I’ve led companies through every major tech disruption. AI washing is the same mistake, every time

When Sam Altman observed earlier this year that some companies are using AI as a convenient excuse for workforce cuts they may have made regardless, he wasn’t wrong. Every morning, I open my news feed to another instance of it. I’ve spent more than two decades leading enterprise technology companies through the cloud transition, the mobile revolution, and the platformization of work itself. I know what it looks like when a narrative outpaces the evidence — and this is that moment. The “transformation” story typically goes like this: AI is here, headcount is a cost, and moving fast on both is what leadership looks like. The data, however, tells an entirely different story. The fundamental misread When you measure AI’s impact at the task level rather than the job level, the picture changes completely. Anthropic’s research team recently published one of the most rigorous early attempts to measure AI’s labor market effects. They found that, even in occupations with the highest AI exposure — computer programmers, customer service representatives, and financial analysts — there has been no statistically significant increase in unemployment since ChatGPT launched. At Cornerstone, where we serve more than 140 million workers across 186 countries, our workforce intelligence platform reinforces this from a different lens. Tracking more than 55,000 distinct skills across 1.3 billion job postings and 1 billion resumes globally, our data shows positive demand growth across 15 of 16 occupational categories regardless of AI exposure level. In nearly every category, demand outpaces supply by an average of 3.2 times. These are not the signatures of a displacement crisis but signals of a talent shortage that AI is accelerating. AI is primarily eliminating tasks, not jobs. That distinction isn’t semantic — it has meaningful impact. When AI absorbs the routine synthesis work in a financial analyst’s role, their job doesn’t disappear. What remains, and what compounds in value, is