Push to replace workers with AI faces backlash — even from management

Workers across the org chart appear nearly unified on one critical workplace topic of the day: AI should not replace them or their colleagues.

Companies that are considering shedding employees in favor of AI agents will encounter resistance, not just from the workers at risk of reduction but their managers as well, according to a new survey.

That’s because a large majority of executives, managers, and front-line employees prefer to work with other humans, with only 9% saying they would like to replace their entire workforce with AI tools, according to the survey from IT training provider Udacity. Seven out of every 10 respondents to the survey are in management positions.

CIOs and other executives planning to replace workers with AI should expect broad pushback, says Victoria Papalian, COO at Udacity. Respondents recognized the institutional knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking capabilities humans bring to the table, she adds.

“There’s a lot of narrative out there around workers being displaced because of AI coming in and taking over what they had historically been doing,” she says. “But in this research, we definitely saw that there’s still a bias towards the human, not even human in the loop, but human as a knowledge base and an area of expertise. There’s still discomfort with AI replacing that type of human role in an organization.”

The limits of AI

Respondents gave several reasons for preferring human workers to AI bots, with 62% saying AI can’t create the new products and services their customers will want in the future. Another 53% say their customers prefer to work with humans, and 49% say they’re worried about security and privacy when using AI.

Because models are trained on past human knowledge, AI agents face significant limitations when it comes to creating innovative new products, Papalian says.

“There is no data set for something for a model to be trained on yet,” she adds. “AI can’t reference anything because it is just new to market, and the other element is those products and services that customers will want.”

Human workers provide perspective AI still cannot, adds Eric Kingsley, partner at Kingsley Szamet Employment Lawyers. Most savvy companies aren’t trying to replace human workers with AI; instead they are cautiously adopting the technology as they navigate legal, compliance, and reputational issues, he says.

“Employees use judgment, discretion, and create workplace culture, which AI is simply incapable of replicating,” Kingsley adds. “Employers also understand that once they start to replace employees with AI, they also increase their potential legal liability in the event that the remaining employees become overworked, misclassified, or unfairly managed within the new AI environment.”

There also seems to be growing concern about the long-term effects of replacing entry-level workers with AI tools, adds Dimitri Boylan, CEO at HR SaaS provider Avature. If companies dramatically cut back on entry-level hiring, the pipeline to veteran employees will be interrupted, some critics worry.

A recent survey from Avature found that 76% of HR practitioners are at least moderately concerned that AI will reduce entry-level hiring. “They understand that their organization develops its workforce by hiring more people at a junior level and then training and filtering so that they develop this mid-level and the senior levels of the organization,” Boylan says.

“Our customers run internal mobility programs, performance management, and learning programs. They understand that those activities are based on the hiring pyramid, and they see the pyramid potentially going away.”

Mega layoffs

The surveys from Udacity and Avature come after a year of massive layoffs, with many reportedly connected to AI. Personal finance and trading education platform RationalFX counted 245,000 tech sector layoffs in 2025, with about 70,000, or 28.5%, tied to AI adoption and automation.

RationalFX found another 30,700 layoffs in the tech sector in the first six weeks of 2026, with about 4.7% tied to AI.

Some observers predict that a large-scale replacement of human workers with AI tools is just getting started.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, predicts that most tasks in white-collar jobs will be automated by AI in the near future.

“White-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” he says.

AI advances, including recently released legal, finance, and marketing plugins for Claude Cowork, will “result in the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs,” adds Andrew Yang, CEO at Noble Mobile and a former US presidential candidate.

A new automation wave will result in the layoffs of millions of white-collar works in the next 18 months, Yang wrote on LinkedIn.

“As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit,” he predicts. “It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. Millions of workers are about to be given their pink slips.”

Too much fear?

Udacity’s Papalian believes the narrative of AI replacing jobs may be overblown, with some reports of the phenomenon hiding other company motives or missing a rehiring trend.

“There is research out there that companies are saying or claiming to be displacing workers because of AI, when actually that’s a guise for something else,” she says. “Or those who have attempted to displace workers because of AI are actually potentially hiring those folks back because they weren’t ready for AI to take over elements of their workforce.”

After some early regrets over replacing workers with AI, many companies are recognizing the value of human workers, sometimes working alongside AI, Papalian adds.

“Leaders continue to recognize where humans are valuable and irreplaceable,” she says. “Their impact multiplies when they’re equipped with knowledge on all of these technologies. Being properly upskilled with respect to different AI technologies, plus all of these uniquely human qualities, is the most powerful combination for a worker.”

Like Papalian, Dan Turchin, CEO of AI-based IT and HR platform provider PeopleReign, doesn’t see a large-scale replacement of human workers with AI. The AI revolution will require that people rethink how they work with machines — and will reshape the kinds of jobs that are available — just as has happened during past industrial and technological advances, but human employees will still be valuable, he says.

Some recent layoffs tied to AI were related to other factors, he says. For example, when package delivery giant UPS recently announced plans for 30,000 job cuts, part of the reasoning was increased automation, but the company is also winding down a partnership with Amazon.

“Humans aren’t going away,” says Turchin, also host of the Future of Work podcast. “Things like empathy and rational judgment and emotional support, the ability to coach each other, these are parts of the human condition that we don’t want to automate. I think employers are increasingly starting to realize that and communicate that.”

In the near term, there may be some upheaval in the job market as the roles for human workers change with the adoption of AI, he acknowledges. “There is a very real delay in hiring because the productivity improvements that we’re getting oftentimes with AI mean that you need fewer of the same role to produce the same level of output,” he says.

But over the longer term, AI will create more economic opportunities, he adds. “Right now, we’re in kind of this process of figuring out what those new jobs are, the new roles, how much are we delaying hiring plans, things like that,” he says. “But over time, it’s clear that organizations will grow because they need more humans with amazing ideas, inspiring people, and building the things that society needs.”