A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to eliminate jobs. Tech CEOs have been taking a more optimistic stance over the past month.
In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman – who has long predicted that AI would bring major changes to the workforce – said during a conference, “We have been almost right on the technical predictions and quite a bit wrong on the social and economic implications.”
Shortly thereafter, he told CNBC, “Our industry underestimated how much we would be able to do to put people at the center of everything.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned in May 2025 that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level jobs, highlighted more positive scenarios for AI-adopting businesses a year later: “They can do the same work with fewer resources, and that could lead to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources. But that requires creativity.”
In a June essay, the executive wrote that while warning of job displacement, he wanted to give policymakers and the private sector the best chance to adapt—he was not trying to be a “prophet of doom.” (He also wrote that “permanent job loss” remains a possibility.)
Is the sunnier outlook a move to win back customers and the public who are weary of AI’s worldwide promise? Or is the role of AI in the workplace now better understood?
The layoffs, intended to raise more money for AI spending, come amid some commentary about AI’s potential to create jobs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said in an interview with Complex that if businesses focus on making people more productive at a faster rate than on automation, “in theory there should be more jobs in the future, not fewer.” In May, the company began laying off 8,000 employees, affecting teams.
In February, Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy talked about AI’s job-creating potential in an interview on CNBC. A year ago, he announced that the company would be reducing the number of employees in the coming years due to AI. Amazon has said that the subsequent layoffs of 16,000 employees were not related to AI adoption, but to a continued effort to reduce layers and reinvent company culture.
Collectively, the narrative has shifted from a worker-light doomsday scenario caused by AI to a future in which workers keep their jobs – and receive increased productivity.
The shift in sentiment isn’t limited to tech leaders: A survey by EY-Parthenon found that the percentage of CEOs who believe AI investments will result in a significant reduction in headcount has fallen from nearly 46% in January 2025 to just 20% this May.
“They may have noticed that the labor market is actually not changing (i.e. exploding) as fast as they expected,” said David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They must have realized that saying that your great new product will destroy the economy was just bad business.”
A recent study from financial-technology company Ramp and workforce-intelligence firm Revelio Labs found that companies that made the largest AI investments grew employment about 10% more than other similar companies that had not yet adopted AI.
“The companies I know that have adopted AI the most are also the ones that hire the most,” Altman said in a CNBC interview. Some tech leaders say AI is also creating new demand for some jobs, and will create more jobs that don’t yet exist.
Many of the world’s leading economists disagree on the long-term impact of AI on jobs.
Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said last year that AI would “replace virtually half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” The company recently hired several hundred engineers and attributed the move to concerns over the quality of work being automated. (The hires were first reported by Bloomberg.)
A Ford spokesperson said, “Engineers with deep technical expertise leveraging the power of AI is a powerful combination that is driving increased quality at Ford.”
Meanwhile, negative public sentiment about AI is building. Only about 30% of Democrats think the US should accelerate AI innovation as quickly as possible, compared with nearly half of Republicans and 77% of tech founders, according to a recent survey by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
“The essence of the conversation has changed,” said Maurice Schweitzer, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who researches leadership and decision making. “There was a lot of hype in the early days.”
Between efforts to build data centers and the possibility of government regulations around AI, “there’s a political component to what they’re trying to do,” he said.
Then there’s how AI is actually performing in businesses. Companies in technology and beyond are learning how long it can take to effectively implement a new AI tool and are working to better understand how well it handles tasks and workflows.
Companies are having difficulty telling which of their AI investments are draining, according to a survey of corporate executives conducted by technology and management-consulting firm Emergence. Nearly 20% of U.S. leaders said AI deployment reports paint a better picture than the facts they received, with some describing the bad news as “soft” and employees remaining silent about failures.
According to Stephen Heinrichs, a senior research fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, it can look good on an earnings call when a CEO explains what AI is capable of and what kind of returns can be expected. “How it actually spreads throughout the economy is really a different story,” he said.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a history of predicting that AI will create new jobs. In June, he even said that AI could lead to labor shortages. When asked on CNBC in May about whether people were afraid of jobs being taken over by AI, he said the reason they were afraid was because “all these smart people keep saying that.”
Now very few people are saying this.
Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com