Here is a drinking game TheWrap does not recommend: taking a swig every time “artificial intelligence” is mentioned on one of the Big Tech earnings calls this month.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to point to one example, mentioned AI 23 times on his company’s first-quarter call — you would likely be heading to the hospital by the time the hour-long Q&A session with analysts is finished.
As earnings season gets underway, it has already become a cliché to point out AI is the term-of-choice for tech execs like Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. But in the coming weeks, it will be worth listening for another term: headcount.
That’s because the corporate sentiment around what AI will be used for has steadily shifted over the last year. Companies are becoming more upfront about how it will be used to displace jobs, and not just how it will enhance what we do. And with the AI arms race only heating up, those Q&A sessions will be the best opportunity to get insight into just how fast things are moving.
These tech companies serve as the potential vanguard of the disruption other industries may face. Of the five players — Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company — only one of the companies, Apple, started this quarter with a record number of employees. And coincidentally or not, Apple has been the tech giant that has had the most difficult time building a formidable AI business — to the point where industry experts are calling on the company to use $30 billion from its cash pile to buy Perplexity.
The others have seen their headcounts decrease since 2022 and 2023, when they all hit their respective peaks.
This trend stands out when considering the tech giants made it clear this was the Year of AI Investment. Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s partner on ChatGPT, said they were spending a combined $320 billion in 2025, up 44% from last year, with the bulk of that investment going towards AI. Apple, meanwhile, said it was committing $500 billion towards AI over the next four years.
The focus on AI has led to nine-figure pay packages being offered for AI execs to jump from one tech company to the next, as Zuckerberg hinted at in his interview with The Information on Monday. Wall Street is rewarding this direction.
“We see the post as reaching out to AI talent, signaling Meta as a place for AI innovation,” said Bank of America analyst Justin Post. “We expect AI
investment to be a top focus area on the upcoming earnings call.”
This direction, however, has not resulted in more job openings for the “average” employee.
Indeed, Google spent $2.4 billion to essentially hire away key staff and license technology from AI startup Windsurf, which specializes in AI code generation. As in, replacing engineers with AI.
It’s no surprise that executives have been increasingly open about how AI is replacing high-paying jobs.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in April said up to 30% of his company’s code is now written by AI; over the next three months, his company laid off 15,000 employees.
Similarly, Zuckerberg recently said most of Meta’s code will be handled by AI by the end of 2026.
“I would guess sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll reach the point where most of the code that’s going towards these efforts is written by AI,” Zuckerberg said in April. “And I don’t mean like autocomplete … I’m talking more like you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can improve things, it can find issues, it writes higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already.”
And last month, Jassy told Amazon employees the company will soon “need fewer people doing some” jobs and “more people doing other types of jobs” due to AI.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy said.
The willingness to shed headcount does not come as the tech giants are dealing with hard times, either.
Rather, share prices are booming. Meta, Amazon and Microsoft are each trading at all-time highs, and Apple, after being rocked by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff plan, has rebounded strongly; the Cupertino, California-based company was worth $3.14 trillion at the close of business Wednesday. Alphabet, at $184 per share, is currently trading about 10% below its all-time high set back in December — which is not bad, considering Google is facing two antitrust lawsuits from the federal government.
So as the Zuckerbergs and Jassys talk about how AI is turbocharging their businesses over the next few weeks, listen for whether they mention more employees will be coming aboard as a result — or if their headcounts will continue to shrink.
