Technology executives are using artificial intelligence as a convenient excuse to cut staff, the chief executive of Scale AI has said, dismissing fears of an AI employment crisis as overblown.
Jason Droege, who runs the AI infrastructure company, told the Semafor World Economy conference that leaders at rival firms are dressing up routine headcount reductions as AI-driven restructuring.
He accused companies of "washing the layoffs" with AI, arguing the cuts would otherwise be seen as ordinary right-sizing.
His comments come as a growing number of major companies cite AI to justify sweeping redundancies.
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, attributed 1,000 job cuts, roughly 16% of its workforce, to rapid advances in artificial intelligence this month.
Oracle has slashed up to 30,000 roles globally as it redirects spending towards AI infrastructure, while Meta, Block and Atlassian have each pointed to AI in recent workforce reductions.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the career services firm, said AI was cited as the leading reason for US job cuts in March, accounting for more than 15,000 of the 60,620 redundancies announced during the month.
The firm's data shows AI has been blamed for roughly 27,600 layoffs so far in 2026, on top of nearly 55,000 AI-linked cuts recorded across 2025.
Droege argued that AI remains too unreliable to replace humans in many critical roles, pointing to financial decision-making as an area where the technology falls short.
He warned, however, that workers who fail to learn how to use AI tools properly face a different kind of risk, suggesting the real threat is not wholesale automation but a failure to adapt.
His remarks echoed those of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who told CNBC's Invest In America Forum that workers should worry less about being replaced by AI than about being outperformed by a colleague who has mastered it.
Related reading
- Pixel Societies: the hackathon project building pixel-art AI twins to test human compatibility
- Bitcoin miner HIVE Digital is raising $75m to fund a shift into artificial intelligence infrastructure
- Anthropic takes 158,000 square feet in London as US artificial intelligence rivals race for British talent
Droege's own company is not immune to the pressures reshaping the industry, having cut 14% of its staff last July after scaling its data-labelling business too quickly.
Scale has since pivoted towards enterprise and government clients, securing contracts worth nearly $200 million with the US Department of Defense and US Army.
The recap
- Scale AI CEO Jason Droege said CEOs use AI as an excuse
- 30,000 layoffs have been blamed on AI this year
- Droege made the comments at the Semafor conference