Big Tech promised AI would disrupt labor — just not like this | CNN Business

A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. Oracle is reportedly laying off thousands of employees, adding to an already long list of tech giants cutting staff while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers. Microsoft laid off 15,000 people last year. Amazon axed 16,000 jobs in January. Atlassian let go of 10% of its workforce as part of its AI pivot. Block shed 40% of its staff, claiming AI could do much of the basic coding work it needed. Meta, which has explicitly set out to create a godlike “superintelligent” AI, reportedly laid off 700 employees while boosting a stock incentive program for a handful top executives. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: Big Tech executives have long warned that AI would lead to job losses. They perhaps just forgot to mention those losses wouldn’t necessarily come from actual AI tools replacing human workers but rather from the same old boring Business 101 reasons as the pre-AI era: When you spend too much, you usually end up having to cut costs. Executives have been quick to tie their staff cuts to AI in the most oblique possible terms to avoid