Companies That Signaled They Are Replacing Workers With AI: IBM, HP, Amazon

HP said it’s reducing the size of its corporate workforce as a result of AI initiatives. In an earnings report on Tuesday, the company said it plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, estimating the changes would save around $1 billion.

HP’s earnings presentation said part of its strategy was to cut costs through “workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation, and productivity measures” and to increase customer satisfaction, innovation, and productivity with “artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.”

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that it had replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI.

More recently, the company announced in November that it would cut thousands of workers in the fourth quarter of 2025, affecting a “single-digit percentage of its global workforce.” Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, said the company is shifting priorities to hire more people around AI and quantum. He also said the company plans to increase hiring among recent college graduates over the next year.

Krishna has also said AI adoption has led to the company hiring more employees in programming and sales.

In 2023, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM had halted or slowed hiring for back-office roles, like in human resources, that could be replaced by AI.

“I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” he told the outlet at the time.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that AI-driven efficiency gains would shrink the retail giant’s workforce in the coming years — but when the company announced it was cutting 14,000 jobs in October, Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said in the company’s most recent earnings call. “It really — it’s culture.”

An Amazon spokesperson also reiterated to Business Insider that the cuts were not driven by AI.

When the layoffs were announced, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology wrote in a blog post that the move reflected a continued effort to run the company “like the world’s largest startup.” The SVP, Beth Galetti, also referenced a need to be leaner in the age of AI.

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote in the post.

In an episode of “The Logan Bartlett Show” released in August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was using AI agents in the customer support division to replace humans and help the company work through more sales leads.

“I was able to rebalance my head count on my support,” he said in the interview. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”

A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider that Benioff was referencing an organizational transformation that took place over several months to reshape its customer support function.

After deploying Agentforce, the company no longer needed to “actively backfill support engineer roles,” the spokesperson said, adding that it successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas of the company, like professional services, sales, and customer success.

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in 2024 that the company could operate effectively with half its current staff.

A spokesperson for the company said its AI assistant now handles the equivalent workload of 853 full-time agents, up from 700 at launch. That’s saving an estimated $58 million annually, the spokesperson said.

After its CEO acknowledged that previous cost-cutting measures had gone too far, the buy-now-pay-later firm redeployed workers to customer support roles. However, the spokesperson said that Siemiatkowski’s comments were in reference to outsourced support quality, not limitations of AI. The recent in-house hires were a “tiny pilot” of under 10 people aimed at improving the quality of outsourced agents, not replacing AI, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that the company never removed human support entirely, and it still works with outsourced teams of around 2,000.

Micha Kaufman, the CEO and founder of Fiverr, said in September that the company was slashing roughly 30% of its workforce. The cut would affect about 250 team members, and the freelancing platform had 762 full-time employees as of 2024, according to an SEC filing.

The CEO said that the cuts were needed to help turn Fiverr into a leaner and faster “AI-first company.”

Kaufman said in a staff memo in April that AI was “coming for your jobs,” and in May, he told Business Insider that Fiverr would only hire people who know how to use AI.

“If you don’t ensure that you sharpen your knives, you’re going to be left behind. It’s that simple,” Kaufman said.