IBM’S 8,000 LAYOFFS REVEAL THE HARSH REALITY OF THE AI REVOLUTION
IBM has historically been at the frontier of computing, and it intends to do so in the age of AI. After making some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the company is now working with CoreWeave to make an AI supercomputer. But the lean into an AI-first future also has a human cost. Talking to The Wall Street Journal, IBM chief Arvind Krishna recently revealed that the company is replacing the responsibilities of a “couple hundred human resources workers” with AI agents. IBM’s decision reflects a broader pattern across the tech industry, where non-engineering roles are increasingly being offloaded to AI automation.
In IBM’s case, the trade-off is a tad odd. With people in the HR department losing their jobs to AI tools, the company is instead hiring people across other departments — and in bigger numbers. “While we have done a huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automation on certain enterprise workflows, our total employment has actually gone up, because what it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas,” Krishna was quoted as saying by The Journal.
