Meta cut 8,000 jobs in late April, slashing 10 percent of its global workforce while continuing to pour billions into AI development. The move sparked debate across the tech industry: are these layoffs truly AI-driven, or is AI simply a convenient story for companies looking to restructure?
Aidan Cramer, Co-founder and CEO of AIApply, has a clear answer. “Meta is just the tip of the iceberg,” he told UC Today. “We’re seeing it across all organisations of any size. Large public companies are laying off thousands. Smaller companies are laying off hundreds. And tiny ones are just not hiring where they otherwise would.”
Agents Are Replacing Teams, Not Just Roles
Cramer argues the scale of disruption is routinely underestimated. AI agents are no longer replacing individual employees – they are replacing entire functions. “One senior manager can manage a swarm of agents replicating the work of tens of people,” he said. “Soon enough, those managers are going to get replaced as well.”
He points to engineering as the current frontline. Anthropic’s Claude Code, he notes, is enabling the best developers to work ten times faster – while simultaneously reducing the total number of developers companies need to hire.
Some Companies Are Gaming the Narrative
Not every AI-attributed layoff tells the full story. Cramer acknowledges that some firms use AI disruption as cover for cuts they wanted regardless. He cited Block – Jack Dorsey’s payments company – as an example of a firm whose stock jumped sharply after announcing AI-related redundancies. “There’s an incentive for large public companies to say they’re preparing for the AI disruption wave,” he said.
That pattern is playing out broadly across the sector, with B2B SaaS and cybersecurity firms among those facing the sharpest pressure.
Cramer does not expect the trend to reverse. “I think we’re going to see a lot more tech layoffs this year,” he said – with B2B SaaS, enterprise CRM, and cybersecurity companies at highest risk.
