The news: CrowdStrike and Chegg lay off hundreds, and AI is partially to blame.

CrowdStrike is cutting 5% of its workforce, or about 500 employees.

• CEO George Kurtz cited AI efficiencies as one reason for the cuts. Other reasons include an expanding product lineup.
• “We’re operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs,” he said, per The Guardian.

Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence, called the cuts “pretty tone deaf” after CrowdStrike’s massive outage last year that cost Fortune 500 companies an estimated $5 billion.

Chegg is laying off about 22% of its employees, or 248 people.

• Cuts will be centered on Chegg Study and corporate services.
• Q1 revenues were down 30% YoY, and the company says Google’s AI Overviews and student-focused offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic are part of the problem.

The edtech company offers exam prep tools, plagiarism checks, and homework help for $19.95 per month. Considering the free generative (genAI) tools available to help students with those things—and the fact that students are cheating their way through college, per New York Magazine—it’s no surprise that Chegg is struggling.

The trend: Companies, and even the federal government, are relying on AI to take the place of humans.

• Shopify and Duolingo stated that they are now AI-first companies and will only invest in human workers if there’s proof that AI can’t do the job.
• The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which laid off 3,500 employees in sweeping Trump administration cuts, is adding genAI tools to speed up regulatory processes, per BioSpace.

Tectonic shift: Despite the numerous job cuts blamed on AI, the technology is expected to create 170 million jobs while eliminating 92 million by 2030. That’s a net gain of 78 million, per the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.

Our take: Workers need to continuously evolve their skill sets as AI becomes more prominent to stay relevant in the workplace. It’s an “adapt or be left behind” environment, and as college graduates who have used genAI throughout their schooling enter the workforce, they could displace those who haven’t kept up.

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