Layoffs Explained: Why Tech Jobs Are Disappearing in 2026 | Spotlight | N18G

If artificial intelligence can do your job faster, why would a company keep you? Today in Spotlight, let's find out. The future of work was supposed to be brighter, more technology, more opportunities, more jobs. But something has changed. Across Silicon Valley and beyond, companies are cutting workforces, shutting offices, and rewriting their hiring plans. Thousands are being told their jobs no longer exist. And behind many of these cuts is a technology that was supposed to make work easier. Artificial intelligence. What if the next email in your inbox is not a meeting invite or a new project, but a layoff notice? For tens of thousands of workers, particularly in the tech industry, that is already a reality. Now, for most of the 21st century, the tech sector has been sold as the industry where the future was being built. But that future now looks very different. Companies are cutting costs, and artificial intelligence is changing what companies need people to do. So what is behind this layoff wave? Why are companies cutting jobs even as they pour billions into AI? Let's start with the scale. Hundreds of companies across technology, banking, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare have announced layoffs this year. And these are not just small or unknown companies. Amazon, Meta, Oracle, UPS, Walmart, Citi, Dell, Visa, Nike, Standard Chartered. Different industries, different business models, but a similar message. Companies are looking for ways to do more with fewer people. The layoff hammer has been particularly swinging hard at tech workers this year, both inside the United States and the rest of the world. And May was the peak, and that is when nearly 9,000, 29,000 rather, tech jobs were lost in a single month. The highest monthly tally of 2026 so far. The month before and after it also saw tens of thousands of tech jobs disappear. The result? A sector that once symbolized jobs, growth, and future-proof careers is now in the grip of a very different reality In total, over 125,000 tech jobs have been lost this year so far. That's around 936 jobs lost every day. 39 every hour. And one tech job disappearing every 90 seconds. And the tally is still moving. More than 1,000 jobs have already been lost in August. Now mind you, according to layoffs.fyi, these figures likely understate the overall tech layoffs. Because many job cuts go unreported or remain unverified. But the numbers alone do not explain why this is happening. After years of aggressive hiring, many companies say they are now trying to make their operations leaner. But then there is AI. And this is what makes the current moment different. Because AI is not just a new product. It's a technology that is changing the nature of work itself. AI can write. It can code, summarize, and analyze data. It can generate images and can search through massive amounts of information in seconds. And that has left companies facing a tough question. If technology can do part of a job, how many people do they really need to do it? And that question is now reshaping the workforce. More than two-thirds of the job losses tracked this year so far are attributed to AI. This means for every one job lost for other reasons, roughly three jobs have been cut in connection with AI. And that's precisely what's being reported as the biggest job market shift of our times. And that shift isn't just showing up in the layoff numbers. It is showing up in the jobs companies are still hiring for. Because while thousands of tech workers are being shown the door, the demand for AI-related skills is moving in the opposite direction. In the United States, 79% of all tech job postings last month were linked to artificial intelligence or machine learning. That's about 8 out of 10 tech jobs now have to do with AI. The message from the tech industry is getting harder to miss. Fewer traditional models, more AI-focused roles, and a workforce being forced to adapt. But what does that actually look like for the people caught in the middle? Take TikTok, for instance. According to the U.S. Labor Department documents, the company's U.S. joint venture is laying off 250 employees and closing its Nashville office. The workspace, located in Nashville's Music Row, is set to close on October 5th, and many of the workers affected are content moderators. They review content, flag violations, and help enforce platform rules. And yet, their own jobs are now disappearing. The layoff story, at its heart, is a human story. Because behind every job lost is a person and people who depend on them. Behind every job cut is someone who has built a routine, a career, and a life around that paycheck. And then, in a matter of minutes, they are told that their position no longer exists. The bills don't disappear, the rent still has to be paid, the family still needs support. But the paycheck is gone. And now, they have to start again. For some people, the uncertainty goes even further. A Meta employee writing anonymously on the workplace platform Blind said the fear of losing her job had made her put family planning on hold. And there's another important part of this story. Layoffs don't just affect the people who lose their jobs, they affect the people who keep theirs. Because when a company cuts 10% of its staff, the other 90% don't simply go back to normal teams. Teams get smaller, the workloads get bigger, and responsibilities change. People start wondering who will be the next to lose their job. And that creates a different kind of pressure. The pressure to prove that your job is essential. And we are already seeing signs of that anxiety beyond the tech sector. U.S. jobless claims for the week ending August 1st rose by 1,000 to 199,000. The previous week's figure was also revised upward. Weekly jobless claims are closely watched because they provide a near real-time indicator of the labor market. So can you be the next person in your team to lose your job? Well, there's no magic formula that can answer that. But there are some questions every worker can ask. How much of your job is repetitive? How much of it can be automated? Are you learning the tools that are changing your industry? Perhaps most importantly, what do you bring that a machine cannot easily replicate? Judgment, communication, leadership, empathy. The ability to deal with people. The ability to make a decision when there is no perfect answer. These skills are not going away. In fact, the future may not be humans versus AI. It may be humans who know how to use AI versus humans who don't have the opportunity to learn it. So the question we should ask is not only will AI take my job, but how can I make sure I'm ready for the job market that comes next? Well, for more on this, we have with us Daryl West. He's a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institute. Good evening. Thank you. It's nice to be with you. Thank you for joining us. Now, a lot of proponents of AI before this boom had promised a better future for humans. But as some had feared, the opposite now seems to be happening. The data is now supporting that. Can you now say that AI definitively has impacted the job security of humans? Absolutely. AI is taking jobs because it is able to do more and more sophisticated tasks. It used to be we mainly worried about entry-level workers. You mentioned the more routine your tasks are, the more administrative those positions are, the more likely AI can do that. But in the last six to nine months, AI is now advancing to more complicated tasks. So it's no longer just entry-level workers who have to worry about it. But AI can analyze data. It can present charts. It can write up results. So many of the things that we thought used to protect humans no longer will protect them. So can you say that the technology has expanded too fast for humans to keep up? And is it becoming dangerous? It is certainly expanding at a very fast rate. And it is creating challenges, I think, for every country around the world. Many organizations are incorporating AI in their operations. Technology in general is starting to flatten organizations, in the sense that there used to be entry-level workers, mid-level people who would supervise them. And then the top executives that would set the overall direction of the organization. Technology is starting to remove the mid-level managers because increasingly we're finding you can evaluate job performance based on data analytics. Like many jobs are now taking place online. And so you can track how quickly people are doing various tasks, how efficiently they are doing it, how many days of work they may be missing. And so we no longer need human supervisors because the data essentially allows higher-level people within the organization to evaluate how well people are doing their jobs. But what can be done? Should it be more regulated? Should we be protecting employment at this phase? Can you even directly link job losses to AI? Or can they just simply say it's an economic decision that can be done? What's the next step here? I mean, what we recommend is what we call lifelong learning. It used to be that people thought they could invest in education through about age 25 and then you would be set for the rest of your life. That is no longer the case. People are going to have to train themselves, get new skills, upskill at ages 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70. Basically throughout their entire lifetime. People will need to start taking credential programs. There may be a specialized talent you need for either your current job or a new job that is being created. Some data analysis or a language component or whatever. There are credentialing programs that will give you the skills and give you credential to certify that you have mastery over that. So there are lots of things that people can do to protect themselves, but it basically means people cannot just rest on their current laurels. They have to regularly upgrade their job skills. On that note, do you think that this is a knee-jerk reaction and a transition period where the unemployment is happening and then those people will reskill, upskill, and then be reabsorbed? Or is that not really going to happen and we're going to be seeing this as a sort of trend? In the short run, I think technology and AI is more likely to augment humans as opposed to replacing them in the sense that organizations that have tried to get rid of people and just rely on technology have often discovered that's a bad formula, that there are still many things humans do much better than AI. Humans have the capacity for empathy and adaptation, learning new things, creativity, and so on. So in the short run, organizations cannot just get rid of all of their workers. But if you're talking on a longer-term basis, like 5 and 10 years from now, there are going to be many jobs that are going to be replaced. We need to improve our workforce development and our job retraining programs so that those people are not left behind, but they can gain new skills. There are going to be new types of jobs created. For example, a lot of organizations are starting to integrate AI assistants and AI agents in their operations. Somebody has to understand how to do that. Somebody has to supervise the AI to make sure it is doing what the organization's leaders want. So there will be new types of positions created, but people are going to have to learn new skills in order to qualify for those positions. Can you nuance which sectors and workers in the sectors are most vulnerable and which ones will be able to pivot quickly and absorb these new skill sets and have much more flexibility when it comes to adapting to AI? Ultimately, almost every sector is going to be transformed by AI. It is really the transformative technology of our time. It's being deployed in many different areas. In your earlier piece, you did mention the technology sector. It used to be the tech companies hired a bunch of computer scientists, engineers, software coders, and so on. It turns out AI can do all those things, so many of the layoffs that have been announced in the tech sector are coders, software engineers, computer scientists, people who used to think their jobs were safe, but they're discovering that is not the case. But it's not just the tech sector because technology is being integrated in healthcare, in education, in the retail sector, in defense, in finance, transportation. We're seeing autonomous vehicles start to arrive on the streets in major cities. Every sector is going to experience a tech wave. It may play out differently in various areas, but nobody is really safe. Everybody should keep an eye on this. Everybody should make sure their job skills are up to date and they're learning new things even as they gain experience in particular companies. Darren, before we let you go, what's the silver lining to all of this? The silver lining is if you go 100 years ago when the world was moving from an agrarian to an industrial economy, many countries made policy and governance changes designed to ease that transition. And in fact, that transition, although it took a long time in many countries, ended up okay. And many people actually ended up better off. Today, the transition from an industrial to a digital world is equally fundamental, equally transformative. We need new policy measures that help people deal with this to make sure people are not being left behind. And so we need to be creative. It may be reducing the work week. In the United States, people work 40 hours a week. Maybe we need to think about 36 or 32 hours a week in order to preserve jobs. So there are things that government officials should be thinking about in order to help people in this transition. All right. Thank you so much for your time and insights. Darrell West, Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation over at the Brookings Institute live from Washington, D.C. Thank you. First Post reports from the world's second largest continent. Hello, I'm Alison McGrange. A very warm welcome from Durban, South Africa. We get you the news and the newsmakers from Africa. From elections to climate change to innovations and opportunities. As the world's attention shifts, we report from Africa, the heart of the global south. Join me every weekday live on First Post.