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VANCOUVER, British Columbia – As the AI revolution continues to rapidly expand throughout the corporate world, many employees are facing “automation anxiety” that their job may be replaced by technology.
Speaking on Centre Stage at Web Summit Vancouver, Kyle Hanslovan said, “I think many will be pressured in the next five years, where their job can be automated.”
Just this week, Meta began laying off another 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while TurboTax maker Intuit said it was cutting 17% of its global staff – about 3,000 jobs – as it accelerates its AI integration. In a company-wide memo announcing the cuts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees, “success isn’t guaranteed” in the AI era, though he said he doesn’t plan another round of layoffs this year.
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Through April 2026, more than 85,000 technology sector jobs have been eliminated, a 33% increase from the same period last year, according to placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Still, despite more than 300,000 total layoffs across all industries year-to-date, that figure is roughly half of last year’s reductions – a number skewed by the mass federal government layoffs announced in the first months of the second Trump administration.
“Inevitably there will be some disruption. We can’t pretend that there won’t be,” said Sim Desai, CEO of pre-IPO marketplace Hiive Capital, speaking on the same panel. But, he added, “in the short term, there’s a lot of job creation, because a lot of people are investing in adopting AI tools.”
That cautiously optimistic view was echoed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who recently told CNBC, “I think there will be a labor shortage because of AI… it’s going to elevate all of these people. We’re going to have so much productivity.”
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The average American is less sanguine. A recent Stanford University study found nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) expect AI to lead to fewer jobs in the next 20 years. That anxiety was on full display in the now-viral video of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s commencement address at the University of Arizona, where he was met with loud boos after telling graduates that AI’s technological transformation would be “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.”
New graduate hires may be the most vulnerable. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that AI could wipe out as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next one to five years. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has already climbed to 5.6%, well above the 35-year average of 4.5%, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
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Despite the negative sentiment, companies are still hiring.
“I am definitely hiring, even now more than I was before,” Hanslovan said, noting that Huntress continues to add software engineers, detection engineers, product managers and sales leaders.
Steven Schwartz, co-founder and CEO of $1.6 billion creator marketplace Whop, said, “the future of work is in question in the era of AI,” but added that he is not “bearish that AI will take everyone’s job.” He expects he’ll “have a bigger team in two years than today.”
In spite of the percolating worker anxiety, the U.S. economy has added 304,000 jobs so far in 2026, according to the establishment survey measure of the Labor Department’s monthly employment report. The jobless rate is still sitting at a historically low 4.3%.
That backdrop appeared to factor into President Donald Trump’s decision Thursday afternoon to postpone the signing of a planned AI executive order – one focused on having the federal government pre-vet frontier AI models for cybersecurity risks. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he pulled the order at the last minute because he was worried it could “be a blocker” to U.S. competitiveness in a global AI race that America still leads.
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