Using AI as an excuse to fire: Are businesses 'legalizing' personnel restructuring?

In September, Accenture, a technology consultancy, announced a restructuring plan that would see employees who failed to upgrade their AI skills be forced to leave. Just days later, Lufthansa announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs by 2030 to boost productivity with AI. Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer service employees, claiming that AI could take over 50% of the workload. Meanwhile, Klarna, a fintech company, has reduced its workforce by 40%, while Duolingo announced it would gradually replace its contract staff with AI.

Commenting on this phenomenon, Mr. Fabian Stephany - Assistant Professor specializing in AI at the Oxford Internet Institute - said that the explanations of businesses may not reflect the real cause. He expressed doubts that the recent layoffs are not entirely due to the efficiency brought by AI, and emphasized that AI is gradually becoming a reasonable excuse for business decisions to cut back.

Many companies may want to present themselves as leaders in AI to bolster their competitiveness, while masking real reasons such as massive hiring during the pandemic or the need for internal restructuring, Stephany said. He pointed to Duolingo and Klarna as two examples, both of which expanded their staff too quickly during Covid-19 and were now forced to cut back.

In the same vein, Jean-Christophe Bouglé, co-founder of Authentic.ly, believes that the pace of AI adoption is actually overstated. According to him, most large corporations do not actually implement significant AI activities, and some projects have even been halted due to high costs or security concerns. On the contrary, layoff notices cite AI as the reason. Mr. Bouglé commented that in the context of a stagnant global economy , blaming AI makes it easier for businesses to legitimize decisions to cut staff.

In an interview with CNBC, a Salesforce spokesperson said the company has implemented an internal AI tool called Agentforce to reduce customer support requests, eliminating the need to expand its support engineering team. The representative added that hundreds of employees have been reassigned to other departments such as professional services, sales, and customer care.

For its part, Klarna said AI was just one element of a plan to streamline its organization, reducing its headcount from 5,500 to 3,000 in two years and dissolving some departments, leading to voluntary resignations. Accenture and Lufthansa both declined to comment, while Duolingo did not respond to CNBC's request.

AI-related layoffs are not as widespread as the media has suggested, according to research institutes. A report by The Budget Lab at Yale University found that the US labor market has barely changed since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. The report also found that the structure of industries has barely changed significantly compared to previous technological revolutions.

Another study from the New York Federal Reserve found that in the past six months, just 1% of businesses in the service and manufacturing sectors said AI was the reason they cut staff – down sharply from 10% in 2024. At the same time, 35% of businesses used AI to retrain employees, while 11% even increased hiring due to higher productivity from the technology.

Fabian Stephany stressed that there is no evidence of widespread technological unemployment. He noted that fears of being replaced by machines have cropped up many times throughout history, even going back to ancient Rome, when some emperors banned the use of mechanical tools for fear of losing their jobs. However, he said the opposite is true: technology often makes industries more efficient and opens up entirely new types of jobs.

Viet Anh

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