Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate workers on Tuesday, in the first step of a plan to reportedly axe 30,000 corporate jobs. On Monday, the online education company Chegg said it’s slashing 45% of its remaining workforce, after cutting over 20% earlier this year.
Companies lay off people all the time, for all manner of reasons. But in 2025, when white collar workers get let go, one reason in particular seems to get mentioned more and more: artificial intelligence.
Chegg publicly blamed AI chatbots like ChatGPT for eating its business model, which is basically helping kids do their homework. Amazon’s CEO sent employees a note in June saying AI will eliminate the need for certain jobs.
Historically, when a transformative new technology comes along — the internet, the car, the steam engine — old jobs get replaced with new, better jobs. So when can we expect those new AI jobs, exactly?
Remember when everyone wanted to be a prompt engineer?
That was the hottest AI job title back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT launched. Even if you weren’t a programmer, if you played with the technology enough to actually get it to do what you wanted it to do, a company might pay you six figures to be their professional chatbot whisperer.
Well, it’s 2025. Have any of your friends been offered a prompt engineering job yet?
“That’s, that’s a great question. I’m still wondering when that phone call is coming for me as well,” said Larry Schmidt, an economist at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Turns out, AI tools got smart enough that lots of businesses could easily teach their employees how to be the “types good questions” guy — no new salary or title required.
“We do find evidence that the jobs are changing, but it’s more subtle than that. It’s not necessarily that whole new categories of jobs get created,” Schmidt said.
At least not within just three years.
Harvard economist David Deming says in the long run, those subtle AI changes will likely evolve jobs into something better than they are now, if history is any guide.
“Think about, like, an office assistant went from stenographer to typist to secretary to administrative assistant to executive assistant,” he said. “So that’s just one example of a job that changes not just titles, but really functions underneath, in response to changes in office technology.”
Wondering what happens until we get to the long run? History has some other lessons where the short-run is, well, maybe we should all brush up on our Dickens …
“If you look at like, for example, when the economy industrialized, you know, about 150 years ago, it was a pretty bad time for humanity for a couple of decades,” Deming said.
For now, companies are trying to figure out what to do with employees who are saving time by using AI.
“What you would typically see is 20% of that person’s time, then, can go toward innovation. So the old Google model of ‘spend your Fridays thinking about something more blue sky,’” said David Martin, who helps companies implement new AI processes at Boston Consulting Group.
Martin said one common topic of such brainstorming: How do we keep AI from putting us out of business?
