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After a year marked by artificial intelligence layoffs, influential leaders and CEOs are now warning that 2026 can expect a huge increase in anxiety about the technology.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told CNBC’s Karen Tso and Steve Sedgwick on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum’s flagship conference in Davos, Switzerland, that AI is a “major driver of economic growth.”
“We see the potential to increase growth by 0.8% in the coming years, but it is hitting the labor market like a tsunami, and many countries and many businesses are not ready for it,” Georgieva explained.
“What should they (countries and companies) do?” They already need to think about the new skills they need and how they will acquire those new skills,” he added.
AI was seen as an almost essential contributing factor 55,000 jobs were laid off in the US 2025, according to December data from the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Big firms have cited AI as a reason for layoffs.
Amazon It announced 15,000 job cuts last year Salesforce According to CEO Marc Benioff, 4,000 customer support employees have been laid off because AI is taking over 50% of the company’s work.
Other companies that referenced AI during the restructuring included a technology consulting firm Accenture and a group of airlines Lufthansa.
Worker sentiment toward AI continues to shift as AI continues to dominate layoff headlines. In fact, an employee Concerns about job losses due to AI According to preliminary findings from consulting firm Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide, it will increase from 28 percent in 2024 to 40 percent in 2026.
Mercer’s research shows that 62% of employees feel that leaders underestimate the emotional and psychological impact of AI.
“Concerns about said intelligence will go from low to high this year,” analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote in a note on Tuesday. “This is reflected in lawsuits ranging from copyright to privacy, data center siting and protecting young people from chatbots that encourage them to harm themselves or worse.”
Note a The Stanford Study in November, which cited a 16% relative drop in employment for graduates in AI-influenced roles, compared to jobs for experienced workers, which remained stable since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
“Anxieties about job turnover are also much higher,” the experts added, but noted that the Stanford study was “inconclusive and noisy.”
Firms should improve the skills of workers
According to analysts at Deutsche Bank, companies that attribute much of the blame for job cuts to AI should be taken “with a grain of salt” because “AI overwashing will be a major feature of 2026.”
Indeed, some studies suggest that AI’s impact on the labor market has stalled by now. AI hasn’t yet caused job losses, says Yale University’s budget lab stated in the report in October. The lab analyzed US labor market data from 2022 to 2025 and found that the share of workers in various occupations has not changed significantly since ChatGPT’s debut.
Sander van Norden, CEO of Randstad, the world’s largest staffing firm, told CNBC in Davos on Tuesday that the role of artificial intelligence in job cuts is being overstated.
“I would say that those 50,000 job losses are not due to AI, but to general uncertainty in the market. It’s too early to attribute them to AI,” Nordende said.
He added that “2026 is the year of great adaptation,” where individuals and team leaders need to start thinking about how to integrate AI and improve productivity.
“I see the industry as a huge opportunity to do better with talent. Access to talent. Connect with talent, evaluate talent, activate talent. A lot of those things can be done by AI,” he said.
An additional 97% of investors in Mercer’s report said they would be negatively impacted in their funding decisions by firms that fail to consistently upskill and future-proof their AI workforce.
Three-quarters of investors said they are more likely to invest in companies that offer AI training to employees.
“We used to think a few years ago, even last year, that everyone was doing annual AI, and if you get into AI, you’re going to get hit right away,” Ravin Jesuthasan, a future-of-work analyst and senior partner at Mercer, told CNBC.
“Now you have the opposite phenomenon, people running for the hills… I think what you’re seeing investors say next is … ‘How are you integrating your workforce with AI?’ How are you getting your workforce?’
Jesuthasan says investors will “actively invest in or de-invest in companies that do not achieve the optimal combination of people and machines” because they believe that upskilling is important to “support the economic efficiency of the organization.”