AI job cuts could come with a costly undo button

Gartner forecasts that, by 2029, nearly a third of employees laid off because of AI will need to be rehired, often at significantly higher cost. The global research firm warned that workforce cuts could save money in the short term but risk weakening talent pipelines and eroding institutional knowledge over the longer term. With …

[GoneFission]

Good thing that's a problem for 2029's C-Suite. The current perpetrators always just pocket the difference and walk away

[elsergiovolador]

I think they sail away.

[Cris E]

Dude, we're all making TV and movies now. Get out of the valley and come down to LA, that computer shit is over. What are you even doing up there?

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

The best news

The easiest jobs one can replace with AI are C-Suite positions. And you can't jail AI's.

[Pete 2]

Numbers please

> by 2029, nearly a third of employees laid off because of AI ...

And exactly (or even, roughly) how many will that be? There is a lot of talk - or is it just clickbait scaremongering - that 70% of workers could be replaced by AI, but so far there seems to be little evidence that many have been.

Sure, Oracle is cited as an example. But in a recession there are daily reports of job losses in the thousands. Not just one high-tech outfit losing 13% of their workers due to planned restructuring.

And generally in a recession the number laid-off can be in the millions. Most of whom are later re-hired, reskilled and end up working in the newly invigorated post-recession world. This sort of cycle, while painful for the individuals involved, does lead to a new workforce with modernised skills. People who later boost the economy and contribute to higher growth.

This "warning" seems to be just repeating what already happens on a regular basis.

[Cris E]

Re: Numbers please

Well it depends, doesn't it?

If it's 2021 and everyone is suddenly living online then everyone hires a lot of developers.

If it's 2023 and you're selling AI then it'll be LOTS of devs being not paid anymore because they'll all be buying AI.

If it's 2024 and you're paying developers then it's lots of people out in the street because you hired way too many two years ago but you don't want to admit it so you say it's AI related because you're smart.

If it's 2025 you may be firing devs for a host of reasons, but you could be using AI too.

If it's 2026 you fired some staff and you're looking at firing more because of your burgeoning AI bills. Damn.

And finally if you're Gartner you'll say anything in any year in the hopes that some exec will want to hear that and start writing checks again.

[Pete 2]

Re: Numbers please

> Well it depends, doesn't it?

Yes, exactly.

And without the details and comparisons with similar events (e.g. the dotcom boom/crash) there is nothing to base a rational response on. Just touchy-feely emotional reactions from those who don't "do" numbers. And scary content intended to manipulate those individuals.

It is quite possible that a lot of people will lose their jobs. Although that has yet to be seen. Nor is it evident that those losses will be permanent. They never have been in the past and UK unemployment rates now, at 4.9%, is below the long-term average of 6.6% and nowhere near the highs seen in previous recessions.

But none of that will matter to the folks who don't "do" numbers, or other forms of reality.

[keithpeter]

Re: Numbers please

@ Pete 2

Georgian London. The Virginia and Baltick coffee shop. A group of merchants and traders sit with their bowls of coffee and discuss trade and set shipping prices based on the ships that came in last month and vibes. The record became the Baltic Dry Index. Liverpool a few decades later, ancestors of mine going down the Mersey Docks and Harbour company offices' yard each Saturday to see what the rates for dock work were the following week. Company officers, in the absence of radio, took a guess as to likely arrivals based on past history. That history became the numbers.

I think that the problem now is the very narrow base of people from which the guesses based on experience are made. People who are not to be found in a coffee shop or office near you, and who don't have a wide range of opinions presented to them.

Numbers: remember Libor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Numbers please

It’s not just job losses. It’s hiring to replace natural wastage/loss. That seems to have seized up completely… esp. for those at the bottom of the food chain hoping to work up.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Numbers please

> It’s hiring to replace natural wastage/loss. That seems to have seized up completely

Well we are almost at the end of the Boomers retirement spike, I was born in 1961 so near the tail end and my school 2 years later was half the size it used to be as the numbers crashed.

So the last decade will have seen a lot of replacement hiring which will have stopped by now - as well as the drive to reduce numbers in the name of profit.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"working in the newly invigorated post-recession world."

You can take the pitcher to the well once too often.

I don't see this planet being invigorated by AI's insatiable demands on its water and energy resources.

Up until now we have managed to avoid the worst consequences of our neolithic slash-and-burn mentalitiy — no longer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

Oracle is on borrowed time waiting for the AI bros to pay their compute bills with money they don’t have … and won’t have unless somehow they magic up a bunch of billions in more debt.

And nobody who has ever had to suffer the dog awful grot that Oracle slops out even without AI will mourn its passing down the toilet where it belongeth.

[Excused Boots]

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

“....and won’t have unless somehow they magic up a bunch of billions in more debt.”

Billions? That’s chump change, we are talking about 100s of billions, if not trillions of dollars, pounds, (at these levels it’s almost irrelevant) of debt, that one day will need to be called in. You only need one lender to decide to ‘move first’ and the entire edifice will collapse.

You would have thought that the finance industry would have learnt from the sub-prime mortgage disaster, but apparently not. I can only assume that they think that ‘governments will bail them out’? Except it may be that the scale of the failures are that not even the US or Chinese governments have the ability to do so.

Won’t be pretty!

[theOtherJT]

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

I'm pretty sure learning lessons isn't a thing that the finance industry is capable of doing.

Remember the old adage: You owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars and can't pay - you're in trouble. You owe them a hundred million dollars and can't pay, the bank is in trouble.

They don't want to look too hard at the real numbers because in their heart of hearts I think they all know by now that they may have already cocked it and are waiting for the inevitable "We could never have seen this coming!" followed by a government bailout.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

> Except it may be that the scale of the failures are that not even the US or Chinese governments have the ability to do so

Well the US can just increase it debt but it's borrowing costs are going up, I think the Chinese let them burn rather than bale them out. Forget the UK as we are up to the eyeballs in government debt.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

and won’t have unless somehow they magic up a bunch of billions in more debt.

That is easy. Come to the UK with wine and steak. Dazzle ministers with nice dashboards and bed time stories about rogue agents. Then PM of the day will wheel out the Chancellor of the day saying something about another blackhole and that the AI will save us and therefore everyone has to pay they fair share except the rich and big corporations and add few more % to NI or Income Tax.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

I can see revenue squeezing scum like Broadcom being interested in breaking up a distressed or crashed Oracle and leaving the Datacenters to the Bond Owners to fight over selling them for Amazon (not Data) Warehouses.

[Tron]

That's probably the death knell for enterprise AI sales.

Corporates were only interested in cheap tech that replaced meatbags, reducing costs.

They are not interested in improving the skills of cubicle slaves with expensive AI, not least because 90% of roles involve minimal creativity. And they have no interest in paying to train their staff.

Either AI magically replaces meatbags, saving sacks of cash that can be added to their bonuses, or they walk away.

[frankvw]

...paying for those cuts in the long run

I remember when IT departments were being decruited by the Grim Downsizer in favour of outsourcing, because that would save so much money.

I remember when server rooms were being emptied in favor of "moving everything to the cloud" because that would save so much money.

And now AI. I'm having a major case of deja-moo (the feeling I've seen this bull$h1t before). Indeed there is nothing new under the sun.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: ...paying for those cuts in the long run

Deja-moo. I'm stealing that!

[David Hicklin]

Re: ...paying for those cuts in the long run

Its like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

[alain williams]

Reminds me of outsourcing

Companies fired the developers who they had had for years, to replace with Indians who did what they were asked but did not understand the big picture.

Thus "eroding institutional knowledge over the longer term".

History does not repeat itself, it rhymes.

[coredump]

Re: Reminds me of outsourcing

History does not

repeat itself but sometimes

it is a haiku

[RM Myers]

Gartner continues to amaze

I'm never sure when I read quotes from Gartner whether to laugh or cry. The sheer number of hackneyed cliches is stunning - these people deserve a doctorate degree in bullshit. If it wasn't Gartner, I would probably assume someone was "taking the piss". with the reader. Won't someone please think of the children English language.

[Wiretrip]

Re: Gartner continues to amaze

I am willing to bet the report was written by AI.

[Rikki Tikki]

"Gartner advised organizations to use AI to "enhance human capability while preserving accountability.""

I suggest replacing Gartner with the combined wisdom of The Register's commentards. Isn't this essentially what many of us have been saying for some time?

Time for a --->

It's Friday, nd I"m sure we've all earned it.

[David 132]

Alas, here it's still Thursday. Not that that'll stop me having a convivial post-work pint, you understand.

It'f POETF day, yef, it furely if!

[David Hicklin]

But will get paid ??

[Michael Hoffmann]

Rehire?

Where do they think those laid off hordes will be in the meantime? Frozen in stasis, ready to go? Like Ancillaries?

If I got hit by AI induced layoffs and managed to somehow survive without ending on the streets, it sure as hell would NOT be in IT! Learn a trade and make more money than before, mostly by never showing up when you said you would, it seems.

I'm so glad I'm now just part-timing loose ends, because <client> begged me instead of retiring outright. The feeling is indescribable.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

I look forward to the greedy investors, CEOs, and board members getting screwed right royally in the future as they're doing to so many millions of people today. The karma they deserve for such crimes is epic!

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

AI is only as good as the training data

AI systems are only ever as good as the training material that they are built upon. In the recent past this training data was freely available because nobody realised what a goldmine of valuable information they were sitting on. Those heady days of free training data are now gone and will not return; everybody who has code and potential AI training material now knows the value of that data.

This imposes another cost on people training AI models since in future the free training data will be out of date and fairly rubbish, and the useful, up-to-date stuff will cost.

In future the AI assistant will have access costs imposed to pay for the cost of training it, and the power, hardware and other costs of actually running the model. It would not surprise me at all if AI systems were relegated to the role of an off-line librarian which can be asked questions, the answers to which appear minutes or hours later.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Gartner… never wrong…

nor ever right.

If I were looking for an oracle I think I would rather take my chances at Delphi with prognostications of some old cat sitting over a sulphurous vent — I suppose not so very different from Gartner.