In 2024, Klarna announced its AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The company projected $40 million in savings. One year later, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg the result was “lower quality.” Klarna started bringing human staff back.
Around the same time, IBM made a notable shift. After CEO Arvind Krishna projected in 2023 that roughly 7,800 back-office positions would be eliminated by AI, the company announced in February 2026 that it was tripling entry-level hiring for software developers, cybersecurity specialists, AI engineers and HR professionals. IBM’s net US headcount stayed roughly flat. The company was adding roles in some areas and restructuring others. But the decision to invest heavily in new talent marked a different direction from the original AI-replacement message.
Amazon cut 30,000 positions. Block cut 4,000. UPS cut 20,000. The layoffs grabbed headlines for months. But the story that followed got far less attention.
Workforce analytics firm Orgvue surveyed over 1,000 senior leaders and found that 55% of businesses that cut staff for AI admitted they made wrong decisions. The knowledge that left with those employees was hard to replace. AI systems needed more human oversight than expected. Customer satisfaction suffered.
Forrester Research predicts that half of all AI-attributed layoffs will be quietly reversed, with many of those positions returning at lower wages or offshore. Analyst J.P. Gownder describes a growing pattern he calls “AI washing,” where companies label standard cost cuts as AI transformation to appear forward-thinking to investors and shareholders.
So what does all of this mean for someone choosing or changing a career right now?
That question is at the center of what WiseOrbits does. WiseOrbits is a career guidance platform built by psychologists, career experts and professionals with years of hands-on experience in AI and automation. The career test uses the Big Five personality model to match people with careers that fit their personality and have a strong long-term outlook. But the part that sets it apart is how it handles job security. Every career in the WiseOrbits database includes automation risk ratings, salary data, education paths and hiring trends, all based on what’s happening in the market right now.
When Klarna began rehiring human customer service staff, WiseOrbits adjusted the relevant career profiles to reflect that those roles were proving more resilient than expected. When California and the EU introduced regulations requiring human workers in certain industries, those career profiles changed too. The database doesn’t stay frozen in 2023 assumptions. It moves with the data.
92 million jobs displaced, 170 million created
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030, with 170 million new ones created. That’s a net gain of 78 million positions. Postal clerks, bank tellers and data entry workers are declining. Big data specialists, AI engineers and nursing professionals are growing. Graphic designers and legal secretaries appeared on the decline list for the first time, pushed down by generative AI tools that can now handle parts of their work.
The new jobs look nothing like the old ones. They require different training, pay different salaries and exist in different places. Someone who trained for a declining role five years ago may find that their skills don’t transfer easily to the roles that are growing. And someone just starting their career may be training for a job that won’t exist by the time they finish.
This is where personality-career matching becomes practical. Two people with different personality profiles will thrive in very different careers. A person who scores high in openness and low in conscientiousness will have a completely different set of strong matches than someone with the opposite profile. Recommending the same careers to both people makes no sense, yet most career advice does exactly that. It groups people by interest or education and ignores the personality differences that determine whether someone will actually enjoy the work long term. WiseOrbits maps those differences across its full career database and only recommends roles where both the personality fit and the job outlook are strong.
The Big Five model behind the assessment has strong research backing. A 2023 study reported in Scientific American found it approximately twice as accurate as the MBTI in predicting job satisfaction and career outcomes. Adding MBTI data to Big Five results added zero predictive value.
Reading the signals
Gartner found that 80% of customer service leaders did not reduce headcount after deploying AI, choosing to use the technology to handle more volume rather than replace people. Forrester expects half of AI layoffs to be reversed. Orgvue found that 55% of companies that made AI-related cuts regret the decision.
Across every major workforce research firm, the findings point in a similar direction: many companies that replaced workers with AI are now dealing with unexpected consequences.
For anyone making a career decision in 2026, the job market is more complex than a single headline can capture. Some careers are shrinking. Others are growing. And the ones that seemed most at risk from AI are, in some cases, bouncing back after companies learned that full automation didn’t deliver what they expected.
The people who will come out of this period in the strongest position are the ones who looked at real data before making their move. Not the panicked headlines, not the hype, not the predictions from CEOs with a product to sell. The actual numbers from Orgvue, Forrester, Gartner and the World Economic Forum tell a more balanced story than the one most people have been hearing.
WiseOrbits tracks all of this across its career database and updates its job security ratings as new data comes in. Each career match includes salary ranges, education requirements and a clear explanation of why that career fits the user’s personality. Paid plans add detailed career profiles, step-by-step interview preparation guides and workplace stress management resources. The updated assessment launches soon, with early access registration open at wiseorbits.com.
