In February, Block laid off nearly half of its ten-thousand-person workforce. Jack Dorsey said AI had made a lot of those jobs unnecessary, and that within a year most companies would reach the same conclusion.

Salesforce cut about 4,000 support roles, and the CEO put it as: he needed "less heads."

Goldman Sachs started testing its first autonomous coder. And across all of last year, US companies announced over a million job cuts, with AI named directly in around 55,000 of them, mostly in customer support, content moderation, and middle management.

These weren’t small startups experimenting with AI. These were major companies across completely different industries, all moving in the same direction at almost the same time.

And the people losing those jobs were also the same people spending money in the economy. They were paying subscriptions, buying phones, ordering food, financing cars, and keeping businesses running.