What 1,800 AI Job Cuts Tell You About Your Own Hiring Plan
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The number matches what a source told Reuters back in November 2025, between 1,500 and 1,800 positions eliminated over 12 to 18 months, concentrated in call centers. Back then, Allianz wouldn’t confirm anything. It said only that new technology could “also impact roles that are currently heavily reliant on manual processes.” Eight months later, the CEO said the number out loud and put AI’s name on it.
The scale is what makes this one land. Allianz Partners employs 22,600 people, and roughly 14,000 of them handle customer inquiries and claims by phone. Cutting up to 1,800 means roughly 8% of the entire division, and as much as 13% of the phone-based workforce. Kunzmann said the company has spent six months negotiating with works councils and offering voluntary leave across Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries. Those jobs answer a share of the roughly 200,000 calls the unit fields daily, many of them routine tasks like address changes and status checks, exactly the kind of scripted, repeatable work AI systems are built to absorb first.
Watch the progression, because it’s becoming the template. A source leaks a number, the company declines to comment, and eight months later, an executive confirms it on the record with AI named as the cause. Companies used to bury cuts like this under “restructuring.” Now AI gets credited by name, and executives seem comfortable saying so. I flagged the same pattern on Monday in Goldman Sachs’s AI displacement report, where the loudest projections came from economists modeling scenarios. This is what it looks like once a real company attaches a real number to it. Oracle went through a similar round of AI-attributed cuts earlier this year, and the job types keep rhyming: phone-based, scripted, repetitive.
If your team runs high-volume customer contact work, call centers, claims processing, or scheduling, this is the signal to start building what AI doesn’t easily absorb: judgment calls, complex problem solving, and work built around owning an outcome instead of following a script. The same standard applies whether you’re the one doing the hiring or the one wondering about your own role.
1 in 12 US Job Titles Now Mention AI, and Most of Them Aren’t in Tech
Indeed Hiring Lab economist Pawel Adrjan tracked something more concrete than survey sentiment: actual job titles. He analyzed postings across the US and five large European markets, counting a title as “AI-touched” only if at least five postings used it, a threshold built to filter out one-off listings.
The US count has more than tripled since 2022. In the first quarter of 2022, 264 distinct titles were AI-touched. The count dropped to 159 in 2023, the year after ChatGPT launched, before climbing to 822 by the first quarter of 2026. AI now shows up in 8.3% of all US job titles, about 1 in 12.
The more interesting number is where those titles live. In five of the six countries Adrjan studied, more than half of AI-touched titles now sit outside tech departments entirely. The US leads at 63% non-tech, followed by Germany at 59%, the Netherlands at 58%, and France and the UK both at 54%. Spain is the outlier, still 64% concentrated in tech roles.
These are decades-old jobs getting renamed. Real postings Adrjan found include an “AI Autonomous Truck Test Driver,” a “Physical Therapist (AI Documentation),” and a “Real Estate Agent: AI Lead System Included.” He grouped the growth into three clusters: AI enablement and consulting, AI training and content creation, and AI instruction, meaning coaches and trainers hired specifically to teach others how to use AI tools.
“The spread of AI into how roles are named points to a redefinition of jobs across the US and Europe that extends well beyond software and data teams,” Adrjan wrote.
A job title is the most deliberate signal an employer sends. Job descriptions mention AI constantly, and it often means nothing, filler tacked onto a bullet list. Putting AI in the title means a company treats it as central to the role, and the five-posting threshold filters out the noise, which makes this a cleaner read on real adoption than most surveys I see.
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A Deutsche Bank Economist Says the AI Payoff Is Years Away. The Cuts Aren’t Waiting.
Jim Reid, global head of macro and thematic research at Deutsche Bank’s research institute, told Bloomberg Television this week that AI’s productivity boom is real, just not close. “In my career I haven’t seen anything like AI in terms of potential for productivity,” he said. “But I would probably caution that it’s going to take a number of years for us to properly embed it into enterprises to really get the benefits of that.”
Reid, an economic historian by training, leans on history for his read on jobs. “At every point of a new breakthrough in innovation, we’ve been really scared about jobs, about new technology destroying jobs, and it has never happened in aggregate,” he said. His team points to software employment still growing as support.
He also addressed the bubble question hanging over semiconductor stocks, which have rallied hard enough that investors and policymakers are openly questioning the valuations. “There’s a risk obviously, when you see parabolic rises up, that at some point there’s a big tech bust,” Reid said, adding that humans have been innovating for 250 to 300 years since the Industrial Revolution and “we’ve only seen inflation go up.”
His one caveat matters for anyone watching interest rates: AI’s productivity gains may not be enough to rescue countries from unsustainable debt levels. “Everybody knows that debt levels aren’t sustainable for a lot of countries,” he said. If rates climb much above where they sit now, the debt math stops working for a lot of governments.
Put Reid’s timeline next to what Allianz just did. He says the payoff is years away because companies haven’t finished embedding AI into how they operate. Allianz confirmed 1,800 cuts with AI named as the reason this week, not years from now. The displacement is running ahead of the productivity payoff, and workers are absorbing the gap in between.
“It has never happened in aggregate” is true, and it’s cold comfort if you’re one of the roughly 14,000 people answering phones at Allianz Partners. Aggregates recover. Individual careers take the hit in the meantime, and those transition years are exactly when people need retraining, mobility, and honest information about where the work is going. Recent payroll data showing the labor force itself shrinking makes that stretch harder, not easier, for anyone caught in it.
A Return-to-Office Rule Just Cost a Company Founder His Own Firm
William Nieporte co-founded Bramshill Investments, an $8 billion asset management firm, in 2012 with a high school classmate. A third classmate joined as CEO two years later. In 2022, all three owners signed an email ordering every employee back to the office five days a week, offering severance to anyone who refused.
Nieporte lived in San Ramon, California, hundreds of miles from the nearest office in Newport Beach, a move his co-owners had approved years earlier. He decided the rule was written for employees, and that as an owner, it didn’t apply to him. His co-owners fired him for exactly that reason. Their termination letter stated he had “willfully and deliberately failed to report to ‘in-person’ work.”
Here’s what makes this expensive instead of just awkward. Bramshill’s operating agreement requires any shareholder fired for cause to sell their ownership stake. Nieporte held 12%. He argues his co-owners used the office policy as a pretext to force him out and claim that stake, after a 2021 buyout offer he’d already rejected as a lowball. In May, he filed a federal lawsuit against ADP TotalSource, the HR company that shares employer responsibilities with Bramshill, seeking at least $30 million. He’s separately in arbitration with Bramshill and his former partners. The company says his claims are fabricated and that he was fired for dereliction of duty.
He now works remotely for a startup in Nevada.
Strip away the lawsuit drama, and this story confirms something a lot of workers already suspect: return-to-office mandates get used for reasons that have nothing to do with productivity. Nieporte’s partners had already tried and failed to buy him out. Then a policy appeared that he was almost certain to violate, and they used it to remove him and claim his stake.
Companies figured out a while ago that an RTO mandate doubles as a workforce reduction tool. You don’t owe severance to people who quit over a commute. This case shows the same play running at the ownership level, with a 12% stake standing in for the severance check.
The lesson holds whether you’re the one signing a workplace policy or the one it applies to: assume it covers you. Nieporte put his own name on the email that ended up quoted in his termination letter. If your organization is weighing a return-to-office push, settle the policy and the reasoning behind it before you send the email, because employees, and apparently owners, will hold you to exactly what it says. And if a rigid mandate is pushing good people out the door, a staffing partner can help close the gap it leaves behind.
