Transcription
But I'm reading about meta layoffs. Google layoffs. Indeed, they're now laying off people due to AI.
I was laid off in March this year. Took me 6 months to find a new job. Got a new job 7 weeks ago. And now this new job has announced hundreds of layoffs.
So I think I'm being laid off from my job today. If that does impact your position today is going to be your last day.
I'm 30 years old. I am unemployed. I've been unemployed for 4 months. I literally can't get a job. I've applied to over 150 jobs. I now have negative $441 in my savings account because of the monthly service fee that just hit.
Salesforce just laid off 4,000 employees, claiming that they're now an AI first company and that AI is making their workforce redundant. However, what they didn't tell the public is that in 2025 alone, they insourced 1,137 jobs. Insourcing being the process of bringing workers to the US. It's the opposite of outsourcing. According to the US citizenship and immigration services data, in 2025 alone, Amazon has received approval for 10,044 H1B visas. Amazon Web Services, their cloud division, was approved for 2,347 H1B visas, and those are definitely developers. Think about that. If AI is so good that it's replacing human coders, then why does Amazon Web Services need over 2,000 visas to bring workers into the US? If AI agents are handling everything, why do they need over 10,000 visas just in 2025? They're trying to say that AI is replacing all jobs, but that's an oversimplified narrative, and it's often used as a cover for these corporations who are doing more complex and controversial business practices. Corporations started using the H-1B visa to bring in labor, pay them less, and effectively lay off American workers. We just saw this recently with Tesla. Tesla is currently in a lawsuit that alleges that they replaced over 6,000 American workers with visa holders as a means to cut costs.
Now, I want to be clear that this is not me being anti-immigration. I myself am an immigrant. We shouldn't be upset at H-1B visa holders for accepting an opportunity provided to them by these corporations. But what we should be upset about is the exploitation. Corporations are exploiting both American workers who they lay off and the immigrant workers who they often underpay and overwork because their visa is tied to their employment.
Now with that, let's revisit Salesforce. As I said, in 2025 alone, Salesforce received 1,137 H1B visas. In 2024, they received 1,525. And in 2023, they received 1,021. That's a total of 3,683 visas. Almost the same amount of people that they just laid off. Now, let's look at their Indian office. Salesforce employs over 13,000 people in India alone. So, how much of this is actually due to AI and not insourcing or outsourcing because what the pandemic taught these corporations is that operations could continue as normal and it could be even more cost-effective if they used remote workers. In fact, it's estimated that over 1,700 global capacity centers have been established in India, employing more than 1.6 million professionals. The data shows a correlation between US corporations outsourcing tech jobs and India's booming IT sector. Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, they've all largely contributed to India's economic growth. This is eerily similar to how US manufacturers outsourced jobs to China in the 80s and '90s, helping to transform China into the world's second largest economy and pulling roughly 800 million people out of poverty. They outsource the jobs and now China largely competes with the US. Tech companies are now doing the exact same thing. They're outsourcing tech roles and laying off American workers.
One could actually make the argument that the US government supports outsourcing because in 2017 they passed the tax cuts and jobs act. This bill lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. But buried in the bill was the global intangible low taxed income. This gave corporations massive tax cuts for moving their operations overseas. Here's how insane this is. If a corporation makes profits in the US, they pay an effective tax rate of 21%. But if they make profit on a foreign subsidiary, they only pay 10.5%. As you would guess, this incentivizes corporations to move their operations overseas. They effectively went from paying 35% to 10.5%. You may have heard of the executive order that would apply a $100,000 fee to the H-1B visa process as a means to stop these companies from bringing in talent from outside the US. However, it's quite unclear how this will actually work. Even if this worked perfectly, corporations could just skip visas entirely because they're still rewarded for offshoring jobs.
Executives not only benefit from offshoring, but they benefit from every headline that says AI layoffs. Executive compensation is directly tied to stock performance. Corporations lay off, the stock price goes up, and executives cash in. We recently saw this with Bumble, who announced they would be laying off 30% of their workforce. That same day, their stock price jumped up 25%. I'm sure the executives had a nice dinner at Nou that night. And then you have the venture capitalists like Jason Calacanis claiming that Amazon will be 100% AI by 2030. Every factory worker gone, every driver replaced, the same Amazon that just got approved for a total of 12,391 visas. But keep in mind, this is the same guy that needs his AI investments to blast off to the moon. And I recognize that Amazon does have a lot of automation. I just find it strange when people make these types of claims. Yet, they're continuing to hire people just in a way that most people don't see.
"Before 2030, you're going to see Amazon, which has massively invested in this, replace all factory workers and all drivers. The idea that when you order something from Amazon, a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane. It will be 100% robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. every Amazon worker, all those jobs, you UPS gone, FedEx gone, every all of those are going to be gone. And those companies will be more profitable."
You know what's actually insane? A venture capitalist who probably hasn't worked a physical job in decades, if at all, declaring that millions of Americans will be obsolete in 5 years due to the AI that he's invested in. But with all of that being said, AI is replacing some roles. Many of the jobs being lost rely heavily on the English language, and this just so happens to be the perfect use case for large language models. Things like content moderation, basic copywriting, and customer service. Service Now is a tech company offering a platform of AI agents to replace human workers.
"We're slowing down the hiring in jobs that are quite frankly soul crushing jobs. I mean, just think about like IT support, customer support. 80% of the customer inquiries and cases now are fully managed by Agentic AI. And the same is true of go to market. You know, think about people that talk to customers. There's no prep work anymore. Their AI teammate is doing that for them at Service Now. The supporting cast of the soul crushing work is now being done by agents. They work hard 24 by 7. You don't have to pay them. And uh they don't eat any uh lunch and they don't have any health care benefits. So they're very affordable."
That's not innovation. It's dehumanization. Unsurprisingly, they're working with companies like Delta, Uber, and Visa. So, we can make the assumption that these companies let go of workers in favor of using Service Now AI agents.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with revised data on job growth. The gist of the report is that after revising the numbers, there were actually 911,000 fewer jobs created than previously predicted. So, the unemployment rate for computer engineering graduates has more than tripled over the last year. Screenshot from the New York Fed report a year ago, computer engineering, 2.3% unemployment. Same source, a year later, computer engineering, 7.5% unemployment. And this is actually true. Art history 3% unemployment. Do not get an art history degrees. My god.
And according to the Lewig Institute, the real unemployment rate is somewhere around 24.7%. Not the 4.3% that headlines claim. They count anyone without a full-time job or those making less than $25,000 a year as functionally unemployed. Of course, this isn't how the US government measures economic health. That's what the stock market is for. As companies are growing, they're just not hiring more people. In certain roles, one person can do the work of three people by using some type of AI tool. Multiply this across every growing company, and you get those 911,000 jobs. Now, that doesn't mean that's actually the cause because as we saw, the economy is not doing great, but it can explain some of this job loss.
I've officially been unemployed for a year and 4 months now. And I did not think it was going to be this difficult to get a job postgrad. And I feel like every single day, my chances of getting a job seem to get lower and lower because I feel like I graduated so long ago. And even internships where I'm supposed to be gaining my experience require you to either still be in school or recently graduated. The real tragedy here is all of the people currently graduating who can't land an entry-level job. How do they become senior if they can't even be junior? And it's worth noting that these corporations have for quite a while been trying to eliminate entry-level positions by making it really hard to even get hired. How can you get three years of experience if you don't have experience?
If you're willing to switch careers, I do think being in a trade is much harder to automate. And at the rate that these data centers are going up, anything to do with electricity will be needed. Electricians, electrical engineers, basically anything required to build a data center. And if we go back to the Bureau of Labor of Statistics, the only two fields that actually saw growth was education and healthcare. And this makes sense because even when the economy is bad, people are going to have children and thus we need teachers and people are also going to need healthcare.
So to answer the question, is AI taking jobs? The answer is yes. But these CEOs are blaming AI for the layoffs, completely disregarding the Visa exploitation and the tax subsidized offshoring. Every time they credit AI for layoffs, the stock price shoots up and they cash in. They're using AI as a cover for the real extent of their greed.