AI keeps getting blamed for tech layoffs, but the numbers don't really line up

I keep seeing "AI took these jobs" every time a company does layoffs, and I'm not convinced it's the main driver. A few things I keep coming back to. The industry cut around 122,500 jobs in 2025, down from about 153,000 in 2024. AI was named as a direct reason in fewer than 8% of those announcements. So for the other 90 percent plus, something else was going on. Actual AI adoption inside companies is also lower than the marketing suggests. Full org-wide rollout is still in the single digits in the surveys I've seen. Plenty of teams have a ChatGPT subscription and call themselves "AI-driven", but that is not the same as AI doing real work in the pipeline. My read: AI usually isn't replacing people directly. Managers see devs shipping more code and assume they can cut headcount, and companies are moving tight budgets toward expensive AI infra and tooling. But coding is a small part of the job, so "more code per dev = fewer devs" rarely holds up. I don't think AI is taking most jobs. I think it's adding pressure to a market that was already rough for other reasons (economy, over-hiring in 2021-2022, investor expectations). For people who work in eng or hiring: when you've seen layoffs up close, how often was AI genuinely the reason versus the convenient public explanation? submitted by /u/Empiree361 [link] [留言]