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There's a lively debate about when business shifts from traditional software to an agentic future. Few doubt it's coming fast. The common consensus: It'll hit gradually and then suddenly, perhaps next year. This could wipe out tens of millions of jobs in a very short period of time. Yes, past technological transformations wiped away a lot of jobs but, over the long span, created many and more new ones.

This could hold true with AI, too. What's different here is both the speed at which this AI transformation could hit, and the breadth of industries and individual jobs that will be profoundly affected.

You're starting to see even big, profitable companies pull back:

That's why Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and others have said that mid-level coders will be unnecessary soon, perhaps in this calendar year. Zuckerberg, in January, told Joe Rogan: "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code." He said this will eventually reduce the need for humans to do this work. Shortly after, Meta announced plans to shrink its workforce by 5%.

Microsoft is laying off 6,000 workers (about 3% of the company), many of them engineers.

Walmart is cutting 1,500 corporate jobs as part of simplifying operations in anticipation of the big shift ahead.

CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company, slashed 500 jobs or 5% of its workforce, citing "a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry."

Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, warned in a New York Times op-ed (gift link) this month that AI is breaking "the bottom rungs of the career ladder — junior software developers ... junior paralegals and first-year law-firm associates "who once cut their teeth on document review" ... and young retail associates who are being supplanted by chatbots and other automated customer service tools.

And this is just the beginning.

Jeff