AI: the job-cut decider this month

The tech job market doesn’t always reflect the national one, but the two are starting to draw closer together—and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as interpreted by IT certification trainer CompTIA, unemployment in the tech sector edged up from February’s 3.8% to 3.9% in March. It’s a negligible shift, and the national unemployment rate experienced a similarly small change, dipping from 4.4% to 4.3%.

But those seemingly stable numbers may belie an ongoing uncertainty in the job market, driven by the perceived impact of AI.

Reason, challenged. In a blog post from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, CRO Andy Challenger noted that AI investment is increasingly used as a rationale for cuts in the tech sector. The technology is also cited in 25% of job losses across the economy, Challenger found.

In an interview, Challenger told IT Brew that tech companies blaming layoffs on AI is part of an overall trend.

“We’ve started to see more and more tech companies directly attribute their job cut announcements to artificial intelligence, whether that’s replacing jobs directly or reducing the staff in certain functions of their organization as they deprioritize those ventures to move more towards AI,” Challenger said. “All of those reasons combined have continued to put tech as the number one industry where we’re tracking job cut announcements.”

Put into practice. Once AI is deployed companywide, it’s not universally utilized, which can complicate employees’ use of the technology. That’s what Docebo, an AI learning management system, found in its recent AI Readiness Gap report: Adoption is surging, but application lags.

“We found 91% of orgs haven’t actually used AI to fundamentally change their workforce,” Megan Beane Torres, Docebo VP of employee success, told IT Brew. “Yet the majority of employees truly believe that AI proficiency and up-leveling in that space is absolutely vital to their own success, their ability to be effective in their roles, and into their futures.”

No matter how AI is deployed in the workplace, tech workers should see it as an opportunity, Challenger said. Disruption isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“It always makes a ton of sense, as…an IT professional, to be trying to stay on top of new technologies and figure out where you can feel valuable and help implement them,” Challenger said. “If we end up having this massive wave of AI job replacement across every industry in the world, there’s going to be an enormous need for a lot of IT professionals to go facilitate that outside of Silicon Valley.”