I am today listening to YouTube’s Antoine Wade’s, The Wade Report, where he is providing insights on Amazon, UPS, DOW. Mastercard, and Meta. Mr. Wade is focusing on the overall sentiment that while company performance is going up, at least for larger companies, the number of job postings is flat, except for postings that announced a request for workers with skills in artificial intelligence.
Mr. Wade notes that chief executive officers are pointing this out. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, for example, highlighted during an earnings call is seeing jobs that were done by entire teams is being done by one person. AI spending is increasing via $135 billion in capital expenditures. AI is about one individual providing services that at one time could have been provided by an entire team.
The chief executive officer of WIX, Avishai Abrahami, shared that 70% of the top 20 jobs today will be impacted in five to ten years by artificial intelligence.
The main point behind Mr. Wade’s presentation was that 1.3 million artificial intelligence jobs were created globally in over the last two years with 60,000 jobs using AI operations. People are seeing the rotation and they are moving, says Mr. Wade.
I am not surprised by what appears to be a quick shift toward the slowdown in hiring in the tech sector accompanied by the reported slowdown in tech workers jumping off of the ship their current employers provide.
As I have shared in an earlier post, mass firings may start happening this year. First, it may start with a trickle, then with a larger flood. So far, Mr. Wade has noted that 2026 has seen layoffs at Amazon at 16,000 while UPS has experienced 36,000 job losses. DOW has suffered 4,500 layoffs while Mastercard has experienced 1.400 job losses. Meta is at 1,500 job losses so far this year.
Granted, the aforementioned companies are some of America’s larger going concerns, but does it mean that the US labor market is about to face a major labor market shakeup?
My short answer is yes. Some of the shakeup will have to do, on the surface, with artificial intelligence. Specifically, the American labor market will react negatively to artificial narrow intelligence. I believe that as technology gets better, American firms will learn to conduct their operations with less labor.
I am not quite ready to say that almost all jobs in the United States will not be needed in the next 30 years. It would take something like artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence to near-eradicate the American labor market.
As for the speed of changes, I expect the number of jobs in the American labor force to drop this year, specifically white color or corporate jobs. I still need to give some more thought to what the labor force will look like over the next twenty-four to forty-eight months.
Alton Drew
31 January 2026
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