leadership vacuum in 15–20 years. If you have no pipeline between "AI-supervising junior worker" and "Vice President," you end up with a weak leadership cohort that requires either recruiting externally at a great cost, or promoting people who never learned to lead. The organizations that are most at-risk are those that will treat A.I. adoption as purely a cost-reduction exercise rather than a talent strategy question.

Further, external hires get significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years on the job than internal workers promoted into similar roles. They also have higher exit rates, and are paid substantially more, about 18–20% more. Source - Wharton School.  So hiring from outside for middle and senior management roles, because they used A.I. at the junior levels, would eventually require organizations to pay a premium for worse near-term performance. This makes the case for maintaining an investment in human talent in the internal pipelines very compelling.

Contrary to what is stated above, some notable companies have announced job cuts tied to A.I. adoption. Those include: 

• Microsoft: Eliminated 15,000 jobs through 2025, with CEO Satya Nadella saying that “the company needed to ‘reimagine’ its mission for the AI era”. Source - CNBC

• Meta (Facebook): Announced plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, around 8,000 jobs, citing a desire to run the company more efficiently. Source - CNBC

• Amazon: Announced the largest round of layoffs in its history, slashing corporate roles, as it looks to invest in its "biggest bets," including A.I. Source - CNBC

• Salesforce: Laid off 4,000 customer support roles, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company reduced its customer support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 thanks to A.I. agents. Source - CNBC

• Oracle: Made significant layoffs estimated to impact up to 30,000 staff, at least partly attributed to A.I. adoption.Source - Programs

• IBM: CEO Arvind Krishna confirmed A.I. chatbots had taken over jobs of several hundred HR workers, while the company also announced a broader 1% global cut. Source - CNBC

• Citigroup: Targeting a reduction of roughly 20,000 employees, saying automation and A.I.-enabled systems would allow it to run middle-office and operational functions with fewer people. Source - Programs

• UPS: Announced it would be laying off 20,000 workers, with CEO Carol Tomé explaining that machine learning had enabled automation of certain tasks. Source - Tech.co

So how do we explain this? 

The news headlines are dominated by job losses due to A.I.  But remember these are all large organizations that are prone to “fat” amongst their labour force.  Of course A.I. can help them with their productivity and operational efficiencies, and in the process improve their corporate bottom lines with cost savings. In these examples, their use of A.I. tools are not different from the past introduction of spreadsheets, presentation software, the internet and accounting software. These were all examples of technology tools that made workers' lives easier and allowed them to do their jobs more efficiently.  And while there may have been some temporary job losses with the introduction of new technology into the workplace, eventually worker productivity went up, corporate profits increased and that led to an increase in corporate hiring.  A.I. tools will be no different.  

Surprising Optimism & Public Openness

Many economists and business leaders push back against the doom-and-gloom narrative. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, surveying over 1,000 employers across 55 economies, projected that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030 while 170 million new ones will be created, a net gain of 78 million jobs. The argument is that A.I. will shift what people do, not simply eliminate work altogether. Source -  AIMultiple

Perhaps counterintuitively, research shows people are more comfortable with automation than you'd expect. A Harvard Business School survey of 2,357 people found that the public supports automating roughly 30% of jobs based on current A.I. capabilities, and when prompted to imagine a more advanced future A.I., support for automation rises even higher. Source -  Harvard Business School

I conducted an informal survey of business leaders to see if their organizations were actually going to eliminate first tier jobs from their organizations.  The survey sample included a products company, three professional service providers, and a hospitality organization.  The feedback received on the question of A.I. replacing jobs was fairly consistent. That being:

• Some junior roles that entail only data gathering/processing work will be replaced by A.I. tools, but staff will still be needed to oversee this work, to preserve the integrity of the data.  These roles were necessary within organizations but were not deemed value-add and not a great source of leadership skills development. 

• Roles that deliver service and experience to clients will always be staffed by humans.  No organization is comfortable at this time putting their revenue streams into the hands of machines.  

• Every organization needs to have an A.I. strategy and their management would be foolish to ignore the availability of these tools.  There is no doubt that A.I. offers productivity and efficiency enhancements that will improve any company’s bottom line; their staff will expect their organizations to make A.I. tools available for their use, and consider them a less desirable employer if they don’t. 

So, if A.I. is really going to gut the bottom tier of all organizations as many predict, how are those organizations going to sustain themselves over the long term and continue to develop their mid-tier and upper-level of human talent?  Are A.I. agents, bots and applications are really going to evolve to the point where they can set strategy, deal with people issues and have meaningful relationships with your paying clients? Are your clients going to want to talk to machines about their business needs, no matter how human they may look?  I don't think so…