AI Just Killed 4,000 Jobs

AI just killed 4,000 jobs. So 4,000 people woke up on a Wednesday morning in February 2026 with jobs. By lunchtime, they didn't have jobs anymore. Jack Dorsey, the guy who created Twitter, the guy who built Square, the guy running a company called Block that processes billions of dollars in payments every single year, cut nearly half his entire workforce in a single day.

4,000 human beings gone. And you know what happened next? The stock went up 24% in after hours trading. Wall Street literally threw a party.

Investors made billions because Jack Dorsey told them he doesn't need people anymore. He's got AI. And I need you to sit with that for a second because that's not a tech story. That's an AI story.

That's a story about you. That's a story about every person watching this right now who has a job, who has a salary, who has a family that depends on that salary because Jack Dorsey didn't just fire 4,000 people. He looked directly at every other CEO in America and said, your company is next. His exact words in the shareholder letter were that a significantly smaller team using the tools they're building could do more and do it better.

He said, intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every single week. And then he said the thing that should make every working person in America pay attention. He said, he thinks most companies are late, that within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion he did. That is not a prediction from some random analyst.

That's a billionaire CEO who just bet his entire company on it and he's not the only one. Let me talk you through what's actually happening right now. Not the hype, not the fear mongering, the actual facts, the actual numbers, the actual names of the people and companies involved because this story is way more complicated than any headline you've seen. And by the end of this, you're going to understand exactly where we are, exactly where this is going and exactly what you need to do about it.

So in 2025, over 50,000 jobs in the United States were officially cut through with companies citing AI as a reason. That's an 1,100% increase from the year before. 1,100%, I need you to really understand that number. We went from a handful of companies whispering about AI automation to a full on tidal wave in 12 months.

And it's not just Block. Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff, went on a podcast and said he reduced his support staff from 9,000 to about 5,000 because, and I'm paraphrasing here, he needs fewer heads thanks to AI. That's 4,000 people at Salesforce, same number as Block. Salesforce built an AI platform called AgentForce that now handles 30 to 50% of all their customer service interactions.

No humans involved. The AI just answers questions, solves the problems, and closes the tickets. So this is something that is really changing the world. I mean, for example, Klarna, the buy now pay later company out of Sweden, they cut their workforce in half.

They went from about 7,000 employees to around 3,000. Their CEO, Sebastian, became the poster child for this whole movement. They launched an open AI powered chatbot that handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month. Klarna claimed it was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents, 700 people replaced by software in 30 days.

Chegg, the company that millions of college students used for homework help, has been absolutely destroyed. Their stock dropped 99%. Let me say that again, 99%. They slashed 45% of their workforce and blamed what they called the new realities of artificial intelligence.

What actually happened is pretty simple. Students stopped paying Chegg $20 a month when they could ask ChatGPT for free. Revenue dropped 30%. Subscribers fell 31%.

The company that went from a $14 billion market cap to about 150 million. That's not a decline, that's an extinction event. And the list keeps going. Amazon cut around 14,000 corporate roles and then another 16,000 in January, 2006.

You've got, for example, Microsoft cutting roughly 15,000. BT in the UK announced plans to cut 55,000 jobs by 2030 with over 10,000 explicitly linked to AI. HP cut four to 6,000. Workday cut 1,750.

Intuit cut 1,800. Dropbox cut over 1,000 across two rounds. Duolingo cut more than 10% of its contractors. Bumble cut 30% of its entire workforce.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Here's where the story flips on you because there's a question nobody's asking out loud. Is AI actually doing the firing or is AI just taking the blame? New York State started requiring companies to check a box on their layoff filings if AI automation caused the cuts.

It went into effect in March, 2025, and here's what happened. Out of 162 companies that filed affecting over 28,000 workers, zero checked the AI box, not one. Not a single company was publicly telling newspapers and investors that AI caused their layoffs and was willing to put that claim in writing on a legal form. They all checked the box that said economic reasons instead.

Think about that. Companies are telling Wall Street one thing and telling the government something completely different. That should tell you everything you need to know about what's really going on. A researcher named Tom Davenport at Babson College surveyed over 1,000 executives in late 2025 and found that only 2% were making cuts based on actual AI.

There was actually working in the companies, 2%. The other 98% were either cutting costs for normal business reasons or cutting jobs in anticipation of AI gains that haven't happened yet. They're firing people today for productivity improvements they hope to get tomorrow, basically. An Oxford professor named Fabian Stephanie told CNBC he's really skeptical that layoffs we're seeing are due to true efficiency gains.

He said it's rather a projection into AI in the sense of using AI to make good excuses. Another professor, Peter Cohen at Babson, called AI the least bad reason companies can use for layoffs. He described it as a safe thing to hide behind. And here's the thing that really blew my mind.

A resume.org survey found that 59% of hiring managers admitted to using AI as a justification for layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders. 59%. More than half of the people making these decisions are openly admitting that AI is a convenient excuse. Let's go back to block for a second because the block layoffs are the perfect case study.

Former block communications head Aaron Zamost wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that if you look closer at the specific cuts, like for example, shrinking the policy team and eliminating diversity roles, it reads more like standard prioritization and cost management than AI-driven reinvention. Block had tripled its workforce during the pandemic. They hired like crazy when money was cheap and now they're cleaning house. AI gives them a story that makes the stock go up instead of down.

So what do we actually have here? We have a situation where some of the layoffs are absolutely real AI displacement, right? Check is a perfect example. Students literally replace a product with chat GPT.

And that's real. Clowners chatbot handling millions of conversations. That's real. But we also have a massive amount of what people are calling AI washing.

Companies using the hottest buzzword in business to justify cuts that have nothing to do with technology. And that's actually more dangerous than pure AI displacement because when companies AI wash their layoffs, it does two things. It makes workers think they can't compete with machines when the real issue was bad management or over hiring. It makes other CEOs think they need to cut too, creating a domino effect of layoffs that have nothing to do with actual technological capability.

Now, I want to tell you about the people because we can talk about numbers all day. 50,000 here, 4,000 there, but every single one of those numbers is a person with a mortgage, a family, a career. They spent years building. There's a corporate named Olivia Lipkin who worked at a tech startup in San Francisco.

After chat GPT launched, her assignments started drying up. Then she found out her managers were referring to her on Slack as Olivia slash chat GPT. They were literally using her name and the chatbot's name interchangeably. She was let go in April, 2023.

She said, people are looking for the cheapest saloon and that's not a person, that's a robot. She's actually walking dogs now, right? So the main thing to note here is that everything is changing. You know, translators, for example, they've been devastated too.

One Italian to English translator with 14 years of experience had a best year ever in 2024. Then she received zero work requests for the entire month of June, 2025. Another translator reported earning about 8,000 euros for the entire year. That's not living, that's survival.

The UK Society of Authors also found that over a third of translators have lost work to AI with 43% reporting income drops. And the freelance marketplace data tells a bigger story. The share of business spending going to platforms like Upwork and Fiverr dropped from 66% in late 2021 to 0.14% in late 2025. So it went from 6.6 to 1.4.

More than half of companies that were using freelancers in 2022 stopped entirely. And here's the kicker. Companies are replacing about a dollar in freelance spend with about three cents in AI spend, a 25 to one cost savings. And I get the skepticism.

I hear people saying AI can't really do what humans do. The quality isn't there. This is all hype. And look, there's truth to that, right?

Klarna found out the hard way. They cut too deep, quality tanked, and their CEO admitted they went too far. They actually started rehiring after that. But here's what I want you to understand.

The direction is not changing. The speed might fluctuate. Companies might overcorrect and pull back temporarily, but the fundamental trajectory, the fundamental economics are pointing in one direction. And the people who understand the direction earliest are the ones who are going to thrive.

And I want to show you what thriving looks like because this is part of the story that honestly blows my mind more than layoffs do, right? Cursor, the AI code editor built by four MIT students went from 1 million to 100 million annual revenue in 12 months. They crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue by November 2025 with about 300 employees. They spent $0 on marketing to get to 100 million, zero.

The product was so good that developers just told other people about it. And, you know, this is a really crazy thing. For example, like an analyst named Jeremiah Owang ran the numbers and found that AI native startups average $3.48 million in revenue per employee versus 611,000 for traditional software companies. That means the new AI companies are 5.7 times more efficient per person.

And this is what I keep saying. This is what I've been telling people for months now. The gap between people who understand AI and people who don't is becoming the single biggest economic divide of our lifetime. Bigger than college versus no college, bigger than tech worker versus non-tech worker, the people who can learn these tools, who understand how to use them, who adapt their workflows, those people are going to capture an insane amount of value.

And that's exactly why I built the AI Profit Boarding because I kept seeing this pattern over and over. People wanted to learn automation, who they needed to adapt, but didn't know where to start, right? And that's what we've built inside the AI Profit Boarding. Link in the comments description or just go to the AIProfitBoarding.com.

Now, let me tell you what the smartest people in the world are predicting because the predictions are all over the map, but they're converging on something important. Dario Amodi of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% within one to five years. That's not some random person on Twitter. That's the CEO of the three most important AI companies on Earth, right?

And he's not saying that to sell his product. He's saying it as a warning. He wrote a 20,000 word essay in January, 2026, saying the producers of this technology have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what's coming. So overall, I mean, the AI transition is happening, whether you're ready or not.

Jack Dorsey already made his bet. Mark Benioff already made his bet. Every major CEO in America is sitting in a boardroom right now looking at the same data we just went through and asking the same questions. How many people can we replace?

The only question that matters for you is this. Are you gonna be the person who gets replaced or the person who does the replacing? And that's not meant to scare you. It's meant to motivate you because right now, today in March, 2026, the window is still open.

The tools are getting better every week, but most people haven't started learning them yet. That means if you start now, if you start this week, you have an advantage that it's going to compound for years, but that window is closing and it's closing faster than anyone expected, right? 4,000 people at Block, 4,000 people at Salesforce, 50,000 across all of corporate America in a single year. And every single CEO who watched those stocks go up is thinking the same right now.

We should do that too. So don't be on the wrong side of that equation. Start learning stuff, building stuff now. And if you wanna learn more, feel free to join the AR Profit Boarding, link in the comments description, or go to the AR Profit Boarding community to check it out.

Thanks for watching.