66% will fire workers or play wait and see with AI.
The Corporate Playbook of Large employers for 2026 is don’t hire.
At a gathering of CEOs in Midtown Manhattan this month organized by the Yale School of Management, 66% of leaders surveyed said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year. Only a third indicated they planned to hire.
“You’re going to see a lot of wait and see,” said Chris Layden, chief executive of staffing company Kelly Services. “Some of the looming uncertainty will mean that we’re going to continue to see an investment in capital over people.”
The reluctance to add staff reflects concerns about the economy, along with the belief that artificial intelligence could handle more work inside major companies. Other employers hired too many people after the pandemic and are still correcting for that.
“We’re close to zero job growth. That’s not a healthy labor market,” Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at the Yale summit. “When I go around and talk to CEOs around the country, everybody’s telling me, ‘Look, we’re not hiring because we’re waiting to try to figure out what happens with AI. What jobs can we replace? What jobs do we don’t?’”
The pause in hiring could be temporary if companies decide they do require more people to meet their growth goals. But the mood now, Waller said, is that companies simply don’t need any extra labor.
“Everybody’s afraid for their jobs. I’m dead serious,” said Waller, a candidate to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve.
At a conference recently, a top executive at Shopify was asked to describe the company’s hiring plans and he gave an increasingly common answer. “I don’t see us next year needing to increase head count in any way,” Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffmeister said. “It has been over two years we’ve been at this head count. As I look to next year, I think we can continue to be disciplined on head count.”
At Wells Fargo, CEO Charlie Scharf said this month the bank expected to have fewer people as it heads into next year. The company’s workforce has fallen from roughly 275,000 people in 2019 to about 210,000 today as executives have cut costs and overhauled the bank.
Scharf said he expects AI’s impact on staffing levels to be “extremely significant,” though it could take years to play out. He said many executives have been afraid to lay out the damage that AI could do to the job market. “No one wants to stand up and say that we should have—we’re going to have lower head count in the future,” Scharf said. “It’s a difficult thing to say.”
Change in Small, Medium, Large Employment Year-Over-Year
Large Employers Were the Only Bright Spot in 2025.
Change in Small, Medium, Large Employment Details
- Small: -197,000
- Medium: +275,000
- Large: +1,012,000
If large employers go on a hiring freeze, the 2026 outlook looks bleak.
Unlike large employers, small businesses have fewer means of tariff avoidance and less ability to hold inventory or eat the tariffs.
On December 1, I commented Value City Furniture Goes Bankrupt, Cites Tariffs, 120 Stores Will Close
American Signature, Inc., parent of VCF, filed for Bankruptcy. Fallout in 17 states.
Warn Notices
Value City is just one case. Warn notices are soaring. Newsweek reported Mass Layoff Warnings Climb to Highest Level in Nearly a Decade
According to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) alerts, which employers must issue before conducting mass layoffs, have ticked up in recent weeks. Outside of the initial spike which occurred during the pandemic, the bank said these are now at their highest level since 2016.
In addition to WARN alerts, Goldman’s economists analyzed earnings calls from Russell 3000 firms, finding that “the share of companies mentioning layoffs has increased recently.” In conversations about staffing levels, artificial intelligence has also emerged as a major theme, with “about half of layoff-focused discussions in the last two reporting quarters in the tech sector” including references to the technology.
Of course, CEOs might not do what they say their plans are. But it’s a good bet that they do.
The US has become one of the richest and most productive countries in the world because we have utilized technology to our advantage. In spite of the dislocations that result, technology is not something to be afraid of. It is something to keep taking advantage of.
I don’t think 1/3 of employers will be hiring. I think there will be a lot of layoffs in 2026 as the economy gets worse. Also, the average worker that is NOT in a union is going to take a pay cut because employers are going to start requiring employees to pay a lot more of the costs for health insurance. Employers can get away with a lot more as the job market tightens. Insurance costs (health, home and auto) are significantly increasing annually therefore, people have less money to spend on other things which affect the economy. My sister works for an insurance company and her portion of her health insurance went up by $271 a month AND her deductible went up by $400 per person.
The Fed Funds rate going up or down is having a near zero impact on aggregate hiring decisions, as the overwhelming majority of CEOs are holding off due to AI. The Fed needs to focus completely on inflation, since the Fed Funds rate is effectively decoupled from overall labor market decisions for the next couple of years.
AI is just another tool that we must embrace. If we do not embrace it, our competition will, and we will lose even more jobs. This scenario has been playing out for hundreds of years. This is nothing new.
China is embracing AI. So are we. And China has a big advantage over us already. Last year they added 430 GW of new electricity generation while we added 40GW.
Most new generation is from solar and wind. And Trump is doing his best to stop solar and wind.
This is a bit over the top but does illustrate the advances that China is exploring while the US is constantly mired in politics, what did Trump say/do today, stupid economic decisions and so forth.
Meanwhile in the US, the stupid is spreading: https://www.edchoice.org/2025-graduates-of-unprecedented-times-were-naep-scores-always-this-low/#:~:text=In%202024%2C%2012th%20graders'%20test,scored%20below%20basic%20in%20mathematics.
I suspect anytime now the headlines will read “US economy collapses overnight”. Nothing but lies, complete shellgame.
You’ll see at least one war declaration first, or very soon after.
So we have promised our kids that if they leverage themselves to the hilt with student loans, with no bankruptcy recourse, they would be able to achieve the “American Dream” and have a somewhat decent, productive life.
Then we pull the rug out from under them, in a no win situation; should AI succeed there will be no jobs for them, or if it succeeds the Chinese open source model will be dominant, and the US economy will crash because of the malivestment in the US predatory capitalist model, and there will be no middle class jobs for them but their college loans will continue to compound.
Sounds like a great future. Expect great social unrest in the years to come.
Now go back and read my posts on this thread. I’ll never understand why people post stuff in any thread w/o having first read ALL the posts that came before the one they want to make!
I read an interesting quote: “We’re eating the seed corn. Not because we’re starving, but because we’re gluttonous.
Schumpeter says….
https://maarthandam.com/2025/12/25/salesforce-regrets-firing-4000-staff-ai/
Whew! Lot of words to get to 2 primary points:
““We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately,”
“Quite vocally, the leadership has acknowledged that some of the reductions were premature, and that rebuilding trust with customers will require reinvesting in human expertise alongside automation.”
Today: a ROOM FULL of accountants and clerks.
Five years from now: ONE ROBOT and ONE ROBOT MONITOR, tweaking program inputs. Plugging it IN, keeping the Gensets running in power outages and doing some light Janitorial work.
Otherwise, empty buildings which will finally be razed and the AI accounting will be done from AI headquarters with Companies paying the bills like they do with 3rd party payroll companies.
Maybe. What’s the robot going to work on? I mean all of that stuff is for us and we have to pay for it so if we can’t pay for it we really don’t need any of it.
This bullshit dynamic of CONSTANT GROWTH is so fucking stupid that it amazes me. Constant REVENUE/NET MARGIN growth is/ARE REQUIRED so that Companies can manage CONSTANT GROWTH IN BORROWING. IT IS THAT SIMPLE.
FLATTEN THE CURVE OF BORROWING BALANCES and COMPANIES WOULD BE FINE. But, OH NO, that cannot be!
p.s. I KNOW, don’t beat me up because MODERN ECON says things are not so. That is because ECON IS NOT SCIENCE, but instead it is like believing in Allah, or Jesus.
Those are just handy stories to take our minds off of the realities of being alive (Facing Evil, dealing with sickness and shortages in food and terrible natural phenomena)….
Praying helps COPE AFTERWARDS but praying cannot PREVENT tragedies. It is the same in Econ dynamics.
Governments, and Media want US to believe is the make-believe of Stats and bullshit econ data.
The system is collapsing in an accelerated fashion to be sure. We will go back to an economy based on needs of food, water and community. To me it feels like a massive deflationary collapse is upon us but first we will get a final round of inflation before collapse.
Wait until Monday
The problem is less constant growth and more financialization, especially the use of leverage to make profits without producing more.
correct. constant growth is a scam. a real grift. and unsupported by hard science. economics is a philosophy. as soft as sociology etc…….
When you deal with the people making choices in a larger corporation, like I do, it’s almost breathtaking to see how out of touch they are with things on growund level. I’m not sure how it got to this point but i’d assume too much money sloshing around everywhere and now that they actually have to come back to reality they just can’t do it.
The insanity is everywhere, even my hometown. We tore down our old indoor mall and it’s been a pile of rubble for years now, they never even cleaned it all up. Our town doesn’t do well with restaurants and that was before all this crap hit. Now they have grand plans to put in 7 restaurants and a carwash, not to mention other things. There’s a completely redone carwash directly in front of it that’s very large and a closed down Applebees and boarded up BurgerKing down the road. Oh……and we got great tax increases to pay for it.
This thing is going down I don’t care what anyone says.
Greed at the billionaire level can never be satisfied, but they’ll drive the human race over a cliff trying.
The Military-Industrial complex has restrictions on AI. Work involving asking questions to a network based AI app is not permitted due to the risks of questions and answers being intercepted (hacked). 3rd party cloud storage is also a no-no for the same reasons.
Uh, what? Hegseth just in the last month rolled out GenAI to all DoW employees’ computers along with a memo telling them he expects them to start incorporating it into their everyday tasks. There is a desktop shortcut on every PC and the app is also on every DoW smartphone.
https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4354916/the-war-department-unleashes-ai-on-new-genaimil-platform/
This New York Times article warning about AI has drawn more than 1100 comments, many of them poorly informed and needlessly worried about AI. Too many people still fail to grasp that within a few years humans will simply be unable to compete with AI cognition and robot labor.
Where Khan and too many others go wrong is in assuming that our existing economic models must be preserved and protected from AI. People do not need, and should not need, to spend forty to sixty years working at jobs they mostly do not enjoy, simply to survive.
AI and robots will free humans from decades of drudgery and meaningless work, from living for the next weekend and TGIF, while earning just enough to pay their bills and chase social status.
At scale, AI and robots will make essentials abundant and free, from housing to food to health care to education. Money will become a historical curiosity. Governments and politicians will follow. With luck, IMO, so might religion. This is the future actually on offer. Step up, don’t run away out of fear!
“AI and robots will make essentials abundant and free”
Are the wealthy who own and control AI and robots going to share the abundance with the common people? Because the common people won’t be able to afford AI or robots.
On the cusp of every technological revolution there have always been wild fantasies about the population never having to work again because of technology. Early 1900s electrification had a lot of people believing that fantasy, but also as recently as the dot-com era this naïve belief was common.
The futurist fantasies never came true before and they won’t this time either.
This guy is smart but he and other people simply cannot fathom the rapid scale of changes coming. Imo the world will look unrecognizable in a couple of years. By 2035 I feel we will come out of it and those that survive will thrive. Sadly I feel many millions around the world will likely perish by 2035 but it will be for the betterment of the world and progress. Fwiw trying to control the outcome is not possible. Things are simply evolving daily that make it all unpredictable.
Ar eyou referring to the article author or DTJ? They are both stuck in the past and will be unable to adapt to a future radically different form what they are used to.
The focus must shift from ’employment’ to ‘purpose.’
Freed from the necessity of conventional jobs, humanity can finally dedicate itself to higher pursuits: deep space exploration, robotic missions across our solar system, life sciences, material science, and the vast, unexplored mysteries of our oceans.
The decades of binary logic of Turing programming (from 1930s-1940s) led to an AI revolution today that is dismantling the traditional workplace.
And now we stand on the brink of the ever more powerful computing paradigm of the Quantum Computing era, we must prepare the next generation for a fundamental shift in existence.
We can create an economic vehicle that empowers individuals to pursue their true calling rather than just a paycheck.
“AI and robots will make essentials abundant and free”
For the wealthy. The rest of us will be poor and policed by robots.
Make sure to stay on your best behavior then!
FYI. We’ve been told that hiring will be flat until 2030 and that AI should be used by all employees. Anyone not actively using AI might get let go.
Truth be told the following needs to come back to pre-1990s levels:
Energy
Housing
Taxes
Immigration
Citizens wont be better off until this happens.
“Don’t look back. We’re not going that way” is a famous quote.
So is “history doesnt repeat itself but it does rhyme.”
Stanford grads cant find jobs because of AI and immigration. The backlash is accelerating. Dollar collapse is imminent but so is another global economic collapse. This time there will be no papered over recovery. Great depression II will happen by 2028. The party is over for anyone on a work visa.
I hope so! This will provide the environment for AI to be accepted as a savior and take charge.
More AI ? Buy Ag and Cu.
nice dip today, bought a bit more