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Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009’s Great Recession. The data comes from Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires were announcedthe lowest total on record for January. According to the data, that means layoffs are up a staggering 118% from the same period a year ago, and 205% from December 2025. Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January, Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for the firm, said in the report. It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026. The most hard-hit sectors for layoffs are transportation, technology, and health care industries. According to a Reuters report, 31,243 planned cuts came from United Parcel Service (UPS). UPS plans to close 24 facilities in 2026, as part of a major restructuring effort. On the tech side, 22,291 tech job cuts, most came from Amazon, as the company announced plans to lay off 16,000 corporate employees. Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythmwhere we announce broad reductions every few months, wrote Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, in an announcement last week. Thats not our plan. But just as we always have, every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate. Meanwhile, the healthcare sector has been battling as a result of federal funding cuts with 17,107 job cuts announced in January, making it the largest cut since April 2020. Healthcare providers and hospital systems are grappling with inflation and high labor costs, Challenger said. Lower reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare are also hitting hospital systems. These pressures are leading to job cuts, as well as other cutting measures, such as some pay and benefits. Its very difficult for leaders of these companies to tighten budgets while not sacrificing patient care. Additionally, the Labor Department reported that job openings are down to the lowest rate since September 2020, as vacancies fell to 6.5 million in December.Of course, many have been quick to blame AI for a surging number of layoffs. But some experts say that it has more to do with current economic conditions, and that AI could be being used as a mere scapegoat. In a post on BlueSky responding to the new data, CNBC journalist Carl Quintanilla shared a quote attributed to market researcher Renaissance Macro Research (RENMAC), referencing the Challenger report and explaining the real reasons behind the downslide: …While there is quite a bit of attention on AI driving layoffs, most of the reasons cited in this data set are about closing, economic conditions, restructuring, and loss of contract. AI is a comparatively small factor behind the January jump in layoff news. That aligns with data from entities like the Brookings Institution and Yale University, which found that sectors (including ones especially susceptible to AI) havent seen drastic changes in the amount of available jobs since ChatGPT debuted in 2022. Still, other experts continue to believe that AI’s toll on the job market will be crushing. We are at the beginning of a multi-decade progress development that will have a major impact on the labor market, said Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, a workforce research firm, told CNBC last year. Theres probably much more in the tank, he said.
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E-Commerce
Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me,” and upload a photo of themself, and, voila! ChatGPT (or any AI-image platform) spits out an over-the-top, cartoon-style image of you, your job, and anything else it’s learned about you. This ability is predicated on a robust ChatGPT (or other AI) chat history. Those who don’t have a close, personal relationship with the AI might need to give additional information to get a more accurate depiction. But notably, that’s yet another instance of potential AI privacy concerns. It’s not the first AI image trend. Other social media challenges have had users posting themselves as AI-generated cartoons, Renaissance paintings, or fantasy characters. AIs image capabilities have gone in a few different directions. Some of them, like with this trend, or the meme-ification of Sora, are seemingly harmless fun. However, Sora has started to see issues with bad-faith individuals being able to create AI deepfakes (see also: Grok porn). Meanwhile, even as the trend continues to rise, more than 13,000 ChatGPT users reported issues on Thursday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
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E-Commerce
Tech workers have been worried for years about the AI tidal wave coming for their jobs, but their bosses are starting to worry too. Stocks plunged this week as fears escalated that AI advancements will take a bite out of business for many software and services companies. The market losses are tied to updates to Anthropics AI-powered workplace productivity suite, Claude Cowork, which threatens to replace some software tools ubiquitous in the professional world. Companies with business in research and legal software like Thomson Reuters and LegalZoom dropped dramatically on the Anthropic news, with a wide swath of software stocks following suit. Intuit, PayPal, Equifax all dropped by over 10%, with enterprise software companies like Atlassian and Salesforce deepening their own losses, which started well before the latest AI news. The S&P North American software index also slid further this week, worsening a recent losing streak punctuated by a 15% decline in January the indexs worst month in nearly two decades. Unlike Claude Code, a coding tool designed for developers, Anthropic built Claude Cowork as a powerful, general purpose AI agent for non-coders. Available to Anthropics $100-per-month premium subscribers, Claude Cowork can knock out easier tasks like searching, collecting and organizing files, but its also capable of taking on much bigger challenges like making slide decks, producing reports and pulling and synthesizing information from other business software tools, like Zendesk and Microsoft Teams. Claudes ability to execute complex tasks with dedicated software sub-agents prompted plenty of nervous jokes about humans being replaced by C-suites full of AI. And that was before a new Anthropic update introduced powerful new plugins designed to automate tasks across domains like finance, legal, sales, data, marketing, and customer support. The market is still digesting those new agentic AI capabilities, which could pose an existential threat to the software-as-a-service companies that undergird big chunks of the economy. Fears of a zero sum software game grow Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has made his own ominous predictions about AI displacing human workers. Last year, Amodei predicted that AI could vaporize half of entry-level white collar roles, sending unemployment as high as 20% within five years. He pointed to losses in industries like tech, law, consulting and finance, specifically. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told Axios. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.” Not everyone deeply invested in AI agrees. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang swatted away worries that AI would eat the traditional software industry after the stock bloodbath that began on Tuesday. “There’s this notion that the tool in the software industry is in decline, and will be replaced by AI, Huang said, emphasizing that relying on existing software tools makes more sense than reinventing the wheel. It is the most illogical thing in the world, and time will prove itself.
Category:
E-Commerce
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