Employers plan AI-driven job cuts, but studies show most roles will evolve rather than disappear
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, 41 percent of employers plan to downsize their workforce due to artificial intelligence (AI), as reported by NBC New York.
The percentage is higher in the United States, where 48 percent of respondents indicated they intend to adopt this strategy.
Despite these findings, Till Leopold, a lead author of the study and head of Work, Wages, and Job Creation at the World Economic Forum, does not see this as an impending employment crisis.
“We’re not looking at this famous ‘jobs apocalypse’ scenario,” Leopold told CNBC Make It.
Instead, he sees the challenge as one of upskilling. The report found that 77 percent of employers aim to retrain their workforce to work alongside AI, while 47 percent plan to transition employees from declining roles to new positions within their organizations.
Leopold emphasized that the key issue is not a lack of jobs but rather that jobs will change. “The issue is really that jobs may look much different,” he told CNBC Make It.
White-collar roles focused on data entry, such as clerical and paralegal work, are among those most likely to be affected, which aligns with previous editions of the report.
More recently, accounting and graphic design jobs have also been included, as advances in generative AI improve capabilities in these fields.
“Will accounting jobs, graphic design as they exist today still be around in five years? I think what we’re being told is very clearly, ‘No,’” Leopold told CNBC Make It. He added that these roles will evolve into new forms rather than disappear entirely.
Additional studies support the report’s findings.
A June 2024 survey conducted by Duke University and the Federal Reserves of Atlanta and Richmond found that 37 percent of chief financial officers had already used AI to complete tasks previously handled by employees, while 54 percent planned to do so in the next year.
Among large firms, that number increased to 76 percent.
John Graham, a finance professor at Duke and the academic director of the survey, shared Leopold’s perspective, stating that AI is unlikely to result in widespread layoffs in the near term.
“In the short run, this will be more about plugging some holes and possibly not hiring someone they would have otherwise – but not laying someone off,” he told CNN at the time.
However, a study by Bloomberg Intelligence presents a more concerning outlook, particularly for Wall Street.
It found that banks could cut up to 200,000 jobs over the next five years due to AI, with nearly a quarter of respondents expecting a workforce reduction of between 5 percent and 10 percent.
Despite this projection, Tomasz Noetzel, the study’s author, echoed the views of Leopold and Graham.
“Any jobs involving routine, repetitive tasks are at risk. But AI will not eliminate them fully, rather it will lead to workplace transformation,” he said.
Looking ahead, Leopold highlighted the importance of soft skills in adapting to workplace changes. “We need these what we call ‘human skills’ [such as] creativity, collaboration, resilience, agility,” he said. “These ... become newly important.”
