How AI Is Reshaping Work — and Who Is Left Behind

In 2025, Big Tech is firing employees at record speed — not because of crisis or financial downturn, but because artificial intelligence is rewriting corporate hierarchies and replacing entire functions. The future of work has already arrived, and it is leaving thousands behind.

While Microsoft pours $80 billion into AI, more than 15,000 of its employees are shown the door. Amazon, Meta, Google — all are following the same pattern. In the first half of 2025 alone, the tech sector lost 94,000 jobs. Yet profits are at historic highs. This is not a recession; it is a strategy. AI is dismantling the workforce at a pace never seen before.

A Strategy, Not a Crisis

Data from Layoffs.fyi is unequivocal: 2025 is the year when AI left the laboratory and entered corporate structures — pushing people out in the process. IBM became the emblematic case, cutting 8,000 positions in Human Resources and replacing them with AskHR, an internal chatbot capable of automating nearly all HR operations. It is a silent revolution, disguised under the rhetoric of “optimization.” No longer confined to customer service or repetitive tasks, automation now cuts into core business functions. AI writes code, screens candidates, generates content, and analyzes data. Microsoft admits that tools like GitHub Copilot now write 30% of its daily code output — enough to render entire lines of junior developers obsolete.

A Global Wave of AI Layoffs: This is not limited to Silicon Valley. In Europe, SAP cut 8,000 jobs, OpenText reduced staff by 1,200, and UiPath by 10%. In Italy, IBM dismissed 85 employees in 2025, following the 1,000 layoffs between 2019 and 2020. The language used is always the same: “efficiency,” “reorganization,” “digital transformation.” Behind the euphemisms lie disrupted lives. Stories abound of impersonal dismissals: Katherine Wong, a Google employee, discovered she had been fired a month before maternity leave when she opened her email. Others found out when their company badge no longer worked. Termination has become a notification, its reason compressed into a single prompt.

Which Jobs Are Disappearing?

The hardest-hit sectors are those deemed “automatable”: HR, customer care, junior software development, and content support. Klarna eliminated about 1,000 jobs after deploying chatbots in customer service. Chegg lost 22% of its staff once students turned to ChatGPT over human tutors. The logic is straightforward: less human labor, more AI — and often, more profit.

But the shockwave has reached the very heart of tech: software development. Long considered immune, it is now under pressure. Even when AI does not replace developers outright, it forces them to adapt, learn new tools, justify their roles, and work harder to prove value.

Record Profits, Collapsing Employment, so the contradiction is glaring. Microsoft reported $70 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, a 13% increase over 2024. Amazon’s operating income jumped 55%. Yet layoffs are surpassing those of the post-Covid slump. The official narrative speaks of “restructuring to prepare for the future.” In reality, AI enables companies to do more with fewer people — a shareholder’s dream, but a worker’s nightmare.

Work Is Not Vanishing — It Is Mutating. AI is also creating new roles. Meta, Google, and Salesforce are hiring engineers, machine learning experts, and “prompt designers.” The problem is timing: jobs are disappearing much faster than they are created.

According to the World Economic Forum, AI will eliminate 85 million jobs by 2025 but generate 97 million new ones. The mismatch lies in who will fill them. Without rapid reskilling policies, the human balance will remain negative.

Beyond Tech: Ripples Across the Arts and Culture Sector. This disruption does not stop at technology. The art world — from galleries to museums, from curators to artists — is already experiencing its collateral effects. Institutions under financial pressure are tempted by the efficiency AI promises: automated archiving, AI-driven curation tools, virtual guides replacing human mediators.

For galleries, AI is accelerating market dynamics: algorithmic pricing tools, predictive analytics for collectors, and digital sales channels are replacing roles once managed by specialists. The human touch that once defined the dealer-collector relationship is increasingly displaced by platforms that predict preferences with precision.

Museums, facing shrinking budgets, adopt AI for cataloging, visitor flow management, and even exhibition design. Yet with every gain in efficiency comes the risk of reducing staff, sidelining expertise, and weakening the very fabric of institutional knowledge that museums depend upon.

Artists themselves face a double challenge: AI expands creative tools, offering unprecedented forms of expression, but it simultaneously saturates the field with machine-generated content, raising questions of authorship, intellectual property, and the economic sustainability of artistic careers. What does it mean to be an “artist” when algorithms can simulate style, technique, and even intent?

The paradox mirrors the tech sector: cultural institutions record increasing audience numbers thanks to digital innovation, but the number of cultural workers with stable contracts continues to fall.

If this is the transformation of labor we face, it cannot be left to corporate boards alone. The challenge extends well beyond tech: it requires new political, ethical, and cultural frameworks. For the art sector, this means safeguarding the role of human creativity, ensuring that museums and galleries remain places of knowledge transmission, not mere data engines.

The year 2025 is not an experiment; it is the rehearsal of a future that is already here. If society fails to govern it, the cost will be borne not only by coders and engineers, but also by artists, curators, and the fragile ecosystems of culture.

AI is not “stealing” jobs. The real issue is how it is wielded — by those who choose to replace human labor in the name of efficiency.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved