A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI would wipe out jobs; now it seems tech CEOs are striking a more optimistic tone.
In late May, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who has long predicted seismic workforce shifts from AI, sounded a bit less end-of-days at a conference.
“We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.”
Soon after, Altman told CNBC, “Our industry underestimated how much we’re going to be able to keep people at the centre of everything.”
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that artificial intelligence could wipe out half of entry-level jobs. A year later, Amodei was pushing brighter possibilities for businesses adopting AI.
“They can do the same thing with fewer resources, and that leads to things like layoffs, or they can do more with the same amount of resources. But that requires creativity….”
According to the Wall Street Journal the question now is whether this sunnier patter is an effort to win back customers and a public tiring of AI’s world-ending sales pitch.
A survey by EY-Parthenon found that the share of CEOs expecting AI investments to bring significant headcount cuts fell from about 46 per cent in January 2025 to 20 per cent this May.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor David Autor said: “They may have noticed that the labour market is genuinely not changing (i.e., imploding) as rapidly as they expected.”
“They may have realised it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy.”
The article notes that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “has a history of predicting that AI will create new jobs”.
In June, Bezos said AI could even create a labour shortage. Asked on CNBC in May about people being afraid of AI taking jobs, Bezos said the reason was that “all these smart people keep saying that.”
Fewer people are saying it now, because the same firms still need punters, regulators and employees to stop backing away from the shiny machine.
