59% of Young Americans See AI as a Career Threat & Stanford Data Says They’re Not Wrong
Stanford researchers tracked employment data and found that workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs saw a 16% relative employment decline compared to workers in less-exposed roles, measured between late 2022 and September 2025. That’s not a projection. That’s what has already happened to entry-level workers. And young people are responding in ways that would have seemed unlikely just a few years ago.
Vocational and community college enrollment is up nearly 20% since 2020. A Jobs for the Future survey found that 44% of Americans under 34 have thought about switching careers because of AI, compared to just 4% of workers 55 and older. The gap makes sense. Older workers have the institutional knowledge and hard-won experience that AI can’t easily replicate. Younger workers are competing directly against AI for the entry-level work that used to be how you built that experience in the first place. The result is that trades are getting a serious second look from people who, a generation ago, might have defaulted to a four-year degree without much deliberation.
Crypto Companies Are Using AI to Replace Workers
Two major crypto companies made significant cuts this week, and both pointed directly at AI as the driver. Gemini, the exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, has cut roughly 30% of its workforce so far this year, bringing headcount below 500. The company lost more than $500 million last year and says it’s deploying AI tools to boost productivity, a combination that should concern anyone watching how companies are justifying workforce reductions.
Crypto.com cut 12% of its staff, and its CEO left no ambiguity about the reasoning, posting publicly that companies that don’t make the pivot to AI immediately will fail. That’s about as direct as corporate leadership gets on this topic.
Neither company is alone. Block cut more than 4,000 employees (nearly half its workforce), with Jack Dorsey explaining that a smaller team using the tools they’re building can do more and do it better. Meta has reportedly been planning cuts of up to 20%. Atlassian cut 10%, roughly 1,600 jobs. In nearly every case, the stated reason is the same: freeing up resources to invest in AI. Whether that’s the full story is hard to know from the outside. But the pattern is consistent enough that it can’t be dismissed as a coincidence. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott put the sharpest point on it last week, warning that unemployment among new college graduates could reach the mid-30s within a couple of years as AI agents absorb more of the work those roles traditionally handled.
CEO Exits Are Running at Nearly Double the Historical Average
January produced 209 CEO exits at U.S. companies, according to a new Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, a 40% jump from December and the third-highest January total since the firm began tracking in 2002. For context, the average January going back to that starting point is 116 exits. We’re running at nearly double that.
Public company CEO departures are up even more sharply, rising 47% year-over-year, from 36 to 53. The executives leaving are also getting younger. The average age of departing CEOs in January was 51.9, the second-lowest on record. Andy Challenger noted that boards appear to be making changes early in the year to give new leadership a clean runway, and that social media has meaningfully compressed the window for reputational recovery when things go wrong.
What that volume of leadership turnover usually means downstream is worth flagging: when a CEO leaves, whoever comes in typically brings their own team. High-level churn at the top has a way of cascading through organizations in the months that follow. For anyone in a company navigating that kind of transition, or for hiring managers suddenly absorbing new headcount from restructuring, it’s worth keeping in mind that the recruiting environment shifts quickly when leadership does.
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OpenAI Plans to Nearly Double Its Workforce
Not everyone is cutting. OpenAI is planning to grow from approximately 4,500 employees to 8,000 by the end of 2026, according to Computerworld, with hiring expected across engineering, research, product development, and sales. One newer role getting particular attention is “technical ambassador,” essentially a bridge between cutting-edge AI research and real-world enterprise deployment.
The expansion follows Sam Altman’s December “Code Red” memo calling for accelerated improvements to ChatGPT, and it reflects a broader reality across the frontier AI industry: Anthropic tripled its international workforce last September, and competition for AI talent is intensifying fast. According to PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, workers with AI skills earn, on average, 56% higher wages than their peers. AI engineering specialists are commanding 20 to 40% salary premiums over traditional IT roles.
The contradiction built into this moment isn’t subtle. Companies across industries are cutting routine jobs to fund AI investment, while AI companies themselves are aggressively hiring the specialized talent needed to build what’s replacing those jobs. If you want to understand where tech hiring is actually headed, that tension is the story. The workers who come out ahead will be the ones who build deep expertise in AI-adjacent skills now, before the premium for those skills gets competed away.
Frequently Asked Questions
AI is enabling smaller teams to handle work that previously required more headcount, particularly in operations, customer service, and entry-level roles. Some companies are also using AI investment as justification for cuts that may have other drivers. Either way, the pattern is real and accelerating; multiple major employers have now said directly that AI tools are reducing their staffing needs.
Both are happening simultaneously. Routine and entry-level roles face the most pressure, while demand for specialized AI skills is surging. PwC data shows workers with AI skills earn 56% more on average, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are in aggressive hiring mode. The key variable for individual workers is whether they’re building AI fluency or waiting to see how things shake out.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas points to several converging forces: shareholder and board pressure for faster results, the compressed reputational cycle driven by social media, and shifting regulatory uncertainty. Burnout is also a factor; the role has never been more demanding, and executives are stepping away earlier in their careers than at any point in recent history.
Skilled trades are holding up well and have a growing shortage of workers. For knowledge workers, the research is consistent: AI fluency paired with deep domain expertise offers the most protection. Vocational enrollment is rising because the data increasingly supports that path. Whatever direction you choose, the worst position to be in is waiting for AI’s impact to fully arrive before adapting.
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Young Americans are changing career plans because of AI, and the data says they should
Welcome back to Cornering the Job Market. Today’s headlines include a new wave of AI-driven layoffs across the crypto industry, a near record setting month for CEO exits, and OpenAI plans to double its workforce by year-end. We’ll get into all of that. But first, young Americans are making real career changes because of AI, and a new Wall Street Journal report shows just how far some are going. A recent Harvard survey found 59% of Americans aged 18 to 29 see AI as a threat to their job prospects, as they should.
And 41% said they think AI will make work less meaningful. Those feelings, if you want to call them that, aren’t wrong. Stanford researchers tracked employment data and found that workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs saw a 16% decline compared to less exposed roles. And that was measured between late 2022 and September 25. So, what are people doing about it? Well, vocational community college enrollment is up nearly 20% since 2020. And the Jobs for the Future survey found that 44% of Americans under 34 have thought about switching careers because of AI. How could they not these days?
Meanwhile, for people 55 and older, that number was just 4%. And that of course makes sense. Older workers have experience and institutional knowledge that AI can’t easily copy, while AI is really good at doing the thing that entry-level workers typically have to do. That’s how you learn by repetitive tasks, simple things, you gain experience, and then you could move on to increasingly difficult tasks. But AI is competing against all of that right now for younger workers, and in many cases, AI is winning. So it’s almost forcing young people to consider trades when there was a significant bias against that for years, where young people were told you have to go to college, that’s a path to professional and financial success.
But AI is changing that, and we desperately need those workers. So it’s a bit of a silver lining, if you will. But regardless of what you do, if you’re young and you’re trying to figure out which path to go in, my advice is to go in that direction 100%. And if you are going to be in a desk job, if you’re going to be in a role where you’re in front of a computer screen, then make sure you’re leveraging AI. That is imperative right now. So whatever you’re doing, just make sure you’re going in that direction 100% and become as deep of an expert in whatever field you choose.
Crypto layoffs hit Gemini and Crypto.com: Both point directly at AI
Now, speaking of AI reshaping the workforce, two major crypto companies cut stat this week and both pointed directly to AI as the reason. Gemini, which is the exchange run by the Winkelvoss twins, if you’ve heard of them, uh they’re uh really gained fame, um, infamy, whatever you want to call it, uh, when they were fighting with Mark Zuckerberg about their involvement in the founding of Facebook and that was they were in move a movie as a result of that. So the Winkelvoss twins, they certainly have done well for themselves as the founders of Gemini, but it doesn’t look like business is going great there right now.
They cut roughly 30% of their workforce so far this year, and they’re down to under 500 employees. And that’s not bad enough. The company lost more than$500 million last year and said that it’s deploying AI tools to boost productivity. Meanwhile, crypto.com cut 12% of its staff. That was just announced. Their CEO didn’t sugarcoat what’s going on either. He posted on X saying companies that do not make this pivot immediately will fail. That’s about as direct as you can get. And look, these companies are far from alone if you’ve been paying attention to what’s been happening lately.
Block, which is Jack Dorsey’s company, laid off more than 4,000 people last month, which is almost half its workforce. And Dorsey’s explanation was just as blunt. He said a significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better. Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly planning cuts up to 20%, Atlassian cut 10%, which is about 1,600 jobs. And all of this is done specifically to fund more AI investment. And then there’s this that just came out from ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott last week. He said unemployment among new college graduates could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years because so much of the work is going to be done by AI agents.
So the language from these CEOs is getting more direct by the week. And there are a lot of people that say they’re claiming layoffs are because of AI for other reasons. Many of the companies that have had significant layoffs are extremely profitable. We were seeing examples with um, at least with Gemini, of companies that aren’t doing well claiming that they’re going to try to replace staff with AI. So no matter how you slice it, AI is all over this. And again, we’re never really going to know unless you’re on the board, unless you’re really behind the scenes of these companies, you’re not really going to know. But I, for one, don’t think it’s just a coincidence that AI is increasing in capability constantly. What it can do, it’s improving on what seems to be a weekly, sometimes even a daily basis.
And yes, companies are going to continue to embrace it. That will happen, and anyone in the workforce has to pay close attention to what’s going on. So a lot of cuts are happening right now, AI related or otherwise, they’re happening.
CEO exits in January: What near-record turnover means for the rest of the org chart
Um, but it looks like we’re also seeing a big leadership churn that hasn’t existed in a while. That is another story from today. Challenger Grain Christmas reports 209 CEO exits in January alone. That’s a 40% jump from December and the third highest January total since they started tracking in 2002. And for context, the average January going back to 2002 is 116 exits. So it’s nearly double what the norm is. Public company CEO exit surged 47% year over year, going from 36 to 53, and the people leaving are getting younger. The average departing CEO was under 52 years old, which is the second youngest on record.
Andy Challenger said boards are making changes early in the year to give new leaders a clean runway, and that social media has shortened the window for reputational recovery. Yes, yes, it absolutely has. We have to assume that they’re not retirement exits. Some are, of course, if they’ve made enough money, but it’s more of an indication of burnout and just things not going very well wherever they are. And we know that when the person at the top leaves, whoever comes in next is typically going to bring their own people with them. And so that high-level turnover typically leads to more turnover underneath in the near future. So that is what’s going on with CEOs. Thought that was an interesting stat today that uh jumped out at me from all the headlines.
OpenAI’s hiring boom and the growing premium for AI skills
But look, not everyone’s cutting. That’s the good news, and I’ll close with that today. Open AI is going in the opposite direction. They want to double their workforce, almost double at least, from about 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of the year. And they’re hiring cross-engineering, research, sales, and a newer role called technical ambassador. And all of this follows Sam Altman’s December Code Red memo that he pushed out that said they want to prioritize Chat GPT improvements.
They should. They’re getting a lot of competition from Claude and Perplex or from Anthropic with Claude and Perplexity, what they’re doing right now. OpenAI is not uh the leader they they were when they first came out, that’s for sure. Um Anthropic tripled their international workforce last September. So it’s not just the competition from consumers, it’s competition for AI talent as well. PWC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with AI skills earn 56% higher wages on average. AI engineering specialists are commanding 20 to 40% premiums over traditional IT roles. So, wow, today is really all about AI, isn’t it? Um get in the game if you are technical, if you’re non-technical, as I said earlier, if you are sitting behind the desk to do your job, you better be all over it because this is, I mean, how how can you ignore it at this point? Please don’t. Please pay attention to what is happening.
Um, so that’s it for today. Those are the headlines. AI is cutting jobs in some places, creating opportunities in others, and the people who build the skills to match are the ones who will come out ahead. That is the message I want to leave you with today on the workplace side.
Fun fact: Your office desk has 400x more bacteria than a toilet seat
But a fun fact before we go, I should have read this one before. I say that often, but here we go. You can stop listening now if you don’t want to hear this. But toilet seats are usually cleaner than the average office desk. Toilet seats are cleaner than the average office desk, which has typically four hundred times more bacteria. I’m gonna go clean my desk now and say goodbye for today. Thanks for listening. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone who you think might be interested, and I look forward to talking to you tomorrow.
