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The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

libertas.software

51–60 of 218 posts

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#51
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?

The demand doesn't necessarily double.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#52
post #35

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required. You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be. It isn't as if there are enough projec…

This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective, otherwise adding more people would result in making more money.

> It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy

I've never worked at any company where there was any limit to the work to be done. Sales people don't give a shit what your product can do, only what they can sell, and they never sleep.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#54
post #35

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required. You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be. It isn't as if there are enough projec…

I’ve never worked anywhere where lack of work or projects was the bottleneck. Time, headcount, and budget were always the constraints.

Even in cost centers like IT or ops, there’s usually an endless backlog of work, technical debt, support requests, and improvements that never get prioritized because resources are limited.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#55
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major issue, is that once people are more productive with AI, you are able to replace people because less of them are required. You see this in enterprise consulting, wiht the increase in cloud, serverless, SaaS/iPaaS, low code/no code, content generation and translations, followed by AI agent orchestration, the teams can be reduced down to about 1/3 of what they used to be. It isn't as if there are enough projec…

This sounds like an attempt to rationalize the fact that your business isn't that effective, otherwise adding more people would result in making more money. > It isn't as if there are enough projects around to keep the other 2/3 busy I've never worked at any company where there was any limit to the work to be done. Sales people don't give a shit what your product can do, only what they can sell, and they never sleep.

Only if all roles in a company are bottlenecked in the same way.

Example: natural monopoly in some geographically-locked domain. Just to grab an example. You have 150 people in the field, can't let them go because the company still needs hands and eyes on the ground. You have 15 people in some other, paper-pushing department. Thanks to AI advances, you only need 10 of those now.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#56

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

we're not taking into consideration the new bottleneck: product growth. imo it's the growth/expansion of the product that creates new work and opportunities for more work. at the moment, product growth is human-driven--because it's a risk to take a product in any direction, and whoever makes it has to bear the full responsibility. ideas that cause product growth are still generated by humans (and rightly so), perhaps also augmented by ai.

there's also what the market is ready for. we've said that some products failed because they were ahead of their time. it's even more true now where the power of ai, ai productivity, etc could take the product far beyond the markets expectation. what does that lead to? the deliberate slow rate of growth means power/potentials have to be controlled somewhat. so even without hiring, if ai is adopted as a first-class tool within the organization, there will be surplus resources that need to be shed somehow.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#57
post #53

Capitalists usually recoup gains rather than re-investing in people or working in new verticals. This gels with companies who would rather do anything else than grow.

We need stronger goverment and socialist revokution! Strong socialist goverment invest it to people! Socialist goverment would not starve people, torture, or just send them somwehere else (those examples do not count)

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#58
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?

Except that comforting C-suite narrative does not reflect reality. 2026 agents both increase productivity by knocking clearly specified but error-prone and tedious tasks out of the park whilst simultaneously vexing and annoying their users with hallucinations and downright lies on tasks with intrinsic ambiguity. This is made worse by the token providers with their constant tweaks to their deployments to cut costs w/o losing accuracy which flat doesn't work out well for the end user.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#59
I think the unfortunate reality is that lots of companies in our industry have suspiciously inflated employee counts in the first place. Even when removing AI and the pandemic over-hiring, I wouldn't have been surprised to see corrections sooner or later.

Employee count seems to correlate to stock market incentives - which is how GitLab is like 5x larger than Valve.

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