Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, is letting 17 percent of its staff go, roughly 3,000 people, to "reduce complexity" and refocus on AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi delivered the news in an internal memo seen by Reuters; the company has not said whether executives will take pay cuts to match, though TechCrunch noted Goodarzi's own 2025 compensation came to $36.8 million. Intuit joins a long, growing list. The tech industry has shed more than 100,000 jobs in 2026 already, on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025, with Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle all making large cuts and all citing AI as the reason. The other half of that story, less often quoted, is what new Bureau of Labor Statistics data and a recent Gartner report say about whether the strategy is actually working.
The BLS update, summarised by Futurism, looked at the 18 occupations the bureau itself had flagged in 2024 as potentially exposed to AI. Between May 2024 and May 2025, the total number of workers in those roles fell by 0.2 percent. That is small, and inside the noise of normal labour-market churn, but a few categories were stark: sales representatives, for instance, fell 4.8 percent. It is one of the first concrete data points suggesting AI exposure correlates, weakly but visibly, with employment decline in the specific occupations economists had predicted. Whether that 0.2 percent is the leading edge of something larger or a one-year blip is the question economists are now arguing about.
Sitting next to the BLS data is Gartner's recent finding that 80 percent of executives admit to cutting headcount specifically to redirect spend into AI, and that, in Gartner's own framing, these moves are "not paying off in any significant way." The same research firm finds businesses tend to get more measurable gains from giving existing staff AI tools than from replacing them. Intuit's own market context fits awkwardly into this picture. The company reported $4.65 billion in revenue last quarter, up 17 percent, with profits up 48 percent. Its share price has nonetheless underperformed the S&P 500 because investors do not yet count it among the AI winners. The 3,000 cuts are, among other things, a signal to the market that Intuit intends to be re-rated.
That signalling dimension is what makes 2026's wave of AI-justified layoffs unusual. Companies announcing them are typically reporting strong revenue, strong margins, and rising share prices on the back of investor enthusiasm for AI. The cuts are not, in the classic sense, distressed restructuring. They are forward-looking bets that smaller, more AI-enabled organisations will be worth more later, even if the immediate productivity gains are, on Gartner's evidence, marginal. The companies in question can afford to be patient. The roughly 3,000 Intuit employees, and the thousands more let go elsewhere this year, cannot.
One open question is whether the narrative will hold up if the productivity gains fail to materialise on the schedule investors are pricing in. A separate concern, voiced by 71 percent of Americans in a recent survey cited by Futurism, is that the gains will materialise too well, with AI displacing workers faster than new jobs emerge. Both worries can be true at once. Gartner's data suggests today's cuts are running ahead of today's AI capabilities; Barclays and others modelling humanoid robotics out to 2035 (covered separately in today's issue) argue tomorrow's cuts may run behind them. Intuit's 3,000 employees sit between those two timelines. Their layoffs are happening now, on the strength of an argument about productivity that the data, so far, does not quite support.