Companies blame AI for job losses. Critics say it’s a ‘good excuse’

From tech to airlines, major global companies have been downsizing as the real impact of artificial intelligence is felt, scaring away employees. But critics say AI has become an easy excuse for companies looking to downsize.

Last month, a technology consultancy Accenture announced a restructuring plan that includes rapid departures for workers who are not initially able to retrain in AI. A few days later, Lufthansa said it would cut 4,000 jobs by 2030 by relying on AI to increase efficiency.

Salesforce also laid off 4,000 customer support positions in September, saying AI can do 50% of the work in the company. Meanwhile, a financial technology company Klarna reduced its workforce by 40% by aggressively adopting AI tools.

Language learning platform Duolingo said it would gradually stop relying on contractors and use AI to fill gaps.

The headlines are grim, but Fabian Stephany, an assistant professor of AI working at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the job cuts could be bigger than they seem.

Previously, there may have been some stigma surrounding the use of AI, but today companies are making the technology a “scapegoat” that takes responsibility for difficult business decisions such as layoffs.

“I’m really skeptical about whether the layoffs we’re seeing now are really due to real efficiencies. It’s more of a projection toward AI in the sense of, ‘We can use AI to come up with good excuses,'” Stephany said in an interview with CNBC.

Companies can essentially position themselves on the frontier of AI technology to appear innovative and competitive, while hiding the real reasons for layoffs., according to Stephanie.

“There may be various other reasons why companies need to get rid of some of their staff… Duolingo or Klarna are really prime candidates for this, because there has also been over-recruitment during the Covid-19 pandemic,” the professor said.

Some companies that have thrived during the pandemic have “significantly over-recruited” and recent layoffs may simply be a “market clearance.”

“It’s to some extent about laying off people for whom there was no long-term sustainable perspective and instead of saying ‘we miscalculated this two or three years ago, now they can come to the scapegoat, and it’s like saying ‘it’s because of AI though’,” he added.

This model sparked an online conversation. One of the founders, Jean-Christophe Bouglé, even said in a popular LinkedIn post that AI adoption is “much slower” than claimed and that in large companies “not much is happening” and AI projects are even canceled due to cost or security concerns.

“At the same time, plans for massive layoffs are being announced ‘because of AI’. This seems like a big excuse, in a context where the economies of many countries are slowing down, despite what the incredible performance of the stock markets suggests,” said Bouglé, co-founder of Authentic.ly.

Careers expert Jasmine Escalera said this cover-up “fuels the fear of AI,” with employees around the world worried about their jobs being replaced by AI.

“We already know that employees are afraid because companies are not being honest, open and communicative about how they are implementing AI,” Escalera told CNBC Make It. “Now companies are openly saying, ‘We’re doing this (layoffs) because of AI,’ which is fueling the frenzy.”

Escalera said big companies need to be more responsible as they set the tone for what is the norm in business decision-making and avoid green-lighting “bad behavior.”

A Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC that the company deployed its own AI agent, Agentforce, which reduced the number of customer support cases and eliminated the need to “fill support engineer roles,” they said.

“We have successfully redeployed hundreds of employees to other areas such as professional services, sales and customer success,” the Salesforce spokesperson added.

Klarna directed CNBC to comments from its co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski about

Siemiatkowski linked the downsizing to reducing its analytics team into a single “success team,” many of whom then leave through natural attrition, as well as reducing the company’s customer success team.

Lufthansa and Accenture declined to comment on the matter and did not share further details on its AI restructuring strategy. Duolingo did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The Budget Lab, a nonpartisan policy research center at Yale University, released a report on Wednesday showing that work in the United States has actually been little disrupted by AI automation since ChatGPT’s release in 2022.

The lab examined U.S. labor market data from November 2022 to July 2025 using a “dissimilarity index” that measured how occupational composition — the share of workers in different jobs — has changed since the early days of AI and compared it to other technological changes such as the introduction of computers and the Internet. The study finds that AI has not yet caused widespread job losses.

Additionally, New York Fed economists released a study in early September showing that the use of AI in business “does not indicate significant reductions in employment” in the service and manufacturing sectors in the New York – northern New Jersey region.

The study found that 40% of service companies reported using AI this year, up from 25% last year, while manufacturing companies saw a similar increase from 16% last year to 26% this year, but very few used AI to fire workers.

Just 1% of service companies reported AI as the reason for layoffs in the past six months, compared to 10% who laid off workers using AI in 2024. Meanwhile, 12% of service companies said AI caused them to hire fewer workers in 2025.

In contrast, 35% of service companies used AI to reskill their employees and 11% hired more as a result.

Stephany said there wasn’t much evidence from her research showing high levels of technological unemployment due to AI.

“Economists call this structural unemployment, because the job pie is no longer big enough for everyone and people will definitely lose their jobs because of AI. I don’t think this will happen on a large scale,” he said.

He added that concerns about technology ending human labor are visible throughout history.

“It’s happened a dozen times in this century alone, you can go back to ancient times when Roman emperors took over certain machines because they were worried about them and it’s always the opposite that happened. The machine made businesses, industries more productive.

“It’s allowed entirely new jobs to emerge. If you think about the internet 20 years ago, no one would have known what a social media influencer was, what an app developer was, because it didn’t exist.”

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