Name: Have the AI Job Losses Started?
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T18:49:09.000Z
Duration: 41 min 11 s
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Microsoft had already cut 6,000 jobs in May, so when the US tech company announced that it was planning to lay off a further 9,000 workers, many claimed that this was the result of AI replacing our jobs.

Gerund

But it was argued that not only did this have nothing to do with AI, but that artificial intelligence is a long way off from replacing us in the workplace.

Is AI already hitting the job market, and if not, when and whose jobs will be the first to go?

I'm Arjun Karpal, and I'm so excited to introduce my new co-host, Steve Kovacs.

It's good to be working with you, and I'm really excited.

I'm CNBC's tech correspondent over here in the United States.

I'm based in New York City, so I'm glad we're bringing a global element to Beyond the Valley.

Steve, you've been covering tech for a long time.

I just hit my seven-year mark, believe it or not.

And I've been covering tech pretty much my entire professional career, specifically here at CNBC.

I focus on Apple, a little company maybe you've heard of, and Microsoft is my other big beat company.

And then I also kind of dabble in some other things.

When I was kind of putting together my thesis for my coverage here on CNBC, I thought, you know, video games, people don't realize how big video games are and what a big business that is.

So I added gaming to my beat element, too.

So I cover, you know, companies like Take-Two Interactive and the Xbox division over at Microsoft and all those cool companies doing interesting things in entertainment as well.

I feel like, you know, any of our current listeners and any new listeners we pick up along the way, they're going to hear a lot about gaming.

I already have a Nintendo Switch 2 at home.

I just opened a new game yesterday, so we're on the right path.

And look, Steve, we're going to be talking about AI today, and I think, you know, that chat GPT moment we had a couple of years back now was such a big moment.

You cover, like you said, Apple, Microsoft, so many of these big companies as well.

What's your sense at the moment of kind of what the big themes are amongst the big tech giants when it comes to AI?

Yeah, I've been kind of toying around with this because I focus so much on Apple and they aren't exactly at the forefront of AI.

But what I've been kind of thinking a lot about, Arjun, is like this build versus partner or build on top of.

So, and this is kind of emerging out of Apple, obviously, we saw this year, they were going to put out that new super version of Siri, it was going to be personal, it's going to use the data on your iPhone, it's going to be chat GPT, but with an Apple twist, right?

And that was what everyone got excited about, and they failed to deliver on it.

And it was the first time, probably the worst time I've seen Apple go through as far as promising a major product, and then failing to deliver.

You can argue things like the air power, power charger thing, or, you know, little things like that.

But as far as something coming out and saying, we're going to take part in this AI revolution and then failing to do it.

And then now we hear these reports, Arjun, that they might put that to the side and partner just like they do in search with Google, they might start partnering with OpenAI or Anthropic to kind of power the foundation of this new version of Siri and then move on from there.

I was just at the Samsung event this week, we're recording this the week of July 10th.

And it was so interesting to see them, they're not building their own AI, they're using Google Gemini and Perplexity, one of the hottest companies right now in the startup world.

They're not building their own LLMs, they're building a layer on top of the existing thing.

So I'm kind of looking at it from that perspective now, and seeing as these companies are spending enormous amounts of money building all those data centers, as they're spending so much money trying to achieve artificial general intelligence and the talent wars that we're going to get into in a little bit.

Who's building cool products on top of it?

It's not necessarily the LLM makers right now.

It's going to be, you know, there's this idea now, it's going to be someone building on top of that.

Yeah, those are some great themes there, Stephen.

And, you know, we're going to dig into those in some future episodes, no doubt, but let's get in to what we're talking about today on the podcast.

We're talking about AI and whether the threat to the job market is real and happening right now, or maybe it has been overhyped, or maybe it's a bit of both.

To help us explore all of this and more, I have a very special guest joining us today, Michal Levram, who is a contributing editor at Fortune and also a CNBC contributor as well.

And we've got quite the global footprint between the three of us.

We've got the East Coast, we've got the West Coast, and we're here in Europe.

Michal, look, we introduced this podcast talking about the layoffs we saw at Microsoft.

You know, the companies argued that it was nothing to do with AI.

Is it to do with what we're seeing in terms of the efficiency gains of AI, the productivity gains of AI, or is there something else going on here?

Yeah, I think my sense is that it absolutely has to do with AI, but not in the way that everybody thinks or is scared of.

I think that what we're seeing is not engineers or other workers losing their jobs as a direct consequence of AI overtaking jobs.

I think we're pretty far from that at this point.

I personally don't know a single software engineer who has lost their job to AI, been replaced by AI quite yet.

Not saying it won't happen in the future, but what I do think is going on, and the reason it is directly related to AI, is that companies like Microsoft, obviously, we will see others as well, are restructuring, reprioritizing, reorganizing, which is a nice way to say laying people off, ultimately, in order to meet the demands of this new era of this technological transformation.

It is related, it is indirectly a cause of AI, but I don't think we're seeing people losing jobs because AI agents are taking them over.

I don't know if you caught yesterday, again, we're recording this on July 10th, so for people who want to go back and look, Bloomberg had an interesting story yesterday talking kind of the fallout from those layoffs that we heard about last week.

One of them was the executives telling staff, we've been able to save $500 million through AI productivity benefits, or what have you, and more talk about how much code is being written by AI at Microsoft.

I look at this with a much more cynical or skeptical view, probably, than a lot of people.

My first question is, how do they even quantify that?

I talked to so many CTOs about adopting these tools, and they have a hard time quantifying this kind of stuff.

What was your take on that when you heard that $500 million number, which, by the way, is nothing to Microsoft?

Drop in the bucket.  Look, I definitely hear from people out here in the Valley who are absolutely vibe coding.

I think that movement, that trend is real.

And also, what's all of the other work that's involved?

A CEO can get out there, a tech CEO, and say, these are our savings, or 20% to 30% of our lines of code are now being written by AI.

But then what's all of the other work that's involved?

There are other aspects of the job of an engineer, and so how good is it at what it's doing?

I think measuring just in general, the savings part, the dollars part especially, is tricky because maybe it's writing all this code, but then it's requiring more tests after the fact.

I don't think that we're clear on exactly what the numbers are telling us and what the numbers are quite yet.

But again, I do think that it's happening.

I do hear from people that they're doing it.

I've not talked to a single programmer or coder who says they don't use an LLM of some sort to help them out.

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Have the AI Job Losses Started?

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