What is AI providing in the drive through situation? It just feels to me like much of this is "AI" in the business buzz sense, not generative LLMs or whatever doing any kind of work. Like, we have all been struggling with call center "AI" for a long time before this, I personally have not experienced an LLM chatbot call, but plenty of things asking me "is this information correct?"

Like how would some of this even work in reality? Can you go through those drive throughs and ask it to recite a sonnet about chicken nuggets? Clearly no, but then it begs the question of what the idea, the purported advance, even is here with much of this. Like we have had relatively advanced speech recognition for a while, I don't see the added utility or need of being able to go through the drive through and saying: "the number of hotdogs I want is a prime number that is more than 2 but less than 5."

It just feels so clearly silly if you stop and think about it for two seconds. So many hammers, not enough nails... We are just banging at walls at this point.

It's a horrible tendence. The first thing I ask to such AI customer service chats is to let me speak with a real human.

Walgreens is really pushing the AI phone system these days. It lies and says it can handle most requests, which I make and it tries to pawn me off on the website. The website which I had already been to, which recommended I speak with a pharmacist. I swear by the time it’s passed my call through it sounds like exasperated when it says “Just so you know, the pharmacy is open. . . .”

> Not quite AI, but getting there, are the self checkouts slowly replacing front line cashiers, etc.

There's some AI involved at some retailers - I bought 2 identical items and the second wouldn't scan at the self checkout, so I grabbed the first item and scanned it again, and the camera-watching, object-detection system threw a fit (and played back the video of me). I had to call a human to complete my purchase. My suspicion is it is smart enough to detect that I moved an "unscanned" item from my basket item into the bagging area, but not smart enough to figure out I wasn't trying to cheat.

Yes, but when Marc Benioff says he laid off thousands of customer service agents, the reporting is "Salesforce cuts tech workers using AI." The narrative in media is a total mess right now, and there are many in VC and AI-related companies ready to help muddy the waters further for their own benefit. Obviously, many small companies follow the media narrative.

I work in the media space. AI is absolutely ripping through film, TV, and advertising.

Several medium sized studios I've talked with are bidding $50k for projects (eg. Netflix, HBO, Proctor & Gamble are typical clients) they used to bid $400k on, and they're winning more contracts. They don't need to shoot in person in Venice for pharma ads or animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.

This is having a huge impact to the fundamentals of how they do business. They haven't laid anyone off yet, but they're talking about the ramifications if this gets cheaper.

Self checkout in supermarkets apparently is quite a rocky thing, some chains see profits go down after implementing them. The potential for catastrophic mistakes in LLMs is very high, like ordering 3000 big macs.

Sure in the case of 3000 big macs it would be caught by the buyer or the cooks, but ordering 6 instead of 3 will not. This will cause complaints, complaints need more people to handle, etc.

I once called a hotel. A suspiciously regular voice answered. I asked if it was a machine. It said yes, it's [AI marketing bullshit here]. I asked if it had a room. It said no, because it's [AI BS] and doesn't need a physical presence such as a room. I hung up and called another hotel.

A lot of the applications listed don't need humans and probably don't even need "AI" either. At least not beyond speech to text.

When my Xbox 360 hit the red ring of death, I called in to Microsoft support and went through the flow to replace it with just pre-recorded responses and speech to text. This was in 2007.

> Less customer service employees at call centers, replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems.

Is this actually worse than being on hold forever to talk to someone following a script?

> Some fast food places are replacing employees with an AI drive through.

What, as in it transcribes your order with Whisper and tries to upsell you through ChatGPT? One more reason I'm glad not to have a car-centric lifestyle, I guess. The kiosks inside the store might be vibe-coded now but at least I get a traditional UI that lets me specify things directly (even if the kitchen staff will ignore most requested customizations).

> replaced by lengthy, egregiously pedantic AI systems.

Don't forget hallucinating too.

I don't think AI is actively laying people off by replacing entire roles, but I think it is preventing hires that would have happened. In terms of employment figures, this can have a similar effect.

I'm in a small growing tech company and I can say as a matter of fact that in a world without AI we would have made several hires in the past 18 months. Because of LLMs and agents my team doesn't have the need to bring more people in. It's as simple as that.

Marc Benioff at Salesforce is saying exactly this

And Brian Armstrong at Coinbase

The overwhelming majority of AI pilot projects at companies fail. They're trying to replace people but overwhelmingly can't.

> What company wants to be the lightning rod who comes out and says, "we laid off a bunch of people and replaced with AI"?

Isn't that precisely what all publicly traded companies want to say, and are often saying? I feel like I read a new headline of some sociopathic CEO bragging about how many people he managed to lay off thanks to AI every day.

We'll put that link in the top text too. Thanks!

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121342 - Sept 2025 (313 comments)

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052423 - Aug 2025 (629 comments)

>Maybe it hasn’t come for jobs that are not entry level yet.

You don't layoff what you don't hire, so ou can argue it "hasn't affected the job market" if hiring freezes are just that. Not growing, but not really declining either.

> The AI hype seems to be a smokescreen for mass layoffs from the CoVid era

This. Better to tell markets "we can now downsize our workforce due to incredible efficiencies achieved by our AI initiative" than "we hired too many people, grew slower than expected and now we're making cuts"

A little tinfoil birdie told me that even the Covid era itself (and the resultant mass layoffs during, mass hiring following, and mass layoffs following that) were a smokescreen for (bond?) market instability. I personally tend to think that both were more of a, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," situation.

Market hiccups? Use a pandemic panic to justify printing a ton of money.

Printed too much money? Distribute it to the "right" people through a hiring frenzy, personnel you totally need in order to build a metaverse or whatever.

Money ran out + overleveraging during the boom + market changes caused by the rapid socioeconomic shifts (e.g., commercial real estate tanking)? You can cover the bottom line for now with a lot of firing and consolidation, say it's AI's fault.

One way I had it explained to me (may be different now).. H-1B's are often a way of getting willing candidates who are overqualified to work tons of extra hours for years compared to other options.

There is very clearly tacit collusion by managers of firms in the software production segment of economy.

And why not? It benefits them. I get it. But lets be real about it.

Covid overhiring was quite a while ago, surely it has been long corrected?

Salesforce's weak quarterly revenue forecast signals lagging AI monetization - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r... - September 3rd, 2025

> Salesforce forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, signaling lagging monetization for its highly-touted artificial intelligence agent platform as clients dial back spending due to macroeconomic uncertainty.

> The cloud software provider also announced a $20 billion increase to its existing share buyback program, but that was unable to allay investors' concerns, sending Salesforce's shares down over 5% in extended trading.

Salesforce revenue growth has decelerated from ~24% in FY 2021 to just over 8% for the trailing 12 months.

A company that was tuned to double revenue in 3 years transforming in one expecting to double in 9 years is definitely carrying too many people. It made sense for them to reduce headcount to align with their much slower growth curve.

Side note: Benioff also said earlier this year that they were done hiring programmers because AI. I'll let their careers page put the lie to that.

4k jobs across the economy is far less than random variation in the stats.

Salesforce reduced their headcount in 2023 by 8-10%. Another reduction by 5% attributed solely to AI could be a half truth and the reality could simply be Salesforce driving an efficiency agenda.

Personally, I believe it will take a few more years for systems to be built. Once those systems are in place, then headcount reductions are going to come fast and wide. Or putting it simply think of it as exponential growth. Currently AI job displacements are small, but it's growing, and will continue accelerating in its growth.

Salesforce just gave weak guidance. "Company that doesn't expect to do so well lays people off" is a pretty standard story, and one might be forgiven for thinking that "Company that expects magic robots to do everything lays people off" is, in this case, more marketing than anything else.

I wouldn't necessarily pay that much attention to what the CEO _says_.

shame, because what he really needed was fewer heads

Expecting the Fed to know anything about AI would be like asking your pet dog to express his opinions on astrophysics.

They very specifically say inflation is not "under control" which is why they have not lowered interest rates recently. It was almost under control until Trumpty Dumpty started his corrupt monkey wrenching with tariffs.

The same people who didn't see the financial crisis of 2008.

You're absolutely right about the HN bias, but we're also a crowd with a lot of experience in some of the jobs supposedly being replaced and with the tools supposedly replacing us, and it's a little hard to buy.

The data about new grads not being hired isn't lying, but if AI is to blame we should be seeing a flood of data and stories on how roles X, Y and Z were obliterated by AI. But I have yet to see a single solid example, so I find it hard to believe it's a massive shift.

If anything, I would expect AI to be replacing older, expensive workers with young, tech-savvy workers who can put the AI to use. But that is clearly not the case.

Well, this one isn't that rosy

> The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.

can you share some of the evidence showing that AI has caused job loss? I haven't seen any

At least in western Europe it doesn’t look like ai is taking over anything. Maybe in the US it is different

It has done something - caused a tremendous amount of expenditures with negative returns for claimholders of firms pursuing AI (so far) :)