AI is already reducing U.S. monthly payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs over the past year, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report cited by CNN, even as companies keep announcing layoffs and pinning the damage on AI. That is the cleanest measure here of who gets squeezed first: workers, while executives and consultants debate the future from above.
Who Pays for the Automation Push
CNN said knowledge workers face the sharpest exposure because their output is what AI replicates best at superhuman speed around the clock. The report’s logic is blunt: the more a job can be broken into repeatable tasks, the more vulnerable it becomes to automation, and the people doing that work are the ones left to absorb the fallout.
David Shrier, professor of AI & Innovation at Imperial College London, told CNN, “The most valuable jobs, the ones that we tell people to go to school for – software engineer, finance professional, accountant, lawyer – a lot of these cognitive professions, those are the ones that are the most vulnerable… to AI automation.” Oded Nov, a professor of technology management at New York University, said jobs should be thought of as “a collection of tasks we switch between, often many times a day.” He said workers should identify repeatable, rule-based tasks, which are the most vulnerable to automation.
CNN said some jobs in hospitality, healthcare and skilled trades still need someone physically present to do much of the work, and that robotics is at least a decade away from replacing those roles. It said AI is not yet as good at handling tasks that require emotional and social awareness, such as “understanding organizational culture or group dynamics,” and that AI tends to be recursive rather than inventive or creative. Shrier said, “AI is bad at creativity, but it’s surprisingly good at elaborating on creative prompts.” He added, “But you still need the human to come up with the idea and guide the AI to do something interesting.”
What the Institutions Tell Workers to Do
CNN advised workers to invest in skills that are structurally hard to automate, including physical duties, emotional and social awareness, interpersonal skills and judgment. It also said workers should embrace AI and learn how to make it work for them, including by using chatbots, coding tools and AI agents. Shrier said, “In some ways it’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, because if you can think of it, you can make it.” He added, “There are people making robust enterprise-grade software that is built off of a prompt in plain English.”
That advice lands in a world where the people with payroll authority and investment power are already reorganizing work around machines, while the people doing the labor are told to adapt, reskill, and become more useful to the same system that is cutting them loose.
Layoffs, ROI, and the Corporate Storyline
The Fox News report said a Gartner study found that about 80% of organizations piloting or deploying autonomous business capabilities reported workforce reductions, but those cuts did not appear to translate into a stronger return on investment. Gartner’s Helen Poitevin said, “Workforce reductions may create budget room, but they do not create return.” She said companies improving their return on investment are investing in skills, roles and operating models that let humans guide and expand autonomous systems.
The Fox News report also said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called out “AI washing,” where companies blame AI for layoffs that may have other causes. That leaves workers stuck between two versions of the same corporate script: one where AI is the excuse, and another where AI is the strategy, but the layoffs still land on the same people.
Fox News said Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that AI led all reasons for job cuts in April 2026 for the second month in a row, with AI cited for 21,490 cuts in April and 49,135 cuts so far this year. It said Gartner found companies seeing stronger gains were using AI to help people do their jobs better, describing this as “human-amplified business.” The report said Gartner’s research looked at 350 global business executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue. It also said Gartner said autonomous business could create more jobs by 2028 to 2029.
The pattern is familiar: executives and consultants frame the upheaval as adaptation, while the costs are pushed downward onto workers who are told to become more flexible, more skilled, and more resilient inside a system that keeps centralizing control over labor.