When someone asks about artificial intelligence and jobs, most tech CEOs will say the same thing: productivity will increase, new roles will be created, and society will always adapt.
Uber (NYSE: UBER ) CEO Dara Khosrowshahi isn’t doing that.
in a recent interview Diary of a CEO (1), When host Steven Bartlett brought up the inconsistency between what tech leaders say publicly about artificial intelligence and what they admit privately, the Uber CEO didn’t push back. He agreed and went further.
Khosrowshahi said he hears executives talk privately about the “huge disruption” they expect from artificial intelligence, and then sees those same people appear on CNBC or Davos to tell viewers everything will be fine.
“I understand the motivation,” Khosrowshahi said, noting that talking too frankly about job losses could scare investors and fundraisers.
Khosrowshahi did not soften his numbers. He estimates that artificial intelligence will be able to replace 70% to 80% of human jobs, that mental jobs will disappear within 10 years, and physical jobs such as driving, logistics, and robotics will disappear within 15 to 20 years. Nor is he assuming his own labor force. With 9.5 million drivers and couriers on the Uber platform, it is the world’s largest flexible workforce network. Khosrowshahi acknowledged that most of those trips will eventually be made by self-driving cars, and when asked what those nine million people did next, he said: “I don’t know.”
Early data has already accumulated.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off approximately 4,000 employees in February, accounting for nearly 40% of the company’s workforce, one of the largest artificial intelligence layoffs in technology history (2). Dorsey isn’t sugarcoating it: AI tools, he says, “fundamentally change what it means to build and run a company.”
He is not alone. Atlassian cuts 1,600 jobs, citing “artificial intelligence era”(3). Meta reportedly plans to cut its workforce by up to 20%, possibly more than 15,000 employees, in part to offset huge spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, although the company called the report speculative (4).
Crypto.com, eBay, Pinterest and even the law firm Baker McKenzie have all mentioned artificial intelligence in their recent production reduction announcements (2, 5). The macro-level numbers cannot be ignored. Companies will cite AI in 55,000 job cuts by 2025, 12 times the number two years ago, according to employment consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas (6). In 2026, another 12,000 AI-related layoffs were announced. Goldman Sachs Research predicts that if artificial intelligence is widely adopted, the number of unemployed people in the U.S. labor force will reach 6% to 7% (7), and the unemployment rate among young technology workers aged 20 to 30 has increased by about 3 percentage points (8).
Some economists remain skeptical. Oxford Economics said some companies are using artificial intelligence as a cover to “dress up layoffs as good news” rather than acknowledging the post-pandemic overcorrection. This may be true in some cases. But even skeptics don’t think AI isn’t transforming the labor market. They argue about how fast.
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But even Khosrowshahi’s timeline may be too generous.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, leading to unemployment rates as high as 10% to 20% (9).
Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial intelligence investor, said that similar predictions of 50% replacement by 2027 are “extremely accurate” (10). An MIT study found that 11.7% of jobs in the United States could be automated using existing AI, rather than future versions of the technology (11).
The World Economic Forum’s latest forecast is somewhere in the middle: 92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030, offset by an estimated 170 million new jobs (12). But this optimistic math depends on retraining programs, which so far do not exist on a large scale in any country. Khosrowshahi himself has made this point, adding that UBI experiments conducted so far have produced worse outcomes for beneficiaries, not better.
Goldman Sachs’ own data tells a similar story. A recent survey of the firm’s investment bankers found that while only 11% of clients are currently laying off employees due to AI, the number of expected layoffs over the next three years is growing fast enough that “the impact of AI on the U.S. labor market may come sooner than expected” (13).
Khosrowshahi linked the threats to personal events. Watching his father lose everything after fleeing the Iranian revolution, and his sense of purpose, left a mark. Khosrowshahi believes that work is more than just a paycheck. Through them people know their importance. If you strip this away at scale, without a clear alternative, you have not just an economic problem, but an identity crisis.
When asked what he would tell his four children to survive in an AI-dominated future, his answer was reassuringly simple: “Work hard. You’ll be fine.”
The implication was that even he didn’t seem to fully believe it. He just didn’t have a better answer. Unlike most of his peers, he was willing to speak up.
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CEO Diary (1); CBS News (2); CNBC (3, 4, 5, 8); Challenger, Gray and Christmas (6); Goldman Sachs Research (7); Axis (9); Fortune (10, 13); MIT (11); World Economic Forum (12)
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