How many humans does your company intend to keep?
Today, I came across a LinkedIn post that reported rough data on how many people were laid off across the biggest tech companies due to AI:
- canva: 1,271
- microsoft: 5,300
- meta: 10,400
- uber: 3,300
- atlassian: 1,380
- ebay: 1,100
- netflix: 1000
- hubspot: 600
- squarespace: 300
- dropbox: 200
total humans affected: 24,851
I understand the need for the founders to make the processes as effective (AKA layoffs), but it somehow reduces the economic power and ability to buy products (in the long term)
How many employees does your company intend to keep, and to what extent do you want to automate your business?
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Great topic, Nika. I really am interested in this topic.
Last week I attended a conference where one of the speakers was the founder of a unicorn company. When he was asked, "Are you laying people off right now?", he said, "Oh no, quite the opposite. This year, 2026, we've hired 100 people, and in 2027 we're going to hire 200 people."
And they asked him, "Okay, but how is AI affecting you? How are you dealing with AI in your business?" He said, "AI is great for us. Our employees are actually working more. We're giving them more work. If someone can't handle it, we'll let them go, but realistically, we're using AI to get people to do more work. Our goal is to capture more market share. To that end, every Friday of the month during the summer, we gave them the whole day to work with AI and use the latest models on Claude and OpenAI to improve their AI skills."
@byalexai What was the name of the conference? Sounds pretty interesting.
@busmark_w_nika It was called Crossroads. There was a great GrokBot workshop. We participated in a hackaton there and were one of the wiiners. :lol:
https://www.startupbulgaria.eu/crossroads
Great topic, Nika. I've run my company alone for over 22 years, so my number is one. With AI agents my output feels about 100 times what it was, and in a bigger team I think people would be the bottleneck now. The one place I keep a human is customer support. People want a person, and satisfaction drops once they realise it's a bot. So AI drafts the reply, and I check it and send it myself within a day.
@hisashispace But didn't you notice people complaining about AI content? We lost some people who didn't like that we were using AI.
@busmark_w_nika Yes, and that's exactly why I never let AI talk to customers directly. People can tell, and satisfaction drops once they realise it's a bot. So the AI only drafts, and every support reply gets checked and sent by me. If it would take days to answer, though, I'd still take a quick bot reply over silence.
I’m with the view that AI lets a small team do a lot more. We’re three people right now, and if we hired, it would be someone who really knows how to use AI. The part that doesn’t go away is the deciding, what to build, which source to trust, what’s worth doing. AI makes all of that faster, the finding, the checking, the automating, but someone still has to make the call. So for us it’s less about keeping fewer people and more about each person covering more ground.
@alieksia the market requires now people who know how to handle AI :)
@busmark_w_nika or at least willing to learn fast
I’d keep the team and try giving people some of the time back. Let's say five people can finish the week’s work by Thursday. Give them Friday off on the same salary for a couple of months and see how it goes. If the work gets done and the business can afford it, that seems like a pretty good result to me.
The way you handle this affects how honest people are going to be about using AI too. If I watched a colleague automate part of their job and get laid off because of it, I’d be pretty careful about showing my boss what I’d figured out. Dunno..I’d probably keep using the tools and let everyone assume things still took as long as before :D