New Gartner research with 350 global
business leaders earning at least 1 billion dollars in annual revenue finds that the highest return on AI investment does not come from large-scale job cuts. Instead, the most effective firms use AI to assist people and make them more productive rather than replacing them entirely. The survey shows that 80 percent of respondents have tested AI or automation and then reduced headcount even though the economic benefits were not clear. Helen Poitevin, Gartner vice president and lead analyst and one of the study's authors, told Fortune that maximizing AI value by firing workers is a narrow approach and may leave many firms with only modest gains. Recently, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, echoed the Jevons paradox that says greater efficiency can lead to higher overall demand for the underlying activity. He suggests this paradox could apply to AI: the more productivity AI brings to a task, the more demand there may be for human labor. Poitevin notes that the firms with the highest ROI are not those trimming staff, but those deploying AI as a tool to augment human capabilities and help workers perform better. The value lies in enhancing productivity rather than eliminating employees. In another Gartner survey of CEOs and business leaders, about one third expect AI to assist human decision making rather than making decisions independently. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently revised his controversial remark that AI would wipe out half of low skill office jobs; he now says AI could become a tool for more efficient work rather than a complete replacement of human labor. However Gartner reports that as many as 27 percent of leaders believe AI could operate almost entirely on its own with little or no human intervention. Many of the layoffs being attributed to AI are now under scrutiny as AI washing, meaning the layoffs may reflect preexisting cost-cutting or restructuring plans rather than the impact of automating work. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also acknowledged this phenomenon in a February interview, noting that while some cases used AI to justify layoffs, others involved genuine displacement. Poitevin argues the current AI-related layoffs appear to be short-term experiments by companies and not evidence of a broad, sustained workforce restructuring and that they do not maximize the returns from AI investments. The piece is part of a broader AI versus AI debate on the future role of automation in the labor market.
