[giancarlostoro]

I think there's a few things going on and I also believe that in many (if not most, and dare I say ALL) cases AI as an excuse for lay offs is simply a scapegoat. If AI is so great, why aren't you re-training those who are ineffective at using it, and then cutting those who still don't make the cut? If it's this amazing thing for your company, wouldn't it drive revenue up drastically?

I wish the SEC would start auditing claims about AI for job cuts, not sure if its within their ball park but there's people claiming this, when they have no receipts, and then stock goes up, if that's not market manipulation, I'm not sure what is.

[Schlagbohrer]

This is a good example. If AI increases productivity so much, then having more employees would be beneficial, because each can produce even more output. So the firm would only be limited by the imagination of their product managers and marketing team finding new things to produce with this vast capability.

And yet...

[agnosticmantis]

Devil's advocate: if demand is constrained/finite in a given market, there's an upper bound on revenue, no matter how hard you try. In that case it'd make sense to work on efficiency to maximize profits given fixed revenue.

(Not saying AI helps with that yet.)

[giancarlostoro]

Even IF somehow you can do with less employees, in the case that you over hired after the "Great Resignation" following COVID (I think this is partial to blame for many lay offs still happening now that people aren't resigning from jobs willy nilly), where are these magical numbers that your current workforce is producing with AI? Are you just shipping more code with less testing? So many questions, only very little remarks. We need receipts.

[andrekandre]

  > then having more employees would be beneficial, because each can produce even more output

this is true even without ai. the issue is does a company have enough ideas/runway for all those employees to generate new value...