Tech companies that are cutting jobs and leaning more on artificial intelligence are also disrupting themselves.

Amazon’s Chief Executive Andy Jassy said last month that he expects the e-commerce giant will shrink its workforce as employees “get efficiency gains from using AI extensively.”

At Salesforce, a software company that helps businesses manage customer relationships, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said last week that AI is already doing 30% to 50% of the company’s work.

Other tech leaders have chimed in. Earlier this year, Anthropic, an AI startup, flashed a big warning: AI could wipe out more than half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

Ready or not, AI is reshaping, displacing and creating new roles as technology’s impact on the job market ripples across multiple sectors. The AI frenzy has fueled anxiety from workers who fear their jobs could be automated. Roughly half of U.S. workers are worried about how AI may be used in the workplace in the future, and few think AI will lead to more job opportunities in the long run, according to a Pew Research Center report.

The heightened fear comes as major tech companies, such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon and Meta cut workers, push for more efficiency and promote their AI tools. Tech companies have rolled out AI-powered features that can generate code, analyze data, develop apps and help complete other tedious tasks.

“AI isn’t just taking jobs. It’s really rewriting the rule book on what work even looks like right now,” said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a company based in Folsom, Calif., that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers.

Disruption debated

Exactly how big of a disruption AI will have on the job market is still being debated. Executives for OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT, have pushed back against the prediction that a massive white-collar job bloodbath is coming.

“I do totally get not just the anxiety, but that there is going to be real pain here, in many cases,” said Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, at an interview with “Hard Fork,” the tech podcast from the New York Times. ”In many more cases, though, I think we will find that the world is significantly underemployed. The world wants way more code than can get written right now.”

As new economic policies, including those around tariffs, create more unease among businesses, companies are reining in costs while also being pickier about whom they hire.

“They’re trying to find what we call the purple unicorns rather than someone that they can ramp up and train,” Lucido said.

Before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT — a chatbot that can generate text, images, code and more —tech companies were already using AI to curate posts, flag offensive content and power virtual assistants. But the popularity and apparent superpowers of ChatGPT set off a fierce competition among tech companies to release even more powerful generative AI tools. They’re racing ahead, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, facilities that house computing equipment such as servers used to process the trove of information needed to train and maintain AI systems.

Economists and consultants have been trying to figure out how AI will affect engineers, lawyers, analysts and other professions. Some say the change won’t happen as soon as some tech executives expect.

“There have been many claims about new technologies displacing jobs, and although such displacement has occurred in the past, it tends to take longer than technologists typically expect,” economists for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a February report.

AI can help develop, test and write code, provide financial advice and sift through legal documents. The bureau, though, still projects that employment of software developers, financial advisors, aerospace engineers and lawyers will grow faster than the average for all occupations from 2023 to 2033. Companies will still need software developers to build AI tools for businesses or maintain AI systems.

Worker bots

Tech executives have touted AI’s ability to write code. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks AI will be able to write code like a mid-level engineer in 2025. And Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella has said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.

Other roles could grow more slowly or shrink because of AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment of paralegals and legal assistants to grow slower than the average for all occupations while roles for credit analysts, claims adjusters and insurance appraisers to decrease.

McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economics research arm of the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., predicts that by 2030 “activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated.”

The institute expects that demand for science, technology, engineering and mathematics roles will grow in the United States and Europe but shrink for customer service and office support.

“A large part of that work involves skills, which are routine, predictable and can be easily done by machines,” said Anu Madgavkar, a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute.

Although generative AI fuels the potential for automation to eliminate jobs, AI can also enhance technical, creative, legal and business roles, the report said. There will be a lot of “noise and volatility” in hiring data, Madgavkar said, but what will separate the “winners and losers” is how people rethink their work flows and jobs themselves.

Tech companies have announced 74,716 cuts from January to May, up 35% from the same period last year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that offers job search and career transition coaching.

Tech companies say they’re reducing jobs for various reasons.

Autodesk, which makes software used by architects, designers and engineers, slashed 9% of its workforce, or 1,350 positions, this year. The San Francisco company cited geopolitical and macroeconomic factors along with its efforts to invest more heavily in AI as reasons for the cuts, according to a regulatory filing.

Other companies such as Oakland fintech company Block, which trimmed 8% of its workforce in March, told employees that the cuts were strategic not because they’re “replacing folks with AI.”

Diana Colella, executive vice president, entertainment and media solutions at Autodesk, said that it’s scary when people don’t know what their job will look like in a year. Still, she doesn’t think AI will replace humans or creativity but rather act as an assistant.

Companies are looking for more AI expertise. Autodesk found that mentions of AI in U.S. job listings surged in 2025 and some of the fastest-growing roles include AI engineer, AI content creator and AI solutions architect. The company partnered with analytics firm GlobalData to examine nearly 3 million job postings over two years across industries such as architecture, engineering and entertainment.

Workers have adapted to technology before. When the job of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman was disrupted because of the rise of online search, those workers pivoted to selling other products, Colella said.

“The skills are still key and important,” she said. “They just might be used for a different product or a different service.”

After a series of setbacks, Kroger’s recent decision to close 60 locations nationwide is the latest sign of distress for the grocer that operates more than 300 stores in California.

Kroger, the parent company of Ralphs and Food 4 Less, is reducing its footprint after the resignation of its chief executive and a failed merger with competing grocery giant Albertsons. The company faces a lawsuit related to the merger and also has been struggling with labor unrest.

Employees had been threatening to strike until the company reached a tentative agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers union this week.

Based in Cincinnati, Kroger also owns Harris Teeter, King Soopers and Dillons. The company operates more than 2,700 stores under different brands across the country and offers fresh goods, some household items and pharmacy services.

“Instead of popping champagne and toasting to their merger, Kroger is instead just enduring one hit after another,” said Jeff Wells, lead editor at the trade publication Grocery Dive. “They’re still a pretty stable business, but they’re facing a lot in terms of challenges.”

Impending closures

Kroger announced late last month in its quarterly earnings report that it plans to close 60 stores over the next 18 months. The company did not disclose which locations would be shut down.

“We’re simplifying our business and reviewing areas that will not be meaningful to our future growth,” interim Chief Executive Ronald Sargent said in an earnings call. “Today, not all of our stores are delivering the sustainable results we need.”

Kroger temporarily paused routine store closures while the Albertsons merger was pending, Sargent said. The company normally closes about 30 stores per year, Melius Research analyst Jacob Aiken-Phillips said.

The company is on track to complete 30 major store projects this year and expects to accelerate store openings in 2026, Sargent said on the earnings call.

Competitive market

Kroger is under increasing pressure from competitors, experts said, some of which offer a wider range of items and convenient one-stop shops.

“Kroger faces this intensely competitive field in the grocery industry,” Wells said. “From Walmart to Costco to Whole Foods and Sprouts Farmers Market, everybody in the industry is kind of gunning for them.”

The Albertsons merger would have given Kroger the scale to compete with giants such as Walmart and Amazon, Aiken-Phillips said.

“After the merger failed, they had to reexamine their strategy and focus on how they can grow and compete without that scale,” he said. “That’s the major challenge right now.”

Kroger relies on pharmacy services, advertising and e-commerce for additional revenue, experts said. Although the company grew its e-commerce business 15% in the first quarter of this year, the business remains unprofitable.

A chief executive shuffle

Former Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen stepped down in March after an investigation into his personal conduct, the company announced. Sargent was appointed chairman of the board of directors and interim CEO.

Kroger did not share details of the investigation into McMullen. His “personal conduct, while unrelated to the business, was inconsistent with Kroger’s Policy on Business Ethics,” the company’s statement said.

“When he resigned, it threw a wrench in progressing the company because now you need a new leader to come in,” Aiken-Phillips said.

A failed merger

In 2022, Kroger agreed to buy Albertsons for $24.6 billion, a sale that would have been the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history.

The Federal Trade Commission, California and several other states sued to stop the merger, arguing that it would hobble competition in many parts of the country, leaving customers at the mercy of a newly formed behemoth and driving up prices. Kroger and Albertsons collectively own about 5,000 grocery stores.

In late 2024, Albertsons scrapped the deal after a federal judge in Oregon issued a preliminary injunction in the case. The high-stakes court battle centered on concerns that the megamerger would add to the financial woes of consumers who have grappled with the rising cost of food.

Albertsons also sued Kroger, claiming that the grocer didn’t do enough to win over regulators. Kroger has since countersued.

Ongoing labor unrest

In June, grocery workers at Albertsons and Kroger — numbering about 45,000 — voted to authorize a strike to protest what they called unfair labor practices. A walkout would have caused a major disruption for two of the nation’s largest grocery chains during the busiest season of the year.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union announced Thursday that it reached a tentative agreement with the two companies that would allow them to avoid a strike. The union will vote on whether to approve the agreement July 9-11.

“Following an intense 40 plus hour bargaining session that began on Friday morning, we’ve secured an agreement that addresses our priorities,” the union said in a statement.

The agreement includes higher wages, improved pension plans as well as health and welfare improvements, the union said. Kroger did not respond to requests for comment.

Congressional Republicans just passed President Trump’s sprawling domestic policy bill that extends and expands tax cuts, while slashing Medicaid, food benefits and clean energy initiatives to pay for them — but only partly. The bill favors the wealthy, and low-income Americans stand to lose the most.

What could the bill mean for your pocketbook? Answer these questions to learn more about the individual impacts of the wide-ranging legislation. (Your answers are not tracked by The Times.)

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