For many years, my conversations with CEOs about AI-related job loss were similar to those involving Donald Trump. Privately they predicted doom, but publicly they said little or nothing. Kevin Roose of the New York Times wrote about this two-faced approach back in 2019 about the World Economic Forum discussions he heard. I worked with Deloitte on an anonymous survey of US executives back in 2018, and we found that 63% agreed that “To cut costs, my company wants to automate as many jobs as possible with AI/cognitive.” But at that time almost no CEO went on the record that AI would lead to substantial job loss in their organizations.

Things are changing rapidly in this regard, however. Several prominent CEOs have recently proclaimed that AI will eliminate jobs in their companies:

• Ford’s CEO Jim Farley predicted that AI would replace “literally half” of all (not just Ford’s) white collar workers in the US, adding that “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”

• Andy Jassy of Amazon told employees in June that he expected AI would lead to a smaller corporate workforce;

• Marc Benioff of Salesforce eliminated 1000 positions at Salesforce this year, and later commented that AI was doing 30-50% of the work at the company;

• JP Morgan Chase consumer bank CEO Marrianne Lake told investors in May that AI could drive 10% job loss among operations and account servicing employees at the bank.

• Vista Equity Partners CEO Robert F. Smith told a conference of investors that 60% of them would be looking for jobs next year.

And that’s not all—I could go on. While I suppose there is something to be said for honesty, I think these pronouncements are generally harmful to the companies and to the economy in general. They make me wistful for when the AI job doomers were restricted to expressing themselves quietly at ritzy executive gatherings.

For one thing, their predictions are likely to be wrong. I have reviewed perhaps twenty different predictions of AI’s effect on jobs, mostly involving losses but sometimes predicting gains. The predictions all have one thing in common: they were hugely wrong. We don’t have—and probably won’t have—good numbers on the actual jobs lost because of AI. But it’s pretty clear that we haven’t lost even the low predicted number (Gartner, with 1.8 million) and certainly not the highest predicted number (2 billion jobs, from an organization called Vista that I haven’t heard of since). It’s also obvious that we didn’t gain the 133 million new jobs from AI that the World Economic Forum predicted would arrive by 2022. In short, we don’t know the answer to this question, and making up numbers that are bound to be inaccurate just makes people (including CEOs) look bad.

But accurate or not, hearing from your company’s CEO that AI will put many of you and your colleagues out of work is also rather dispiriting to say the least. Maybe these predictions are designed to encourage mass resignation, but AI isn’t ready to take over everybody’s job who might resign. The most likely future is that many of us will be working alongside AI—my co-author Steve Miller and I discovered many people who were already doing this several years ago in our 2022 book Working with AI. We found that collaborating effectively with a smart machine requires some creativity and initiative on the part of human workers, and being told you’re going to lose your job to AI hardly encourages that type of thinking. I’m guessing that it leads to a lot of employees just going through the motions of working. Maybe the CEO AI job doomers are contributing to the lowest employee engagement figures in a decade—only 30% are engaged in their jobs.

These dire predictions may also create a social movement and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other CEOs will feel like they have to be similarly provocative in order to keep their stock prices high (although there is no evidence that investors are impressed by these pronouncements). Eventually perhaps analysts and investors will expect large-scale job cuts because of AI.

At a recent conference I asked Daron Acemoglu, the MIT economist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, if he thought that AI-based job cuts are the route to better economic performance. He said that is unlikely. “It leads to a race to the bottom,” he said. Your company cuts its costs, but so do your competitors. Everybody becomes less profitable. Far better, he said, to focus your AI investments on the ability to innovate and create better products and services. Incidentally, Acemoglu predicts relatively low job losses from AI.

I’m not sure what these doomsayer CEOs are thinking when they say that AI will lead to massive job losses in their companies and the broader economy. If lots of people lose their jobs, they won’t be able to spend much on these companies’ products. It’s the reverse of the Henry Ford strategy—he paid workers more in part so that they could buy his cars. Instead many companies are planning to implement AI in a way that may well bring down the economy.