No you've got your head in the sand. 41% of firms having plans to reduce staff with AI as part of the reason - that figure 100% tracks for me from conversations with upper management and C-suite at client sites.

Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years.

The mechanisms here are simple and plausible,

1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening.

2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate.

Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs:

A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits

B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward.

It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.