“The timing matters,” says Aakash Gupta. “This isn’t a recession. It’s a rebalancing. And most workers are on the wrong side of it.”
More than 170,000 jobs vanished in the United States in October alone, according to reports. The list of companies is as familiar as it is alarming: UPS, Amazon, Intel, Nestlé, Ford, Microsoft, and more. The economy is still growing, stock prices are rising, yet payrolls are shrinking.
Goldman Sachs has put numbers to what many are now calling the AI rebalancing. Its recent report suggests that one in four work tasks in the US and Europe could be automated by artificial intelligence. The most exposed occupations are in offices and courtrooms, not on factory floors. Administrative and support roles face 46 per cent exposure, legal jobs 44 per cent, and architecture and engineering 37 per cent. Construction, maintenance, and cleaning, by contrast, sit below 6 per cent.
For Gupta, a former product leader turned commentator, the layoffs tell two very different stories. “Tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are cutting to fund GPU purchases. Their revenues are growing. Their stock prices are climbing. They’re firing people to free up cash for compute. This isn’t cost-cutting during a downturn. It’s a forced reallocation from payroll to datacentre capacity.”
He argues that companies outside tech are trimming staff for the opposite reason. “UPS, Nestlé, Ford, and Target have already deployed AI tools that work. Customer service automation, supply chain optimisation, generative design systems. The productivity gains are real and compounding.”
The picture is of a loop in motion. Tech firms are buying the infrastructure to build AI systems, while industrial and retail giants are renting those systems to run leaner. The common denominator is silicon. “Both sides are feeding the same beast,” Gupta said. “Tech companies are buying the shovels. Everyone else is buying the gold those shovels dig up. Semiconductor companies sit in the middle, collecting rent from the entire value chain. TSMC, NVIDIA, and ASML are printing money while employment craters on both ends.”
Goldman Sachs’ chart shows where this will bite next. Knowledge-heavy work that once seemed safe—law, finance, design, management—is now easier to automate than manual trades. The shock is that AI is replacing analysts before it replaces assembly lines.
Not everyone agrees with Gupta’s diagnosis. Software veteran Mario Peshev argued that inflated salaries and slow-moving corporate structures are the real culprits. “Nobody in big tech is firing for GPUs,” he said. “The reasons are half-million-dollar salaries for staff spending half their time in meetings and getting approvals from different tiers.” Another critic dismissed the AI explanation entirely, claiming that firms are using the technology narrative to mask traditional cost-cutting during a slowdown.
Gupta sees the cycle differently. He points to adoption data showing enterprise use of AI climbing from roughly 10 per cent toward 50 per cent. “History says this phase moves fastest and generates the most wealth,” he said. “But that wealth is concentrating in compute, not labour. The gap between market cap growth and wage growth has never been wider.”
The Goldman Sachs findings echo that warning. Automation’s reach is spreading most quickly among those who once thought their jobs were untouchable. The rebalancing Gupta describes is not a future forecast but a present reality, playing out in corporate budgets and redundancy lists across sectors.
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