Executives Outside Tech: AI Means Hiring Less, Not Layoffs

Summary

Executives at S&P 500 companies outside technology rarely say AI is costing jobs. Since January 2024 an executive said AI was reducing the company's headcount, or letting it hold headcount flat while the business grew, on 41 of 4,335 earnings calls, by 26 companies. That is about one call in a hundred.

It is becoming more common. Those statements were on 0.51% of calls in 2024, 1.05% in 2025 and 1.38% in 2026 so far. Counting every call where AI was named alongside job cuts, slower hiring or a leaner structure, the share went from 0.76% to 3.65%.

Most of it is hiring less, not layoffs. In 22 of the 41 calls the claim was that AI lets the company grow without adding people, and in 5 more that it replaces people who leave. Fourteen described cut roles or lower headcount. Banks, insurers and other financial companies made half of the claims, and one freight broker, C.H. Robinson, made eight.

The denials are growing almost as fast. Executives said they were not using AI to cut jobs on no call in 2024, 7 in 2025 and 13 in 2026, against 17 claims this year. Analysts asked how AI would change headcount on 1 call in 2024 and 18 in 2026.

Abstract

We read the earnings calls of the companies in the S&P 500 outside the technology sector, 4,335 calls by 403 companies held from 1 January 2024 to 23 October 2026, using the speaker-by-speaker transcripts in the Equibles earnings call archive. We searched every sentence that mentions AI for a link to jobs, headcount or hiring, and read each candidate by hand. A call counts as tying AI to headcount when an executive said AI is reducing the company's headcount or will, or that it lets the company keep headcount flat or grow it more slowly than the business. A broader count adds calls where AI is named alongside job cuts, a hiring slowdown or a flatter structure without being given as the cause. We also counted denials, where an executive said the company is not using AI to cut jobs, and analyst questions about AI and headcount.

Executives tied AI to headcount on 41 calls (0.95%) by 26 companies, rising from 0.51% of calls in 2024 to 1.38% in 2026. The broader count is 88 calls (2.03%) by 55 companies, rising from 0.76% to 3.65%. Of the 41 calls, 22 were about holding headcount flat or growing it more slowly, 5 about not replacing people who leave and 14 about cutting roles or headcount. Financial services companies made 20 of the 41 claims, on 2.58% of their calls, and five sectors made none. Denials rose from none in 2024 to 13 calls in 2026, and analyst questions about AI and headcount from 1 call to 18.

Rare, but rising

In 2024 an executive tied AI to the company's headcount on 8 of 1,576 calls. In 2026 so far it was 17 of 1,233. The jump came in the second half of 2025, when the share tripled. It held there in January to June 2026 and eased to 1.06% in July to October, with October's reporting season still under way.

The broader count rose faster. It adds calls where AI was one item in a list next to a headcount reduction, a voluntary separation program or fewer management layers. Those went from 4 calls in 2024 to 28 in 2026, as more companies put AI into the description of a cost program.

Even the broader count is small next to how often AI comes up. In July to September 2026 an executive mentioned AI on 60.5% of these calls, as our study AI Talk Has Nearly Doubled Outside Tech found. On most of them, AI is a productivity or product story, and headcount does not come up.

Mostly hiring less, not layoffs

The most common claim is that AI lets the company grow without adding people. That was the claim on 22 of the 41 calls. On 5 more, executives said AI would do the work of people who leave, so they would not be replaced. Fourteen calls described cut roles, restructuring or lower headcount with AI named as a cause.

Banks describe the attrition version most plainly. A large bank loses thousands of people a year, so hiring fewer of them shrinks the workforce without a layoff.

“And so the issue is, as we leverage that technology, including artificial intelligence and generative AI, is how can we use those tools, we will have attrition in our workforce that we won't have to replace because we have technology that can do a particular job.”

David Turner, chief financial officer, Regions Financial, earnings call, 18 July 2025

“So we're doing it through attrition. Each month we have to hire 1,300 people round numbers to stay neutral in the company, and so you can adjust the headcount by just being careful and hiring and let attrition be your friend, as we call it.”

Brian Moynihan, chief executive, Bank of America, earnings call, 15 April 2026

Moynihan said the bank was down 1,000 people that way, and that “AI gives us places to go we haven't gone.” WM's chief executive put the same idea in one line:

“That means using technology to supplement our operations and using AI, which every company is talking about these days, to replace labor that leaves us.”

Jim Fish, chief executive, WM, earnings call, 28 October 2025

Airbnb's chief financial officer listed it as the second early payoff of the company's AI spending, after lower customer service costs:

“Second, what we're seeing is that we don't need to grow our headcount at levels that we did in the past because we're getting so much more output and speed from our existing workforce, which obviously also creates efficiencies over time.”

Elinor Mertz, chief financial officer, Airbnb, earnings call, 6 August 2026

Some executives say AI only continues something older. PNC's chief executive said the bank had kept headcount roughly flat while it grew for years:

“That sort of thing continues. AI allows that to continue. Maybe it accelerates through time.”

William Demchak, chairman and chief executive, PNC, earnings call, 15 April 2026

One of the earliest statements in the sample is about call centers. In January 2024 Charles Schwab's president said AI tools for its phone, chat and branch staff would eventually mean hiring fewer of them:

“Here with thousands of phone reps that we hire each year, at some point, we likely will have the opportunity to hire less in a particular year, because we've made our reps both on the phone, on chat, and in our branches, even more effective and efficient because we're powering them with information and putting it at their fingertips.”

Rick Wurster, president, Charles Schwab, earnings call, 17 January 2024

The companies that name cuts

Fourteen calls went further and tied AI to fewer roles. The clearest statements came from an advertising group, an index provider and a hospital operator.

“There are other categories where we believe there are technologies or we're investing in them, which will allow us to eliminate certain positions that are done kind of manually today, but can be done in an automated fashion with generative AI.”

John Wren, chairman and chief executive, Omnicom, earnings call, 18 February 2026

“The key takeaway is that AI will significantly enhance our margins because it allows us to develop many new products and scale them quickly across various client segments, while also lowering costs by using AI agents instead of human resources.”

Henry Fernandez, chairman and chief executive, MSCI, earnings call, 28 October 2025

“And, you know, now we're using an AI agent to make those calls in many cases. And so, you know, in both cases, I think we're driving efficiencies. It allows us to reduce headcount.”

Steve Filton, chief financial officer, Universal Health Services, earnings call, 26 February 2026, on post-discharge follow-up calls that nurses used to make

United Airlines put a percentage on it for its headquarters managers, with a target for next year:

“We're making process-changing changes and using AI to make the work of our headquarters management team more efficient too. In fact, our management headcount is 4% lower than last year as this efficiency work continues, and we're planning to shrink another 4% in 2026.”

Michael Leskinen, chief financial officer, United Airlines, earnings call, 15 October 2025

State Street's chief executive said it in April 2024, earlier than most:

“Now the technology is at a cost level where we can simply eliminate the labor and not have, particularly for some of these repetitive kinds of tasks between machine learning and other kinds of AI that you can use to replace labor.”

Ron O'Hanley, chief executive, State Street, earnings call, 12 April 2024

When a company announces an actual layoff, AI is usually one of two reasons. Coinbase cut staff in May 2026, and its chief financial officer would not say which reason was bigger:

“So the restructuring reflects two forces acting simultaneously. It wasn't all one. It's not all the other. And it's hard to just detangle and say what is more or less. We definitely saw market headwinds. And we've definitely also seen a transition to AI native operations.”

Alesia Haas, chief financial officer, Coinbase, earnings call, 7 May 2026

Banks and a freight broker

Financial services companies made 20 of the 41 claims, on 2.58% of their calls, against 0.95% for the whole sample. Industrials made 15, and eight of those came from one company. Real estate, utilities, consumer defensive, basic materials and energy companies made none.

Seven calls by a company without a sector on Equibles are left out of the table; one of them is in the broader count.

Communication services is high on the broader count because of Verizon, which named AI among the reasons for its cost program on five calls, including the one where it reported a workforce reduction of 13,000.

C.H. Robinson (CHRW $140.15 -0.72%) tied AI to headcount on 8 of its 11 calls in the sample, more than any other company. Its executives have described the same goal since 2024, to stop headcount from rising with freight volume, and tied it to generative AI and later to AI agents that quote prices and process orders.

“I would say we have an expectation that we’re going to decouple headcount from volume growth as we go forward.”

Michael Castagnetto, president of North American Surface Transportation, C.H. Robinson, earnings call, 30 October 2024

In April 2026 its chief financial officer reported that average headcount was down 12.3% from a year earlier, and in the same remarks tied the next productivity gains to “agentic AI solutions across our quote-to-cash life cycle of an order.”

“Our average headcount was down 12.3% year-over-year in Q1 and was down 3.1% sequentially, illustrating how we continue to decouple headcount growth from volume growth and optimize our organizational structure.”

Damon Lee, chief financial officer, C.H. Robinson, earnings call, 29 April 2026

Eight companies tied AI to headcount on more than one call:

Bank of America's January 2026 statement is the most concrete claim of avoided hiring in the sample:

“We gave you some sense for this at Investor Day, today's activity in Erica in our consumer business alone is worth thousands of teammates that we don't have to have to do the great work we do for the customers.”

Brian Moynihan, chief executive, Bank of America, earnings call, 14 January 2026

The executives who say no

Denials barely existed before 2025. An executive said the company was not using AI to cut jobs, or that a fall in headcount had nothing to do with AI, on no call in 2024, 7 calls in 2025 and 13 in 2026, by 17 companies in all. This year the denials nearly match the claims, 13 against 17.

Insurers and insurance brokers, entertainment companies and BNY are among them. Some answer an analyst; others say it unprompted in prepared remarks.

“But if the underlying question was really about headcount, the strategy for us on the deployment of AI is not to have less colleagues, but to have our colleagues become more efficient and work with more clients.”

Chief executive, AIG, earnings call, 7 August 2026

“If you review the materials on page six of our financials presentation, you'll see over the last couple of years that our headcount has trended down a little bit, but that's not really anything to do with AI yet.”

Dermot McDonogh, chief financial officer, BNY, earnings call, 13 January 2026

“We don't view AI as a teammate replacement tool.”

Powell Brown, chief executive, Brown & Brown, earnings call, 27 January 2026

“AI amplifies what our storytellers can do, it doesn't replace them.”

Josh D'Amaro, chief executive, Disney, earnings call, 5 August 2026

Marsh McLennan's consulting chief went further and questioned other companies' claims:

“I think in the whole AI transformation of industry there's a lot of shenanigans going on there's a lot of people claiming AI as a driver for different changes for headcount reductions and so on what we see in our business is that the use of AI tools and agents has had a significantly positive effect on productivity.”

Nick Studer, chief executive of Oliver Wyman, Marsh McLennan, earnings call, 27 January 2026

Take-Two's chairman, asked about AI in November 2025, said the company was not using it that way:

“We are not either using this as an excuse to or frankly, seeing the opportunity to reduce headcount.”

Strauss Zelnick, chairman and chief executive, Take-Two Interactive, earnings call, 6 November 2025

Analysts ask about headcount

An analyst asked how AI would change a company's headcount or hiring on 1 call in 2024, 6 in 2025 and 18 in 2026, 25 calls by 21 companies. Several cite another company's cuts. On JPMorgan Chase's July call, an HSBC analyst pointed to Block, which had cut 40% of its workforce citing AI tools, and asked whether banks could run leaner the same way. Jamie Dimon answered with a number:

“We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people, and we have had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40%, and most of those people offer jobs elsewhere.”

Jamie Dimon, chief executive, JPMorgan Chase, earnings call, 14 July 2026

“And we're hoping you could speak to your approach or philosophy to headcount management and resourcing just in light of this new AI regime that we're all operating in.”

Steven Chubak, analyst, Wolfe Research, on Citigroup's earnings call, 14 April 2026

Some analysts are skeptical of the AI label itself:

“And we do hear a lot of companies putting an AI wrapper around things that have nothing to do with AI.”

Mike Mayo, analyst, Wells Fargo, on BNY's earnings call, 15 July 2026

BNY's chief financial officer answered that headcount, down 7% over the year, was “just an output” of the business plan rather than a target.

Methodology

Source: speaker-by-speaker transcripts of earnings calls in the Equibles earnings call archive. Only calls classified as earnings calls are counted.

Sample: the same sample as our study AI Talk Has Nearly Doubled Outside Tech. The companies in the S&P 500 at the latest index snapshot, and every earnings call they held with a transcript of at least 1,500 words from 1 January 2024 to 23 October 2026, keeping the longest transcript where a company has more than one in a quarter and excluding six calls whose transcript is stored on calls in two different quarters. We exclude the technology sector, Alphabet and Meta (internet content and information), and Amazon, Tesla and AppLovin, whose products are built around AI. That leaves 4,335 calls by 403 companies. Sectors are the company's classification on Equibles.

Candidates: every sentence by any speaker that mentions “AI”, “A.I.”, “artificial intelligence”, “generative AI”, “GenAI”, “agentic”, “LLM” or “machine learning” together with a word for staff or hiring and a word for a change in it, in the same sentence or a nearby one. We read each candidate in its turn. A second, wider pass over AI sentences that mention staff or hiring, without the change word, found further calls, and each was read the same way.

AI tied to headcount: an executive said AI is reducing the company's headcount, or will, or that AI lets the company keep headcount flat or grow it more slowly than the business, with AI named as the cause or as one of the named causes. Plans count as well as results.

Broader count: the calls above, plus calls where an executive named AI in the same passage as job cuts, a voluntary separation program, slower hiring, fewer management layers or a flatter structure without saying AI caused them.

Denials: an executive said the company is not using AI to reduce headcount, or that a fall in headcount was not driven by AI.

Analyst questions: an analyst asked how AI affects the company's headcount, hiring or staffing, read by hand.

Periods: the calendar date of the call; 2026 runs to 23 October. Each call counts once in each category, whatever the number of statements on it, and a call can be in more than one category.

Limitations

Each label is a judgment, and we made it by hand. A statement that AI is one of several reasons for a smaller workforce counts the same as one that names AI alone.

What executives say on a call is not what happens to the workforce. A company can cut jobs it later credits to AI, or use AI to avoid hiring without saying so. Statements that describe automation, digital tools or technology in general without naming AI are not counted, so some workforce effects of AI described in other words are missed. Layoffs announced in press releases, regulatory filings or investor days are counted only if executives tied them to AI on the call.

The sample is today's S&P 500 outside technology, so companies that left the index since 2024 are not in the early periods, and technology companies, where AI-related job cuts are most discussed, are excluded by design. The counts are small: one company's calls move a sector's share, and C.H. Robinson alone is a fifth of the calls tying AI to headcount. A few turns have no speaker role or merge an analyst's question with the answer; we read those in context.

Conclusion

Outside technology, S&P 500 executives seldom say AI is costing jobs. About one call in a hundred ties AI to the company's headcount, and most of those describe growing without hiring or not replacing people who leave, rather than layoffs. The share has nearly tripled since 2024, and so have the questions from analysts, while a growing number of executives go out of their way to say their headcount changes have nothing to do with AI.

Every company's earnings call transcripts on Equibles come with speaker names and roles, and the free Equibles MCP server can search a company's recent calls, so an AI agent can check what a single company has said about AI and its workforce. Our earlier study, AI Talk Has Nearly Doubled Outside Tech, counts how often the same companies put a number on what AI delivers.