Amid a clear majority of Americans harboring concerns about the impact of AI on their jobs, the parent company of jobsite Indeed and employer review website Glassdoor has laid off 1,300 employees—and it’s blaming at AI.
In an email to employees sent earlier this week, spotted by CBS News, Indeed and Recruit Holdings CEO Hisayuki Idekoba said that “AI is changing the world” and that his company “must adapt.” The round of cuts represents roughly 6% of Recruit Holdings’ HR Technology segment workforce.
The writing may well have been on the wall for employees. The CEO gave a presentation at a conference hosted by JPMorgan earlier this year, where he discussed how AI would overhaul his company in coming years.
In the fireside chat, Idekoba said that “one-third” of new code at his company was soon to be written by AI, predicting it was “going to be 50% pretty soon.” Many of the CEO’s predictions could be gloomy for HR professionals across the planet. He explained that the “$300 billion-plus industry” includes a 60% to 65% “human labor manual cost,” much higher than other comparable large industries. He pointed to the potential of AI to reduce this huge volume of manual work.
The news comes as tech giants like Microsoft and Google are also pushing for the majority of code produced at their companies to be written by AI in the near future.
According to its latest internal data, 50% of all code at Google is now originally written by AI, while former CEO Eric Schmidt is urging employees to work 50-hour weeks to push its AI ambitions even further. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s latest internal statistics suggest that 30% of its code is now written by AI tools, with plans to push this number to 60% in the near future.
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently predicted that humans eventually won’t be needed “for most things,” suggesting only niche jobs like pro baseball may be safe. Meanwhile, he warned, traditional careers like medicine and teaching could be at risk.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said the company was laying off 13,000 employees.
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About Will McCurdy
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