The Morning Download: Tech CEOs Soften Stance on AI Jobs Wipeout

Good morning. It’s no accident that the CEOs of AI and big tech companies are framing AI’s impact on the jobs market in more optimistic terms, given the public’s growing anxieties about its effects on work and energy prices. They are probably right that AI’s impact on the jobs market won’t be apocalyptic, at least over the shorter term.

That doesn’t mean AI isn’t changing the nature of work, though. Companies and workers should still make sure that they are on the right side of that change, by learning how to work with AI and AI agents in productive, and dare we say, creative ways.

Business leaders including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy have shifted their public stance on AI’s impact, now emphasizing job creation and productivity boosts over job elimination, the Wall Street Journal reports. This passage sums up the shift in tone:

In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman—who has long predicted that AI will lead to seismic shifts in the workforce—said during a conference, “We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.”

Soon after, he told CNBC, “Our industry underestimated how much we’re going to be able to keep people at the center of everything.”

There are several possible forces for the shift, David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal “They may have noticed that the labor market is genuinely not changing (i.e., imploding) as rapidly as they expected,” he said. “They may have realized it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy.”

Early forecasts about the impact of AI on jobs were generally more nuanced than most people realized.  “It will take millions of our jobs. It’s also going to create millions of jobs. But I think it’s a big misunderstanding to think that that’s the main way or the main use of AI,” Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, said in October 2024 at a WSJ tech summit, now part of the WSJ Leadership Institute.

“‘In an article I wrote with Andy McAfee, we said AI won’t replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace managers who don’t. And I think that’s the right way to think about it.
Too often people think that AI can just do entire jobs, entire functions, and that’s hardly ever the case,’’ Brynjolfsson said.

Venture capital pioneer Vinod Khosla told me in 2024 that AI will drive broad inflation, push the price of expertise toward zero, and enable a new age of abundance, if people let it. Part of the bargain, he said, is accepting that about 80% of the work involved in 80% of jobs across the economy can be automated over time. “So 64% of all jobs can be done by an AI,” he said.

The timeline for those shifts stretch across decades, though. The good news is that people probably have more time than they realized to adapt to AI’s impact on work. But they shouldn’t be complacent, either. We tend to overestimate tech’s impact over the short term, and underestimate it over the long-term. And when changes do occur, they can be sudden and hit with force. Even if changes take many years to occur, it doesn’t mean that the pace of change will be even.

How is your company adapting to the influence of AI on jobs and work? Let us know.

• Software companies are struggling to pay off private loans – and not just because of the AI-fueled SaaS-pocalypse, WSJ reports. The slice of private software debt worth less than 80% of its original value hit a five-year high last year, according to an analysis provided by MSCI. That share peaked at 6.1% at the end of September, or roughly five months before software-company stocks tumbled in value on concerns their businesses might be outmoded by AI tools.

• Students are increasingly skipping corporate internships in favor of hacker houses, startup incubators, and programs geared toward helping them join the AI race in Silicon Valley, WSJ reports.

• And changes are afoot further down the educational pipeline as well. High earning families are ditching traditional schools in favor of alternative education institutions that prioritize life skills and use AI tutors, WSJ reports.

• Companies making humanoid robots are raising big money, but ensuring the robots are safe enough to interact with humans in the real world remains a challenge, WSJ reports.

• Starlink could be going up against AT&T and Verizon, as it reportedly explores plans to build out a network on the ground to provide mobile service, WSJ reports.

This September 14–15, technology leaders will gather in New York City for the WSJ Technology Council Summit to explore how enterprise AI is moving from experimentation to measurable business value. Join the Technology Council and be part of the conversations shaping the future of leadership, as executives tackle AI deployment, cybersecurity, evolving technology policy, enterprise transformation and the strategies driving the next generation of business innovation.

Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.