Aussies have been issued a stark warning about what’s coming as major companies at home and around the globe embrace artificial intelligence.
Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost to artificial intelligence in the first three months of this year alone, and it’s only going to get worse, an expert has warned.
Large companies around the world, including Australia, have announced significant redundancies as AI continues to evolve and push its way into the tech industry.
In January, Amazon said 16,000 positions would be slashed, on top of 14,000 announced months earlier, as it reduces its post-pandemic workforce and embraces AI.
Meta, which owns the likes of Facebook and Instagram, said 1000 jobs would be cut. Reuters also reported over the weekend that a staggering 20 per cent or more of the tech giant’s nearly 80,000 workforce could be laid off to counteract its costly AI infrastructure.
Block, the fintech parent company of Afterpay and Square, revealed in March that it will shed almost half its employees to lean on artificial intelligence.
And WiseTech Global, a Sydney-based logistics software business, announced it was cutting 2000 staff, or about one third of its global workforce, in the next two years.
The mass terminations have triggered alarm bells in the tech space and indicate more layoffs are likely throughout 2026 and beyond.
Toby Walsh, the Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, predicts the sector will be smashed by AI.
“Unfortunately, I expect somewhere around 10, 15, 20 per cent of jobs in this sector to go in the short term,” he told news.com.au.
“That’s going to be in the hundreds of thousands … over the next two years.”
If that eventuates, Australia could see as many as 200,000 redundancies.
According to data from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, about 950,000 people are employed in tech-related jobs in the country.
The federal government has a goal of reaching 1.2 million by the end of 2030, but that appears unachievable given that thousands of jobs have been lost since early 2024.
The picture is even more grim on a global scale. An estimated 92 million jobs will be displaced by AI and other emerging technologies within four years, a Future of Jobs report last year by the World Economic Forum (WEF) found. But there is a big positive.
An estimated 170 million new positions will be simultaneously created, meaning a net increase of 78 million jobs, WEF forecasts.
Professor Walsh, who has been an AI researcher for the past 40 years, also agrees that more roles will emerge, but people must evolve with the tech.
“No one has a good idea of what the net’s going to be,” he said.
“Despite that huge uncertainty, I think there’s one certainty, which is that whatever those new jobs are, they will be different to the jobs that get destroyed. They’ll require different skills. “And so that raises a very important question, which is how do we support people through the transitions? Because even if they end up with one of those new jobs, having lost one of their old jobs, how do we ensure those people have the right skills for those new jobs?”
But AI is not solely to blame, Professor Walsh argued.
CEOs have been accused of “AI washing”, a marketing practice of overstating or misrepresenting the impact artificial intelligence has or will have on their business.
“The truth of the matter might be the company’s been under-performing, and it’s the incompetence of management that’s responsible, not the benefits AI is bringing,” he said.
Professor Walsh sits firmly in the middle when it comes to the pros and cons of AI, warning that industries must tread a “fine line between the two”.
“It’s a technology that has great potential in areas like healthcare, education, medicine, and also doing the 4Ds: the dirty, the dull, the difficult and dangerous,” he explained.
“And taking on many things that humans should never have done in the first place, but equally, there’s a possibility that it may displace many people, it may hollow out the middle, it may cause significant harm to our mental health.”
