Don’t Confuse Financially-Driven Layoffs With AI Layoffs
There’s a common impression — among leaders, in the media, and among employees — that AI is already causing widespread unemployment. After all, the US saw well over a million jobs lost to layoffs in 2025. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff attributed some of the company’s layoffs to internal use of its own AI solutions. And, if you walked down the streets of San Francisco, you probably saw Artisan’s controversial urban advertisements broadcasting the message, “Stop Hiring Humans.”
But here’s the dirty little secret of AI and layoffs: Every week, we speak to clients telling some version of the following story: “Our CEO said we’re laying off 20% of staff and replacing them with AI — how do we do that?” When we ask if they have a mature, vetted AI app ready to fill in those jobs, nine out of ten times the answer is no — and they haven’t even started. So, most of the layoffs are financially-driven and AI is just the scapegoat, at least today.
AI And Automation Will Take Some Jobs — Just Not As Many As You Think
Predictions about AI and job losses have run aground on the rocky shores of reality for a long time. In 2016, AI scientist Geoffrey Hinton made an ill-fated job prediction: “We should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” Not only has radiology not gone away, it has grown; the Mayo Clinic’s radiology staff has grown by 55% since then.
But since our last iteration of this forecast in 2023, the world has changed. Agentic — or, at the moment, more agent-ish — AI has emerged, enabling organizations to create applications that are more accurate and that solve specific problems. We’ve also seen widespread investments in generative AI (genAI), with successes and failures that have taught the market how to get better results. As a result, our new forecast:
Predicts 6.1% of jobs will be lost in the US by 2030 due to AI and automation. That equates to 10.4 million jobs. To give you a sense of the magnitude, the US lost 8.7 million jobs during the Great Recession. The numbers aren’t directly comparable since jobs lost to AI are structural and permanent, while those lost during a recession are cyclical and macroeconomic. But no matter how you view it, the numbers are meaningful and worthy of our attention.
Sees a growing role for genAI in job loss. Where our earlier forecast saw just 29% of US jobs lost to automation coming from genAI, that number is now 50%, which accounts for agentic AI solutions that leverage genAI as well.
Shows a growing number of jobs strongly influenced by genAI. We see AI strongly influencing jobs (20%) more commonly than replacing them (6.1%) — 3.25x the impact. That 20% represents a nearly four-fold increase compared with our 2023 forecast. We’ve seen enough jobs reshaped by AI to establish this growing influence, even if genAI hasn’t yet positively impacted P&Ls, according to MIT researchers.
Build A Human-Centered Strategy With AI As Supporting Cast
Even if we’re not heading for an imminent AI job apocalypse, we’ve entered a new era in which how organizations deploy AI will change how we work, how we serve customers, and how we live. But in the next 5 years, the future of work will remain largely human. AI will take over increasing numbers of workflows and tasks, but workflows and tasks aren’t jobs. Your strategy must invest in the people who use AI to improve their productivity and employee experience. Invest in AIQ (Forrester’s Artificial Intelligence Quotient), as a starting point — your employees will gain the understanding, skills, and ethics they need to thrive in an AI-infused workplace.
I coauthored a major new piece of research diving deeper into these issues with Michael O’Grady, Forrester’s principal forecast analyst. Read our full report, The Forrester AI Job Impact Forecast, US, 2025–2030, and set up a guidance session to help you navigate this terrain and to develop a successful and productive AI jobs strategy.
