Here’s what that 18,000 number really means: companies just proved they can hit their targets without those people. That’s the experiment. It worked. Now they’re going to run it again, closer to you.
Amazon didn’t stop at the first 18,000. They’ve stacked more than 70,000 cuts since 2022, a big chunk justified by “efficiency” from automation and A.I. IBM told investors flat out that A.I. would replace about 9,000 roles. Reports say over 150,000 jobs disappeared in the first seven months of 2025 because of A.I‑driven restructuring. None of those decks said “we hate employees.” They all said the same thing: we can do more with fewer.
That’s the game you’re inside.
Everybody loves to believe this is a “Big Tech cycle” problem. It’s not. It’s a skill problem. It’s a “can you produce founder‑level output with an A.I. stack, or are you just another cost center” problem.
Look at your last sprint, or the last week at your agency. How much of what you shipped was some version of: rewrite this, adapt that, tweak this template, build another dashboard, send similar replies to 50 users, refactor predictable code? That’s exactly the layer founders are feeding to A.I. assistants and lightweight automation.
One sharp operator with A.I. can now cover what used to be three mid‑level roles. If you’re one of those three, the math is ugly. The only question is whether you’re the person running the tools… or the one quietly replaced by them.
If you’re a founder, this shows up as a different kind of pressure. Investors and clients don’t say “fire people for A.I.” They say “shorten timelines” and “improve margins” and “get more done with the same team.” But in practice, that means less headcount, more A.I., and a couple of people on your team who actually know how to drive it.
If you’re mid‑level in SaaS, you’re in the “optimization zone.” Juniors are cheap; seniors own strategy and relationships. The easiest cuts sit right in the middle: people managing work that A.I. can chew through if someone bothers to wire it up.
And let’s be honest: “I sometimes use ChatGPT” won’t save you. That’s like saying you’re safe because you know how to search Google. Everyone does. The people that survive this wave are the ones who turn A.I. into leverage, not a novelty tab: they draft in hours, not days; they automate grunt work instead of asking for another coordinator; they show up with finished options, not vague ideas.
Those 18,000 are not a warning from the future. They’re proof from the present that optional people get removed first. The only thing left to figure out is which side of that line you’re standing on.