Eric Siu questions whether companies are actually laying off workers because of AI or just using it as a convenient excuse. When Heineken cut 9,000 jobs, they blamed AI, but founders from Perplexity and Anthropic say most layoffs have nothing to do with it. Large organizations move slowly and couldn't have replaced thousands of workers with AI this fast.
Heineken says we cut off 9,000 employees because of AI. I'm not saying AI can't impact employees. I doubt Heineken actually cut 9,000 employees because of AI. From a marketing perspective, that's a great narrative to pitch to the market. If you pitch the narrative of, hey, we had all these employees, we weren't able to perform and we weren't doing well, so we had to terminate them. That's probably going to make your stock tank because people are like, you're not doing as well. Using the AI narrative is much more advantageous. CNBC, Bloomberg was all there. And they're interviewing a lot of these founders, both the Perplexity founder and the Anthropic founder. And both of them said most of these job losses have nothing to do with AI. Everyone's just using AI as a scapegoat. That doesn't mean AI won't impact jobs in the future. But as of now, when people are like, yeah, we're at Heineken, we're in manufacturing, and, you know, we have all these people in the back office, these big organizations move really, really slow. I doubt that they adapted that fast and they were able to eliminate 9,000 jobs.
