Companies are blaming AI for layoffs. Critics say it’s a ‘good excuse’

From technology companies to airlines, major global companies are cutting jobs as the real-world implications of artificial intelligence frighten employees. But critics say AI has become an easy excuse for companies looking to downsize.

Last month, technology consulting firm Accenture The company announced a restructuring plan that includes expedited retirement of employees who cannot be retrained in AI. A few days later, Lufthansa German Airlines It said it would cut 4,000 jobs by 2030 as it relies on AI to improve efficiency.

Salesforce also laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, saying 50% of its work could be done with AI. On the other hand, fintech companies Klarna aggressively deployed AI tools and reduced its workforce by 40%.

language learning platform Duolingo says it will gradually wean itself from relying on contractors and leverage AI to fill gaps.

While the headlines are grim, Fabian Stefani, assistant professor of AI at the Oxford Internet Institute, said there may be more to the job cuts than meets the eye.

While there may have been some stigma against the use of AI in the past, companies are now “scapegoating” the technology to combat difficult business moves such as layoffs.

“I’m very skeptical that the layoffs that we’re seeing now are really due to true efficiency gains,” Stefani said in an interview with CNBC.

Stephanie said companies can essentially position themselves at the forefront of AI technology in order to appear innovative and competitive, while at the same time hiding the real reasons for the layoffs.

“There could be many other reasons why companies would have to lay off some of their employees…Duolingo and Klarna are prime candidates because there was overemployment even during the coronavirus pandemic,” he said.

Some companies that have thrived during the pandemic are “significantly overemployed” and recent layoffs may simply be “market consolidation.”

“In a way, this is firing people who didn’t have a sustainable long-term vision, and saying, ‘We miscalculated a couple of years ago, and now they can be the scapegoat, and it’s because of the AI.'”

This pattern has sparked debate online. One of the founders, Jean-Christophe Bougre, even said in a popular LinkedIn post that AI adoption is “much slower” than people say, and that “not much is happening” at large companies, with AI projects being rolled back due to cost and security concerns.

“At the same time, large-scale layoff plans are being announced ‘because of AI’, which looks like a great excuse in a context where the economy is slowing in many countries, despite what the stock exchanges’ phenomenal performance suggests,” said Bougre, co-founder of Authentic.ly.

Career expert Jasmine Escalera said the cover-up is “stoking fear about AI” as workers around the world worry about losing their jobs as a result of AI.

“So we already know that employees are scared because companies aren’t being honest and open and communicating about how they’re implementing AI,” Escalera told CNBC Make It. “Companies are now openly saying, ‘We’re doing this (retrenchment) because of AI,’ and that’s fueling the frenzy.”

Escalera said large companies need to be more responsible in setting standards in business decisions and ensuring they don’t give the green light to “bad behavior.”

A Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC that the company’s introduction of its own AI agent, Agentforce, has reduced the number of customer support calls and eliminated the need to “fill support engineer roles.”

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

Klarna referred CNBC to comments from co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski about X, explaining that the company has reduced its workforce from 5,500 to 3,000 employees in two years, and that “AI is just one part of that.”

Simiatkowski linked the layoffs to the slimming down of the analytics team into one “success team” and subsequent attrition of many employees, as well as the downsizing of the company’s customer success team.

Lufthansa and Accenture declined to comment for this story and did not provide details about their AI restructuring strategies. Duolingo did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Budget Lab, a nonpartisan policy research center at Yale University, released a report Wednesday showing that the U.S. workforce has actually been largely undisrupted by AI automation since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

The institute looked at U.S. labor market data from November 2022 to July 2025, using a “dissimilarity index” that measures how much the occupational mix (the proportion of workers in different jobs) has changed since the advent of AI, and compared it to other technological changes, such as the introduction of computers and the internet. It turns out that AI has not yet caused widespread job losses.

Additionally, economists at the New York Fed released research in early September showing that the use of AI in businesses “does not imply a significant reduction in employment” across service and manufacturing industries in the New York-Northern New Jersey region.

It found that 40% of service companies said they were using AI this year, up from 25% last year, and manufacturing companies similarly increased from 16% last year to 26% this year, but few were using AI to fire employees.

Just 1% of service companies reported AI as a reason for firing an employee in the past six months, down from 10% of companies that used AI to fire employees in 2024. Meanwhile, 12% of service companies said they will hire fewer employees in 2025 because of AI.

In contrast, 35% of service companies are using AI to reskill employees, and 11% are increasing hiring as a result.

Stefani said his research doesn’t show much evidence of large-scale technological unemployment due to AI.

“Economists call this structural unemployment, which means that the pie of jobs is no longer big enough for everyone, so people will definitely lose their jobs to AI. I don’t see this happening on a large scale,” he said.

He added that concerns about technology ending human work have been seen throughout history.

“It has recurred more than a dozen times in this century alone. It can be traced back to ancient times. Roman emperors worried about this and used certain machines, but the opposite always happened: Machines made businesses and industries more productive.”

“This has opened up a whole new set of jobs. If you think about the internet 20 years ago, no one knew what a social media influencer was or what an app developer was, because those things didn’t exist.”

Learn more about companies implementing AI workforce reductions below.