It’s Time To Get Concerned, Klarna, UPS, Duolingo, Cisco, And Many Other Companies Are Replacing Workers With AI
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2025/05/04/its-time-to-get-concerned-klarna-ups-duolingo-cisco-and-many-other-companies-are-replacing-workers-with-ai/
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From the article
The new workplace trend is not employee friendly. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies are advancing at blazing speed. A growing number of companies are using AI to streamline operations, cut costs, and boost productivity. Consequently, human workers are facing [layoffs](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tech-layoffs-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatgpt/), replaced by AI. Like it or not, companies need to make tough decisions, including layoffs to remain competitive.
Corporations including Klarna, UPS, Duolingo, Intuit, and Cisco Systems are replacing laid-off workers with AI and automation. While these technologies enhance productivity, they raise serious [concerns about future job security](https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/business/ai-job-losses-by-2030-intl/index.html). For many workers, there is a big concern over whether or not their jobs will be impacted.
Economic pressures, inflation and roller coaster stock prices, have pushed firms to prioritize leaner operations. The result is there will be fewer human jobs available. Investor enthusiasm for [AI, rewards companies](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/once-decade-buying-opportunity-1-074500603.html) that deploy the technology. We’ve seen numerous occasions in which AI was used in corporate announcements, and their stock share prices rose higher.
Yeah saw this coming miles away, years and years ago. It’s not stopping here and honestly the way we’ve let things go to get to this point, not much we can really do besides the extremes now. Not to be pessimistic, but we’ve been letting companies outsource labor to benefit their bottom line in the most immoral ways for decades, why is this different?
There are a lot of executives that are pushing for AI because they are expected to without understanding where it’s not going to be effective. Kind of like trying to outsource critical thinkers to offshore coding farms.the results will be terrible in a lot of cases.
All in for productivity increase though. All tech should do that.
Isn’t this pretty much exactly what Galbraith was heralding a century ago?
Companies are going to continue to innovate to become more productive, and in the modern day that means automation, because labour is the more expensive line item. Then there are two options to avoid widespread impoverishment: either ensure well-being without employment—massive social state, communism, etc.—or make sure everyone’s an investor.
“experts” 2 years ago: AI is just a tool, it will create more jobs
Don’t worry, this can’t possibly happen because people on Reddit can scrounge up a flaw. A machine that can match one week of output from a human, in minutes, can in no way be of any value. I mean, look! I got the image generator to mess up and add three legs!
Society as a whole is incredibly stupid already at alarming percentages.
This will make things sooooooo much worse.
When none of us have jobs, how will anybody be able to afford being their customers?
I’m not concerned at all. Klarna is telling left and right they replace employees with AI, yet they open big software development hub in my country. Their recruiters reach out to me quite often despite repeated declines. So just moving to cheaper IT market under AI disguise. Maybe they replacing customer support roles, but not much beyond that
Plus, they’re also gutting the social safety net in a country with more guns than people, What could go wrong?
This will fail it if will cost more to hire back the people they let go, resulting in net losses for these companies. But the stock will be temporarily pumped and the current CEOs will all make a mint off it.
Just un-installed Duolingo. Although, I barely touched it anyway…but this was the straw that made me go ahead and uninstall.
It’s a societal model problem. AI is there to stay, will western democracies survive it without bloodshed (as in révolution to end neocapitalism)? Let’s see.
and im going to tell the hard truth noone wants to admit. AI will come, replace workers, people will complain for few days and then stop once they find out customer experience haven’t changed. just like nobody cared when retail workers got replaced with self service machines and other workers of the past have been replaced before. its literally just another case of humans losing jobs to technology which has happened countless times throughout human history in the past already and i find it hilarious how nobody EVER cared about these past cases but NOW suddenly people are worried about people losing job to technology. where was this concern in the past decades? i swear people are SO selective when it comes to caring it’s absolutely hilarious to me. people losing jobs to self service machines? not my problem i actually love the convenience these machines introduced to my life. people losing jobs to AI? now THAT’s a concern. liek give me a break bruh.
A few of my friends with kids in tech programs complaining their kids can’t get internships this summer.
This has been human history ever since the industrial revolution. I don’t think anyone would say it would be better for us to go back to making clothes and shoes by hand, or to hammer in each nail by hand. It’s just that this is one of the few times that white collar jobs are being affected.
The oligarch thinks, “I can take as much as I can before retirement, and there will still be most of it left. The other rich guys can take care of the problem.”
Except they’re all thinking and doing that at the same time and, not only are they not helping fix the problem, they use their wealth to actively fight against it.
They have the same humanity as a locust swarm
We’ve been talking about this issue for a while now.
Before ChatGPT, it was just ramblings of mad people working around ML.
After ChatGPT, it was seen as the ramblings of overly excited geeks.
Then, companies actually started replacing roles with AI. We became fearmongers. Despite all major business consultancy firms making predictions around 30/40% of jobs loss.
Now that it’s becoming obvious to the masses, we finally have the chance to have the conversation out in the open without being shunned for one reason or the other.
It’s really important we start talking about how we’re gonna deal with the obvious upcoming paradigm shift.
Nothing says enshittification more than replacing workers with AI slop
Jobs numbers out-performed expectations last month. I don’t think this is a widespread trend. At least not yet.
In one of my recent positions, the company created an AI chat bot for agents to use while working with customers. Basically the agent tells the bot what the customer says, and the bot provides responses, including sales packages. The bot then takes what works and what doesn’t down so that leadership may better optimize packages.
Needless to say that this is basically the first step to eliminating level 1 sales and support agents.
I suspected similar things are all over the place at this point.
What is going to happen when cars replaced horses? Everyone went broke and starved to death. Life goes on.