CEOs have a fiduciary responsibility to use AI.
If that sentence makes your blood boil, that’s a positive sign. It shows you’re finally paying attention. However, before you grab your pitchfork and head to Silicon Valley, look at the device in your hand. You’re holding the very weapon that’s in the process of dismantling the middle-class workforce, which you’re likely using to order a latte, text banter with [whomever] or scroll through feeds curated by the same algorithms you claim to despise.
We’ve entered an era where human labour is no longer the cornerstone of enterprise; it’s a legacy cost, a line item to be aggressively optimized or erased entirely. CEOs aren’t villains in a sci-fi thriller; they’re the mechanics of an evolutionary engine that we—the consumers—have been fueling with every click, every “smart” shortcut, and every demand for instant gratification. The disruption isn’t coming; it’s here, it’s logical, and frankly, it’s exactly what we asked for.
For decades, companies relied on a thick, expensive layer of white-collar workers to act as human glue. These were the employees who coordinated information, tracked progress, and assembled reports. They were the logistical choreography of the office. Then came outsourcing—call centres moved, factories relocated, and admin tasks went wherever they could be done for the lowest price. Today, the “lowest price” isn’t a worker in a different time zone; it’s a line of code that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t ask for a raise, doesn’t require a benefits package, coffee in the lunchroom and doesn’t keep demanding more.
In the eyes of C-suite executives, AI isn’t a “tech experiment”; it’s a surgical tool for efficiency. When three marketers, working with generative tools, can now accomplish the work that previously required ten, or one analyst can outpace five using automated data extraction, a CEO would be bordering on professional negligence not to cut the surplus. Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, once said, “AI is first going to replace the back-office functions,” and later added that for certain roles, “there is no doubt that the total number of people will be less.”
Fewer tasks = fewer employees needed.
“Fewer employees.” Enter Jack Dorsey, Block’s CEO, the man currently occupying the bullseye of virtue-signalling public outrage. When Dorsey announced on February 28th that he was cutting 4,000 jobs at Block, the armchair critics went into a frenzy. In a letter he posted on X, Dorsey (@jack) wrote: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”
Dorsey didn’t do something sinister; he did something remarkably honest by publicly acknowledging that AI’s compounding efficiency simply rendered those workers a legacy cost. Dorsey said out loud what every CEO in every boardroom is calculating: the ROI of a human versus the 24/7/365 productivity of a machine. This isn’t a “trend”; it’s a structural reset.
Inuit: Now is focusing on AI-driven roles and has recently eliminated 1,800 underperforming functions.
Morgan Stanley: Cut 2,500 jobs earlier this year, a move analyst directly linked to the integration of automated wealth management tools.
Google: Multiple rounds of layoffs have been carried out, affecting thousands of employees as it realigns its focus toward AI development.
IBM: CEO Arvind Krishna has indicated a hiring pause for roles that could be replaced by AI in the coming years, potentially affecting nearly 8,000 positions.
Microsoft: Continued its workforce reductions into 2024 and 2025, particularly within its gaming and cloud divisions, as it prioritizes its multi-billion-dollar AI investments.
These companies aren’t “failing.” They’re evolving. As Sam Altman of OpenAI plainly stated, “AI will almost certainly mean that some jobs will go away, period.”
A CEO’s fiduciary duty is to ensure the company’s survival and profitability. If the math shows that a bank can replace its 20 financial managers with 5 working alongside AI to deliver the same results, then 15 must go. Keeping them would be to subsidize inefficiency at the expense of the shareholders, which you may very well be one of.
Predictable, procedural tasks are what machines excel at. If your workday consists of following structured directions, you aren’t in a career; you’re in a queue for automation. The hysterical narrative that this is a plot to destroy the middle class needs to stop. History is a graveyard of dead trades: the printing press replaced the scribe, and the loom ended handweaving. With every industrial advancement, there have been alarmists shouting about the end of work, and every time, they were wrong. Employment continued; it just looked different because employees, those who adapted rather than futilely resisted, took a step or two, or three, out of the “task lane” and into the “thinking lane.”
However, there’s a massive failure occurring, and it isn’t in the C-suites. The real villains are our governments and educational institutions. They’re still offering mid-90s curricula designed for “predictable careers” while the ground beneath them has turned to quicksand. Governments and schools are our proxies, which we’re allowing to ignore the workplace disruptions taking place. By electing leaders who refuse to modernize, we’re the ones failing to prepare the next generation for a world where ‘job security’ is an oxymoron. Instead of “heads in the sand” discussions, we need a radical shift in how we value human insight over machine output.
Jack Dorsey chose to act now and rip the Band-Aid off. He gave 4,000 people the hard truth rather than letting Block’s morale slowly erode. To his credit, Dorsey’s offer of 20 weeks’ salary is a rare, humanized buffer against a cold economic reality: when the math of an employee’s ROI fails to move the needle, the hard decision to cut isn’t just business, it’s a fiduciary requirement.
AI isn’t some invading force; it’s a wildfire we’re feeding with our own hands. Every time you use AI to generate an instant summary, conduct a lightning-fast search, engage with a frictionless chatbot, or create AI slop or even high-signal content, you’re voting for the obsolescence of someone’s job, much like when you use self-checkout, which eliminates the need for cashiers. We’ve become junkies for ‘convenience,’ mainlining efficiency while pretending to be shocked when the human on the other end of the line finally stops breathing. You can’t demand the ‘instant’ and then mourn the ‘person.’
AI is the new liquid candy. A 12-pack of soda is just a harmless collection of cans filled with chemicals in carbonated water until you choose to crack one open. We’ve jumped on the AI bandwagon not because it’s progress, but because we’re lazy and it’s convenient. We are mainlining this technological syrup, outsourcing the very thinking that makes us the apex predators of this planet, and then shriek with surprise when the C-suite stops paying for our ‘sugar-high’ efforts. We aren’t victims of the disruption; we’re the ones paying for the privilege of being replaced.
You can’t live on a diet of automated shortcuts and expect to remain a high-performance human.
Every time you finish your ‘AI-enhanced’ workday, you weren’t just being productive; you were training your replacement, feeding the machine the very data points it needs to render you obsolete. We’ve started trading the soul of human grit and creativity for the sedation of the algorithm, and now that the bills are arriving in the form of pink slips, we have the nerve to point fingers at CEOs for fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities.
Again, look at what’s in your hands; you, along with everyone else tethered to the smart device, are building the gallows.
The AI disruption hasn’t even hit its stride; it’s merely warming up on the data you fed it yesterday. Every time you engage, the machine maps your intellect, learning to mimic your headspace. The CEOs, who are easy targets to vilify, are simply business surgeons, cutting out inefficient labour to ensure their company’s continued existence. CEOs are doing their jobs while we’re failing ours. ‘The system’—that unholy trinity of profit-hungry corporations, which our consumerism creates and supports, stagnant governments, which we voted in and our addiction to shortcuts—isn’t broken; it’s functioning exactly as we designed it. Go ahead, keep chugging the ‘AI soda’ from the straw the machine has handed you, while screaming about the aftertaste.
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