AI is redefining performance standards in Big Tech

As tech giants use AI to automate traditional coding tasks, companies are simultaneously cutting lower-performing roles while competing for AI talent—creating a two-track job market where AI expertise increasingly defines career prospects.

During a recent interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dished on the company’s plans for its continued push into AI. He highlighted the swift adoption of its Meta.ai assistant and announced plans for Llama 4, the next iteration of its large language model family. Recently, Meta also announced it would cut about 5% of its staff in 2025, attributing the move largely to underperforming workers. The move isn’t the first in recent memory.

In recent years, the company has laid of tens of thousands of workers while withdrawing hundreds of open positions.

Although Meta recently said it would rehire for AI-driven roles, its recent layoff development echoes a broader trend: Across software and tech, many firms are reducing their workforces while investing heavily in AI—a pattern reminiscent of recent moves by hardware companies.

AI augmentation is reshuffling the job deck

From Microsoft’s June 2024 layoffs in Azure and mixed reality to Intuit’s dual approach of cutting 1,800 jobs with plans to hire at least that many AI-related positions in fiscal 2025, companies are reshaping themselves in anticipation of the next wave of AI-driven growth. Some, like Klarna, plan to halve their workforce through AI-enabled efficiencies, while the video game industry has already shed more than 11,000 positions in large part as a result to AI-fueled automation. A survey by the World Economic Forum suggests this is just the beginning, with 41% of businesses worldwide foreseeing workforce reductions linked to AI integration over the next five years.

“Transformational breakthroughs, particularly in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), are reshaping industries and tasks across all sectors,” notes the WEF in its Future of Jobs Report 2025. This aligns with what’s happening in software today: As the WEF puts it, “The interplay between humans, machines and algorithms is redefining job roles across industries.”

Overall, the picture for software companies in recent years mirrors the upheaval seen on the hardware side. In 2024, Intel cut 15,000-person reduction (15% of workforce) while Dell eliminated 12,500. Meta cut 10,000 workers in March of 2024, and Amazon announced multiple rounds of reductions across AWS, advertising, and entertainment divisions throughout 2024. Meanwhile, companies like NVIDIA continued expanding their workforce to meet AI demands. All of this together paints a picture of fierce competition, skyrocketing AI investments, and a wave of layoffs that may forever alter the way tech does business.

Zuckerberg on AI ‘superpowers’

After Joe Rogan asked Zuckerberg if he was concerned about the potential for an AI system to go rogue, Zuckerberg said he believed it would be more likely that the technology would be something like productivity rocket fuel. “We’ll all just kind of have superpowers,” he said.

Yet Meta’s actions—cutting lower-performing roles while aggressively hiring for AI positions—highlight a more bifurcated reality. In simple terms, AI-proficient employees will have more value than less savvy workers.

The value of AI-savvy workers could be in their potential to automate away tedium, freeing up energy to focus on creativity. Here, An embrace of next-generation reasoning models could be a central development. The ability to enlist machines to handle multi-step tasks and generate entire “trees” of possible solutions could redefine productivity, especially with the emergence of AI agents capable of doing certain tasks with minimal supervision.

During the podcast, Zuckerberg used a personal anecdote to illustrate AI’s creative potential. He mentioned how his daughter, once “all about Legos,” recently became immersed in Minecraft—a digital world offering practically infinite building possibilities. Rather than seeing it as mere ‘screen time,’ Zuckerberg considers Minecraft a rich, open-ended platform for design and learning. Just as AI will automate repetitive coding tasks and grant people more ‘superpowers,’ the digital nature of Minecraft frees kids (and, analogously, the workforce) to pursue more imaginative projects with fewer constraints.

“As soon as AI handles the tedious parts, people can lean into their creativity,” he explains. “It’s not just playing a game; it’s a new way to design and learn.”

In the interview, Zuckerberg also drew a distinction between intelligence, will, and consciousness when it comes to AI—suggesting that while today’s AI systems can deploy intelligence, they lack self-motivated “will” or subjective awareness. Yet he cautioned that reasoning algorithms, which can potentially run thousands (or even millions) of queries to map out different actions, will require “very careful guardrails.” From Zuckerberg’s vantage point, this shift from simple chatbots to more sophisticated reasoning engines has significant consequences for software development: “We’re going to get to a point,” Zuckerberg says, “where a lot of the code in our apps … is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”

Microsoft and Amazon are reframing developer roles, too

According to a Fortune article published on January 13, 2025, Microsoft and Amazon are using employee performance metrics and reviews to guide their layoff decisions. The $3.1 trillion tech giant Microsoft is preparing for another round of job cuts with a focus on underperforming employees, according to people familiar with the plans. Amazon has taken a similar approach, implementing performance improvement plans (PIPs) before laying off 27,000 workers between 2022 and 2023. Career experts cited in the Fortune article warn that missed KPIs, disengagement, and failure to self-advocate are key factors that could put workers at risk during these performance-based cuts.

Some of those themes were evident in a memo Meta recently sent to workers. “Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies in the world — AI, glasses as the next computing platform, and the future of social media,” wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a memo to employees. With 2025 expected to be “intense,” there was a need to “raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster.”

Despite the turbulence, Zuckerberg’s recent comments on “The Joe Rogan Experience” suggest he sees these staffing shifts as part of a larger technological transformation. One that will require laser focus while tapping AI to help code. “We’re going to get to a point where a lot of the code in our apps, and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers,” he said. Automation could “free people up to do more creative and interesting pursuits while the AI does the repetitive or complex tasks,” he added.

AI can drive ‘significant’ improvements in productivity

This echoes the WEF’s November 2024 report, “Leveraging Generative AI for Job Augmentation and Workforce Productivity,” which states: “Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has the potential to drive significant improvements in workforce productivity at the level of tasks, organizations and economies.” In particular, one study cited by the WEF found “software developers from three large technology firms increased the number of tasks completed by over 26% using GenAI.”

Viewed through that lens, the decision to cut lower-performing roles while backfilling with AI-focused engineers aligns with Zuckerberg’s vision of a workforce increasingly augmented by machine learning capabilities. As the WEF puts it, “More frequently, GenAI may partially automate some tasks of a job role but simultaneously improve human workers’ ability to perform other tasks. In line with recent research, this paper refers to this process as job augmentation.”

Such sentiments echo the hardware sector’s story, where Intel, Dell, AMD, and IBM simultaneously trimmed thousands of roles while doubling down on advanced computing. NVIDIA, by contrast, ramped up hiring to develop cutting-edge GPUs and software stacks that power AI data centers.

WEF data on tech trends driving business transformation, 2025-2030

In a similar vein, the WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 also cautions: “Technology-related roles are the fastest-growing jobs in percentage terms, including Big Data Specialists, Fintech Engineers, AI and Machine Learning Specialists and Software and Application Developers.” Yet, it warns that “existing and emerging skills differences between growing and declining roles could exacerbate existing skills gaps,” underscoring the need for reskilling and upskilling initiatives. With “59 out of every 100” workers likely needing training by 2030, the emerging AI era requires a mix of human-centric soft skills—such as creativity, resilience, and adaptability—plus technical fluency in AI, big data, and cybersecurity.

All told, the tech sector’s recent flurry of workforce reshuffles suggests companies are following a dual path: they’re reducing non-essential or lower-performing roles while investing in AI-driven growth. The WEF’s findings—and Meta’s moves—illustrate a future of work shaped by machine-human collaboration.