With the announcement this week that tech giant Amazon will cut 14,000 jobs, the era of AI-related redundancies appears to be well and truly under way. While restructuring and a slowdown in recruitment are already evident in the United States, the impact of this technology in France remains difficult to gauge - though the warning signs are increasingly apparent.
The idea that Artificial Intelligence might take our jobs once seemed like pure science fiction. Yet, less than three years after the emergence of ChatGPT, the speed at which these tools have infiltrated our professional lives is nothing short of dizzying.
Workforce reorganisation
AI is driving a profound reorganisation of the workforce and has accelerated the automation of administrative functions, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Banking, insurance, communications, marketing, logistics and data analyst positions are among those most exposed to this transformation, according to the report, with repetitive and predictable tasks the most easily automated.
"I feel like I have a sword of Damocles hanging over my head," Fanny tells RFI.
A freelance translator for fifteen years, lately she’s been thinking more than ever about changing careers. Around her, job postings for career changes are piling up. The reason: the rise of tools like DeepL and ChatGPT, capable of producing increasingly convincing texts.
"For now, I still have enough well-paid work, probably because I translate from German and do a lot of work for Switzerland, where quality is still valued," she explains.
But some of her clients have simply disappeared. None of them have told her they preferred automated translation services, but she’s under no illusions. Her expert eye can recognise the typical turns of phrase in AI-generated translations.
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New professions
Artificial intelligence hasn't only transformed the way translations are done, it's created a new profession – that of "post-editor". In other words, someone needed to correct machine-generated translations. Obviously, Fanny points out, it's much "less well-paid," "not very interesting," and "the deadlines are shorter".
Underlining this significant shift, in 2024, the language learning app Duolingo terminated the contracts of 10 percent of its freelance translators, before parting ways with some of its authors.
Its CEO, Luis von Ahn, stated at the time that he wanted to "stop using contractors to do the work that AI can generate."
While there are no studies on the number of translator jobs destroyed by AI, the sector has served as a laboratory for what some see as the equivalent of the industrial revolution for knowledge-based professions.
Speedy innovation
In May, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and raise unemployment to 10-20 percent within five years.
At online retail and cloud computing giant Amazon, this fiction has become a reality.
On Tuesday it announced a reduction of its workforce by 14,000 posts to streamline operations as it invests in artificial intelligence, without saying where the cuts will be made. This represents four percent of its 350,000 administrative positions.
This announcement was presented as the first step in a wave that could affect 30,000 people.
The types of jobs affected include support functions, human resources, logistics, cloud computing, and advertising.
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Amazon's Vice President of Human Resources Beth Galetti directly linked this decision to generative AI: "This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it allows companies to innovate much faster than ever before," she said in a statement on the group's website.
Amazon is no longer an isolated case. IBM was one of the first to automate its HR functions. Accenture has laid off 12,000 employees, primarily in the United States, as part of an AI-driven plan, and the restructuring is set to continue. The firm has warned that employees unable to adopt these tools are likely to be the next to be laid off.
As for Salesforce, its CEO, who boasted that AI "performed 30 to 50 percent of the work" at the enterprise software company, has dismissed 4,000 employees.
In early September, Microsoft confirmed the reduction of 200 positions, or 10 percent of its workforce in France, as part of a global plan citing "improved operational efficiency" and massive investments in artificial intelligence.
However, some companies have backtracked. Earlier this year, the Swedish fintech company Klarna, a payment specialist, reduced its workforce by 40 percent, justifying it by the widespread adoption of AI in its marketing and customer service departments. Ultimately, faced with dissatisfied customers, it rehired staff.
Difficult to measure
While the United States is already facing AI-related restructuring, Europe is still proceeding cautiously.
In France, no large-scale social plan has yet been explicitly attributed to AI, and the effects remain "difficult to measure," commented Antonin Bergeaud, associate professor at HEC and innovation specialist, in a written response.
"The American market has always been more responsive than the French market," he says. "But we should expect the same consequences: companies slowing down recruitment in high-risk professions, while waiting to see how the technology evolves."
The first signs are there, however. According to a study by the LHH group (a subsidiary of Adecco) published at the end of September, covering 2,000 senior executives in 13 countries, 46 percent of executives say they have already reduced their workforce because of AI, and 54 percent plan to employ fewer people in the next five years.
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However, notes Michaël Chambon, managing director of LHH France, only 12 percent of the employees concerned identify this technology as the reason for their departure. "There's a disconnect here. Management acknowledges the impact, but employees aren't aware of it."
"We are in a process of transformation, not yet destruction," he adds. "But this transformation is silent, because it involves not replacing employees or freezing hiring."
The effects also appear contradictory. "We see that companies adopting AI have a slight increase in productivity and therefore recruit more, which represents an apparent paradox," he notes.
The PwC AI Jobs Barometer 2025 supports this: the number of job offers in AI-related professions jumped by 273 percent in France between 2019 and 2024.
"The upheaval will only really be seen in the average company when a comprehensive AI strategy is put in place. This is currently only happening in large companies," explains Antonin Bergeaud.
Junior positions at risk
According to the World Economic Forum, internships and entry-level jobs are likely to be replaced by automation.
Jean-Amiel Jourdan, executive director of HEC Talents, has already observed this: "The adoption of AI is reducing the number of traditional junior positions. Analysis, synthesis, and report-generating tasks are being automated" at a lower cost.
New recruits must now be able to "supervise and validate the content generated by AI."
This shift could, he warns, place employers in "a dilemma": how to build a pool of experienced talent if we reduce the recruitment of juniors?
A Stanford study in the United States confirms the trend: since the widespread adoption of generative AI, employment among 22-25 year olds in the most exposed professions has declined by 13 percent.
The impact is most visible in the most exposed jobs, such as developers, where the drop has reached 20 percent since the peak at the end of 2022.
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"The market has slowed down in the tech sector over the past two years, and this is being felt enormously in the developer ecosystem, a population that had never experienced a crisis," explains Greg Lhotellier, recruiter and founder of Dev with IA, for whom this situation stems primarily from a less favorable economic climate. "I haven’t yet seen any cases where hiring stops because AI is doing the job."
In the medium term, he anticipates a shift in the profession towards "AI manager" positions. "AI will generate code, but a human will always be needed to control, arbitrate, and understand it."
Constant evolution
One in four jobs presents a risk of exposure to generative AI, according to a study by the International Labour Organization. However, few jobs are fully automatable.
Lhotellier remains cautious: "The social fallout is likely to be real, but the impact of AI on employment remains, for the moment, out of step with the alarmist rhetoric."
A divide is likely to emerge between employees "augmented" by AI and those whose tasks will be partially replaced by AI or who will be left behind by this technological innovation, he explains.
"There are jobs that could disappear, but most are jobs that are evolving," continues Michaël Chambon, who emphasises the importance of anticipating and training. Even if, in the long run, it’s difficult not to imagine a net loss of jobs."
This article is based on the original in French by Aurore Lartigue and slightly edited for clarity.
