Large American companies are resuming hiring, and the expectation that AI will replace jobs is reversing

According to the Wall Street Journal, after nearly a year of freezing hiring, several large companies in the United States have begun to rehire, with railway giant CSX and Google's parent company Alphabet recently indicating plans to recruit to support growth targets or seize emerging technology opportunities. Over the past year and a half, large employers have generally reduced white-collar positions, partly due to economic uncertainty and partly based on the judgment that reducing staff can lead to faster growth and that AI can take on more work. However, some executives now state that the costs and limitations of AI actually require an increase in personnel.

The report states that Booz Allen's Chief Operating Officer Kristine Martin Anderson indicated that the company needs to accelerate hiring, as it cut thousands of positions last year amid a contraction in federal contracts, with a total headcount of about 30,900 as of June 30, a year-on-year decrease of 7.5%. Sarah Franklin, CEO of the HR platform Lattice, stated that many companies had paused hiring for junior positions due to expectations that AI would take over jobs, but now realize that even with programming agents, they still need to hire engineers and are currently re-hiring a large number of junior positions. At the same time, layoffs in the U.S. have slowed, with initial jobless claims recently dropping to the lowest level since 1969.