AI job anxiety: It's real, and coming at the worst time

"Zoom in: Even AI-smitten executives agree it's important to keep humans in the loop. But they continue to be cagey about which humans, how many of them and for how long we'll need them. "I need less heads," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on the Logan Bartlett podcast last month, describing how he'dreduced his customer service agent headcount "from 9,000 heads to about 5,000." But in July, Benioff told Axios' Ina Fried that the company plans to add thousands of sales staff, even as it relies more on AI."

""AI anxiety is real," behavioral scientist Lily Jampol told Axios. "A lot of it is tied up in uncertainty, because things are moving so quickly." Workers also say they're worried that their organizations will implement AI irresponsibly. And, Jampol adds, they feel a sense of powerlessness when they're not the ones making the decisions in their organizations about AI. "AI won't eliminate jobs, leaders will," she wrote in an email to Axios."

"'There's an existential sort of unease,' Geoff Mosher, a product developer who spent years in the tech industry, most recently at Verizon, told Axios about the feelings swirling in his network. Zoom out: Bigger psychological forces are at play as well."We already struggle with our worth as people and as a society," says Jada Butler, a therapist and health and wellness coach. The idea that a machine has more value than humans creates self-criticism, self-doubt, worsening anxieties, leaves some people questioning their value."

AI adoption is emerging alongside a weakening U.S. labor market: as of July, unemployed people outnumbered job openings for the first time in four years, and August brought only 22,000 added jobs. Some executives report reducing headcount for certain roles while planning to expand others, producing uneven labor effects across occupations. Workers report anxiety tied to rapid change, uncertainty, and lack of control over organizational AI decisions, and many fear irresponsible implementation and leadership-driven job cuts. Broader psychological effects include heightened self-criticism, self-doubt, existential unease, and questions about human value relative to machines.

Read at Axios