Posted on 07/26/2026 7:54:31 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AI
America’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all.
For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.
The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing corporate messaging during much of the AI era. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job. But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added; others want to hire people back following layoffs.
“We actually need to accelerate hiring a bit. We’re a little bit behind right now,” Booz Allen Hamilton’s Chief Operating Officer Kristine Martin Anderson told investors Friday. “We’re addressing that now.”
The government contractor cut thousands of jobs last year as the Trump administration slashed federal contracts and asked firms to justify their costs. Total head count stood at roughly 30,900 as of June 30, down 7.5% from a year earlier. But the company now sees healthy demand for its services, including in national security for workers who need security clearances.
For much of the past 18 months, big employers were convinced fewer workers meant faster growth. U.S. public companies shrank their white-collar workforces. Now layoffs are shrinking. The most recent week of U.S. jobless claims was the lowest on record since 1969, according to federal data.
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(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
They need people to train AI with, so they finally can do away with pesky humans./sarcasm
I don’t think you need a sarcasm tag for stating the truth.
I wonder if these companies will be able to afford humans due to the cost of AI?
New Yorker cartoon: a board room, with a chart on the wall showing a sudden plummet in sales. An executive is pointing to the chart and speaking. The caption: “This is when we laid off our sales force.”
It amazes me that a publication that is as serious as The Wall Street Journal appears to taken seriously the idea that AI was going to wipe out a large number of jobs. It was never going to happen, at least not in the near future. It can’t even wipe out jobs where you would think that it should wipe out jobs - call centers, medical dictation, programing. Eventually, it will in those industries but it hasn’t so far. So the idea that Middle America - the guy or gal working in accounting in some Midwestern company - is going to lose his or her job over AI within the next five years is a fantasy.
and, creating AI is likely also creating all kinds of different jobs
Just a couple of years ago these same companies were whining loudly about how they couldn’t find enough people to work for them, and they were hiring anything with a pulse. (And by the way, this was used by libs as an argument for more immigration).
Today they are laying off. They are using AI to give themselves cover to weed out the losers that they hired. Easier for managers than telling them “you’re a loser and we shouldn’t have hired you.”
But companies still whine that we need more immigration.
Wait! They can’t do that!
For every 5 who retire only three are hired.
For much of the past 18 months, big employers were convinced fewer workers meant faster growth ?.
We constantly see two ways of thinking in society.
One ways says that if we plan the work to be inefficient then we will hire more people and full employment will be possible.
The other way says that if we operate efficiently we will make more money and be able to expand and the expansion will employ more people.
These two ways are expressed in many ways, in government, in the private sector, in many places. But it all comes down to needing more people for inefficiency or needing more people for expansion and new development.
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