The article says firms are spinning normal head count reductions, following a period of over-hiring, as efficiency thru AI adoption. This was obvious to everyone who wasn’t high on their own supply. Now the mistake is comparing AI adoption to the dotcom bubble, which is again an extreme take on reality. There’s still lot of promise to AI, and there are very real capabilities being enabled by existing technologies, so nothing is quite dotcom-like (except a few non-AI companies getting a push in profile by spinning themselves as AI), but jobs aren’t exactly being replaced by anything automated. If anything, AI flaws are creating more work, but hiring is stalled due to other reasons.

The article is about a new research from Oxford Economics, which tells that artificial intelligence is NOT currently causing mass unemployment. Head count reduction comes from a slow process of productivity improvement

For them reports of AI influence on massive head count reduction is similar to what was called the “productivity paradox” identified by Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”