Major tech layoffs signal the rise of agentic AI in the workplace

Announcements of mass layoffs at large-scale tech companies have provided clear signals of agentic AI’s rise across the corporate world. Australian software company WiseTech announced layoffs of 2000 of its 7000 staff members, declaring that “the era of manually writing code… is over”, while global technology company Block, which owns Afterpay, announced 4000 job cuts, including hundreds of Australian staff.

The cuts are undeniably ambitious – they place significant trust in rapidly developing agentic AI, magnifying the already high risk associated with large staff reductions. WiseTech Founder Richard White derives confidence in the action through AI’s rapid progress, development and improvements, stating “individually, people can do far, far more work with AI than they could have done nine months ago”. The rapid progress in the viability of incorporating this automation into workflows is evidently now the biggest enabler of these redundancies, implying that there is likely much more to come if White’s beliefs are proven right.

Nevertheless, scepticism remains surrounding the true justification for the mass-layoffs. Particularly, there are suggestions that ‘AI-washing’ is afoot, whereby companies intentionally misattribute redundancies to AI implementation to inspire investor confidence. This is particularly of relevance for Block, which saw its staff numbers more than triple in three years, suggesting that this is instead an exercise of ‘right-sizing’ rather than a technologically-motivated decision.

Further regulatory and compliance risks involved with AI-related redundancies have been exposed as a direct consequence of these firms’ actions. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has threatened ‘co-ordinated’ action against those who fail to conduct adequate consultation to affected employees. These warnings bring the risk versus reward dynamic of AI-motivated mass-redundancies to the forefront, but the risks may only delay what increasingly appears to be inevitable generational change to the composition of Australia’s labour market.

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