There is now a growing chorus of voices that is pushing back against the AI job loss narrative.
Entrepreneur and former Google exec David Friedberg made his skepticism plain on a recent episode of the All In podcast. “There is no job loss with AI,” he said. “I will say it again. I’ve said it a thousand times and I will say it again and again and again.”
His argument centres on a distinction that tends to get lost in the discourse: the difference between the cost side and the revenue side of a business. “There are two sides to a business — there’s revenue and there’s costs. On the cost side of the equation, AI can be used to reduce humans doing things that cost money to some extent. The effect there, I would argue, is nominal.”
The real story, in Friedberg’s view, is what AI does for output. “The real opportunity with AI is on the revenue side, where suddenly one engineer can do a hundred times or a thousand times what they used to be able to do, meaning you can make more products at your company, whether those are agricultural seed products or boats and ships or software for companies or clothing or what have you. Because of AI, everyone has the ability to expand their revenue base, to create more products, and that is the foundation of good economic prosperity.”
He boils it down to a single word: productivity. “We can grow productivity in this country with AI. Where I see AI being used is on the revenue side, a hundred times more than the cost side.”
And at the company level, that’s translating into headcount growth, not cuts. “In that equation, people are hiring like crazy. We cannot hire enough people. I just had a review meeting with my product and engineering team two days ago. They said they want to add an extra 15 headcount to our engineering squads because we have all this opportunity to do stuff that we couldn’t otherwise do. We are going to hire more people. We are seeing that show up in the jobs numbers.”
For Friedberg, the job-destruction narrative has been durable but wrong, and the evidence is now piling up against it. “The idea that AI is going to destroy jobs is a Luddite idea that is being disproven every single day. I see it on the ground. It is only a matter of time before people wake up to this and they realise that this narrative that they’ve all been sold is a crock of s**t.”
Friedberg is not alone in making this case, and the data is starting to back it up. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has made a near-identical argument — that when a single engineer can generate dramatically more output, the incentive for companies is to hire more engineers, not fewer. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has echoed the point, arguing that while AI may trim certain back-office functions, it simultaneously frees firms to expand in higher-value areas.
The productivity angle is central to all of these arguments, and it maps onto what recent Anthropic research has found: workers across income levels are reporting significant productivity gains from AI, with management and engineering roles leading the way but lower-income roles not far behind.
There are counterpoints worth taking seriously. Salesforce announced it would not hire software engineers in 2025, citing a 30% improvement in engineering productivity from AI — a case where efficiency gains went toward margin rather than headcount. And early-career hiring has declined across several markets, though research from the LSE suggests remote work is a larger driver of that trend than AI.
What Friedberg’s argument captures well is the asymmetry between the two effects: cost-reduction through AI is a one-time compression, while revenue expansion through AI is compounding. A company that uses AI to cut its support team by 20% books a one-time saving. A company that uses AI to ship three times the product lines is in a different business entirely. That’s the bet companies operating on the revenue-side logic are making, and if hiring at Friedberg’s own firm is any indication, it’s a bet that demands more people, not fewer.