A lot of apparently AI-related layoffs are companies using the technology as an excuse to remove headcount, the boss of an AI data company said.
Scale AI’s Jason Droege told Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC that firms were “washing the layoffs,” using AI for what he called ordinary “right-sizing.”
He also said that there would be no employment “apocalypse” from AI, although the technology, like all technologies, would inevitably change how we work: “The tools are going to add capabilities, they are going to make companies more competitive. Those more competitive companies are going to put pressure on less competitive companies.”
So if your business doesn’t use AI, he said, “your livelihood could be at risk, but that’s because you didn’t adapt, not because there is something that just happened to us out of our control.”
At the moment, AI is still too unreliable for some of the most important decisions, Droege said. “Humans make mistakes all the time,” he said during his interview. “But there are certain mistakes, like [in] financial decisions, [and] they might pay an extra $200,000 a year in taxes.” A human advisor would be able to review that and spot it easily.
Customers often ask for automation to generate savings and productivity, but “there’s a lot of problems that the technology’s not mature enough to solve with reliability and safety, and we steer our customers away from those types of things,” he added.