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Fear is real. During meetings, cowardly cats and drinks after work, a question is to eat quietly to millions of employees: will AI take my work?
In public, CEOs like to seem reassuring. They say that generative AI “will improve productivity” or “rationalized operations”. But when you really read what they say to their own employees, or what slips into investors’ memos, the message is frightening: virtual workers are here, and they are not only assistants. These are replacements.
Let’s take a closer look at what some of the most powerful technological CEOs say in the world. Not in media threshing videos, but in official internal messages, blog articles and investors’ updates.
1. Andy Jassy of Amazon: “We will need fewer people”
The CEO of Amazon Andy Jassy recently published A message on the scale of the company that seems reasonable, until you really read it.
“While we are deploying more AI and generative agents, this should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people who make some of the jobs that are done today … We expect it to reduce our total business workforce, because we get efficiency gains using AI in depth throughout the business. “
The key sentence? “The next years.” It is the company that speaks from 2026 to 2028. Not at ten years old. It’s soon.
Jassy does not speak of automation only of simple or repetitive tasks. He prepares employees for a reality where AI replaces whole job categories in all areas, and where hiring slows down or stops completely for the roles that machines can now play.
2. Luis von Ahn of Duolingo: “The workforce will only be given if” AI cannot do the work
In a memo poster In LinkedIn, the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, was even more frank. “Most functions will have specific initiatives to fundamentally change the way they work … The workforce will only be given if a team can not automate their work more.”
Translation: No more hiring unless your work is impossible to do for AI. The company bets that most teams will soon need fewer humans.
3. Tobi Lütke of Shopify: Why can’t he do it?
The CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, shared a similar directive on X: “Before asking for more workforce and resources, the teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want to do by using AI … What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?” Lütke openly asks managers to reinvent the teams as if AI agents were already integrated and to justify why humans are still necessary.
– Grand Lutke (@tobi) April 7, 2025
The message of these CEOs is clear: human employees are now the last resort. The new default value is automation.
The CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, recently declared that the AI was already doing 50% of the work within his company, shortly before announcing 1,000 other job cuts. Klarna CEO, a large fintech company, was even more frank, revealing that AI has already allowed the company to reduce its workforce by 40%.
Reality: virtual workers already exist
These are not future scenarios. This is already happening.
The reason for this sudden change is the rapid evolution of AI technology. As explained by Sam Altman, CEO of Openai, in a recent podcast, the latest “reasoning models” made a critical leap. In simple terms, these AI systems can now do more than find information; They can “think” through complex problems and in several steps. Altman suggested that these models can reason with someone who holds a doctorate, which means that he is now able to perform high -level analytical tasks formerly reserved for highly educated humans.
This capacity is actively exploited. Three sources working in large AI laboratories have told Gizmodo that they form powerful models to perform real tasks in almost all “knowledge work”, in particular the bank, financial analysis, insurance, law and even journalism. These sources, which have requested anonymity because their contracts prohibit them from speaking publicly, described how their work is used in comparisons side by side with AI models to refine technology until it can produce professional quality production with a minimum of errors. Virtual employees are already doing our job; The current phase is simply to make them more perfect.
The “next years” that Jassy has spoken can be closer to two years at most.
The layoffs accelerate
Consider recent trends in the layout of the technological industry. In 2024, 551 technological companies dismissed nearly 152,922 employees, according to data from Layoff.Fyi. The pace has accelerated dramatically this year. During the first six months of 2025, 151 technological companies have already dismissed more than 63,823 people. On average, a technological company reduced 277 workers in 2024. If this rate is maintained for the rest of the year, the average number of layoffs per technological company in 2025 would increase to 851, about three times the average of 2024.
Although there is no direct evidence connecting all these dismissals to AI, the trend occurs during a period of record economic force. The Nasdaq has just closed at a top of all time, and eight of the ten largest companies in the world are in the technological sector. Profitable and growing companies allow workers at an alarming rate, and the silent implementation of AI is the most logical explanation.
Our grip
Technological CEOs will not tell you downright that you are replaced. But the memos speak for themselves.
The AI is already there, and your business probably builds a roadmap to automate your role. An internal pilot project at the same time. A chatbot at a time. A hiring gel at a time. If you want to understand the next step for the American workforce, do not listen to marketing. Read the bottom of the CEO’s blog. Because they already tell you the truth.
