Last month, consultancy giant Accenture unveiled a restructuring plan that gives workers two choices: get retrained on AI quickly or get out even faster. Days later, Lufthansa announced plans to dump 4,000 staff by 2030, claiming that artificial intelligence will increase efficiency. Translation, robots don’t need pensions.
Salesforce has already shown the door to 4,000 customer support staff, saying its AI system can handle half the workload. Meanwhile, fintech outfit Klarna has slashed 40 per cent of its workforce while loudly declaring its aggressive adoption of AI tools. Duolingo is also quietly phasing out contractors and letting algorithms fill the gaps.
Oxford Internet Institute’s assistant professor of AI and work Fabian Stephany told CNBC believes companies are stretching the truth.
He said that while there used to be some stigma attached to AI, it has now become a convenient cover story.
“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s rather really a projection into AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,’” Stephany said.
He added that firms are using AI hype to make job cuts look innovative and forward-thinking, while disguising the real reasons for their downsizing.
“There might be various other reasons why companies are having to get rid of part of their workforce. Duolingo or Klarna are really prime candidates for this because there has been overhiring during Corona as well,” Stephany said.
In other words, this might be less about automation and more about poor planning.
Start-up founder Jean-Christophe Bouglé said the supposed AI revolution inside corporations is mostly hot air.
“AI adoption is at a much slower pace than is being claimed. In large corporations there’s not much happening with AI projects even being rolled back due to cost or security concerns. At the same time there are announcements of big layoff plans ‘because of AI.’ It looks like a big excuse, in a context where the economy in many countries is slowing down, despite what the incredible performance of stock exchanges suggest,” Bouglé said.
Salesforce has clarified that its in-house AI tool, Agentforce, reduced the number of customer support cases and eliminated the need to replace some roles.
Klarna’s chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said AI was “only part of the story,” claiming the company had made no layoffs directly because of AI, but had stopped hiring since 2023 “largely due to AI.”
A report from Yale University’s Budget Lab suggested that mass AI layoffs are mostly fiction. The researchers examined US labour data from November 2022 to July 2025 and found little disruption since the release of ChatGPT.
Similarly, economists at the New York Federal Reserve found that only one per cent of firms cited AI as the reason for recent layoffs, while 35 per cent used it to retrain employees and 11 per cent hired more staff because of it.