“Something has changed”: Has the era of AI job replacement begun?

Last Wednesday, WiseTech Global, an Australian logistics software company, announced it was cutting 2,000 employees as part of an AI transformation.

It was the first announcement of massive AI-related job cuts in Australia.

Then Jack Dorsey, CEO of ASX-listed Block Inc, which bought Afterpay for $39 billion in 2022, announced on Friday to his 10,000 employees that about 4,000 of them would be made redundant.

He said: “We are not making this decision because we are in trouble. Our business is strong.”

“But something has changed. We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re building and using, combined with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working that’s fundamentally changing how a business is built and run. And that’s growing rapidly.”

Last week, the CEO of Internet provider Superloop, Paul Tyler, told me that almost all customer interactions are now handled by AI: “Our philosophy is: If you have to call us, we’ve done something wrong.”…