Most tech CEOs say the same thing when someone asks about AI and jobs: productivity will go up, new roles will be created, society always adapts.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber (NYSE:UBER), isn't doing that.

In a recent interview on The Diary of a CEO (1), when host Steven Bartlett raised the dissonance between what tech leaders say publicly about AI and what they admit behind closed doors, the Uber chief executive didn't push back. He agreed and went further.

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Khosrowshahi said he's heard private conversations among executives about the "sheer amount of disruption" they expect from AI, then watched those same people appear on CNBC or at Davos and tell audiences everything would work out fine.

"I understand the incentive," Khosrowshahi said, noting that being too candid about job displacement could spook investors and fundraising.

Khosrowshahi didn't soften his own numbers. He estimated that AI will be able to replace the work that 70 to 80% of humans do, with intellectual jobs falling within 10 years and physical roles like driving, logistics and robotics within 15 to 20. He's not speaking hypothetically about his own workforce, either. Uber has 9.5 million drivers and couriers on its platform, the largest flexible labor network in the world. Khosrowshahi acknowledged that the majority of those trips will eventually be fulfilled by autonomous vehicles and when asked what those 9 million people do next, said: "I don't know."

The early data is already stacking up.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut roughly 4,000 jobs in February — nearly 40% of his company's workforce — in one of the largest AI-attributed layoffs in tech history (2). Dorsey didn't dress it up: AI tools, he said, have "fundamentally changed what it means to build and run a company."

He's far from alone. Atlassian slashed 1,600 roles citing the "AI era" (3). Meta is reportedly planning cuts of up to 20%, potentially more than 15,000 workers, partly to offset massive AI infrastructure spending, though the company has called the reporting speculative (4).

Crypto.com, eBay, Pinterest and even law firm Baker McKenzie have all pointed to AI in recent reduction announcements (2, 5). The numbers at the macro level are hard to wave away. In 2025, companies cited AI in 55,000 job cuts, 12 times the figure from just two years prior, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (6). Another 12,000 AI-linked cuts have already been announced in 2026. And Goldman Sachs Research puts the baseline displacement estimate at 6 to 7% of the entire U.S. workforce if AI is widely adopted (7), with young tech workers between 20 and 30 already seeing unemployment climb by roughly 3 percentage points (8).

Some economists remain skeptical. Oxford Economics has suggested that certain companies are using AI as cover, "dressing up layoffs as a good news story" rather than admitting to post-pandemic overcorrection. That's probably true in some cases. But even the skeptics aren't arguing that AI isn't transforming the labor market. They're arguing about how fast.

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But even Khosrowshahi's timeline might be too generous.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, pushing unemployment as high as 10 to 20% (9).

Prominent AI investor Kai-Fu Lee has called similar predictions of 50% displacement by 2027 "uncannily accurate" (10). An MIT study found that 11.7% of U.S. jobs could be automated using AI that exists right now — not some future version of the technology (11).

The World Economic Forum's latest projections land somewhere in the middle: 92 million jobs displaced globally by 2030, offset by an estimated 170 million new ones (12). But that optimistic math depends on retraining programs that, so far, don't exist at scale in any country. Khosrowshahi made this point himself — and added that the universal basic income experiments conducted so far have produced worse outcomes for recipients, not better.

Goldman's own data tells a similar story. A recent survey of the firm's investment bankers found that while only 11% of clients were currently cutting staff because of AI, expected headcount reductions over the next three years were rising fast enough that "AI impacts on the U.S. labor market could arrive sooner than expected" (13).

Khosrowshahi connected the threat to something personal. Watching his father lose everything after fleeing Iran's revolution, and with it his sense of purpose, left a mark. Jobs aren't just paychecks, Khosrowshahi argued. They're how people know they matter. Strip that away at scale, without a clear replacement, and you're not just looking at an economic problem — you're looking at a crisis of identity.

Asked what he'd tell his four kids about surviving an AI-dominated future, his answer was disarmingly simple: "Work hard. You're going to be fine."

Between the lines, even he doesn't seem fully convinced. He just doesn't have a better answer. And unlike most of his peers, he's willing to say so out loud.

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We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.

The Diary of a CEO (1); CBS News (2); CNBC (3, 4, 5, 8); Challenger, Gray & Christmas (6); Goldman Sachs Research (7); Axios (9); Fortune (10, 13); MIT (11); World Economic Forum (12)

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