Lindsay worked at Oracle for more than a decade and was “deeply passionate” about her job as a strategist.
So learning by email one morning that her role was one of 21,000 cut by the technology company this year due to increased investment in AI was a “surreal” moment.
“We were encouraged – pressured – to leverage AI ... they were using us to train something that [would] ultimately replace us,” says Lindsay, who asked not to use her real name due to an ongoing legal dispute with her former employer.
Oracle, which did not respond to a request for comment, is one of dozens of large employers that have attributed mass lay-offs to AI in the past three years.
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More than 180,000 corporate job losses have been linked to AI since May 2023, according to executive outplacement company Challenger, Gray and Christmas, including 112,000 in 2026 alone.
In July, AI was the most common reason cited by companies for job cuts for the fifth month in a row, its data also showed.
Salesforce, Lufthansa, Accenture and Standard Chartered are among the big companies to have cited AI – at least in part – for their decision to cut jobs in the past 12 months.
The announcements have contributed to worries about the technology’s impact on jobs, particularly in highly exposed sectors such as software engineering, marketing and entry-level roles.
Yet economists and labour market experts have urged caution in interpreting the phenomenon as the start of a tidal wave of white-collar unemployment. Many argue more factors are at play than the widespread replacement of workers by machines.
It is true many companies have said they need fewer workers now because of better technology. “A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Block, as he cut 4,000 workers in February.
But companies have strong incentives to promote job cuts as the result of AI-fuelled productivity gains instead of more prosaic reasons such as poor financial performance, restructuring or focusing on more profitable areas of the business, experts say.
Meta’s 1,000-strong job cuts in January, for example, were from its metaverse division as the tech company redirects funding towards AI devices.
“I haven’t seen any compelling evidence of the narrative that these firms are automating a lot of work,” says Carl-Benedikt Frey, associate professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Instead, he believes many of the cuts have been announced in an attempt to “impress” investors. “I don’t think AI-driven automation is the key story here.”
Many lay-offs are being made by software companies whose share prices were hit hard by an AI-driven sell-off this year, and are now seeking to shift towards the technology.
Atlassian said in March that cutting 1,600 roles would “self-fund further investment in AI”, while software maker Autodesk said it was redirecting investment towards AI as it announced 1,000 job losses, mostly in sales, in January.
Several companies benefited from significant share price rises following their announcements on strategy and headcount reductions, such as Block and Cisco.
However, an FT analysis found investors did not always reward companies that made AI-related lay-offs. Fewer than half the job cut announcements in the past year resulted in a share price boost the following day. Companies citing the technology as a factor in job cuts underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10 per cent in the 30 trading days that followed an announcement.
A recent Yale Budget Lab analysis found that while lay-offs have been rising in the US information sector – which includes media and technology companies – since December 2025, it was not possible to directly link this to AI. It found little difference between AI-exposed sectors and other occupations when it came to wages, job growth or hiring.
Oxford Economics, a think-tank, concluded in January that evidence of AI-driven job losses is “patchy”. It pointed to the lack of accelerating productivity growth that should be expected if large numbers of jobs were being automated.
Broader economic data does not show strong evidence that sweeping job cuts are happening.
In the US and UK, redundancy levels are not running at unusually elevated rates, according to government data. First-time applications for US unemployment benefits fell to their lowest weekly level since 1969 in July.
Executives polled in the US and Europe expect AI to reduce headcount by just 0.7 per cent in the next three years, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in February.
Another paper published this year found companies that used AI the most intensively hired 10 per cent more workers than before they adopted the technology.
However, that does not mean AI will not reshape the labour market. Some data points to it already having an effect in certain areas.
More AI-exposed entry-level occupations have suffered dramatic falls in hiring, analysis by Stanford Digital Economy Lab has found.
Kate Leggett, an analyst at Forrester, believes customer service roles are already being hit – with Salesforce’s slashing of 4,000 customer support positions last September one example.
“More and more I see mandates being handed down by the board to automate vast swathes of customer service jobs,” she says. “[It is] traditionally viewed as a cost centre in organisations, and you have huge labour pools ... so being able to automate those job functions is very attractive.”
Even where jobs are not being directly automated, AI may still be contributing to lower business confidence, putting the brakes on hiring plans. Data from Indeed shows year-on-year job postings were down 2.8 per cent in the US and 12.6 per cent in the UK in July.
“I do think that [AI is] enabling a lot of the hiring decline that we’re seeing,” says Lisa Simon, chief economist at workforce data company Revelio Labs.
“Because people are able to do a little bit more with less, companies have got away with not hiring at the usual rate ... I just don’t believe that these big lay-off announcements are really that credible.”
For Lindsay, being back on the job market for the first time in years is proving a challenge.
“The market’s flooded with candidates, the process is wild, ATS [automated screening software] is crazy – you never know what the screening criteria are,” she says.
“The salt in the wound is that I have to collaborate with AI to customise my resume.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
