Of course it has. That's the entire point of AI.
Ostensibly it's to help programmers, or writers, or lawyers, or whomever. But those are just the users of AI.
The owners and buyers of AI at a company level are developing and using it to push down payroll expenses. That's it. It's to avoid paying people, and providing them benefits. Even if you fire 50% of your employees, realize it was a terrible mistake, and hire most of them back, it's a net reduction in payroll costs.
I will say though as someone who solo runs their own product business, right now feels like a great time to be building your own thing.
No idea if this will last long though.
Fewer and fewer people to buy said thing when layoffs and no-hiring continues
Yeah, who’s going to pay for your single person AI-powered vibe coded calendar organiser product when nobody has a job?
Once stagflation really starts to set in, things will get rough.
I do wonder, will this drive the value of software “things” way down? Once everyone starts solo building their own things…
> Even if you fire 50% of your employees, realize it was a terrible mistake, and hire most of them back, it's a net reduction in payroll costs.
This is inane. If an employer hired most of these employees back it means that firing them negatively impacted the bottom line.
It just means they bought the hype and thought they could actually use AI to fire people. Many companies try to do it, and I don't know how many it works for.
But I do know that companies fire people and stay short-staffed just to keep payroll down all the time. Even when externally that seems like a terrible idea, and likely impacts bottom line. It's important to realize just how much companies hate payroll. And AI is a great way to try to reduce it.