[Job Market Alert] AI Isn't Killing Jobs. Here's What's Really Happening.

Over the last 20 years, we've built two $100M+ companies and made hundreds of mistakes along the way. Everything we do runs on our GTM Operating System frameworks. We even wrote a book called MOVE — which became a WSJ best-selling book on go-to-market, quoted by Geoffrey Moore (author of the iconic Crossing the Chasm).

Our mission: help 100,000 businesses run on GTM OS to build profitable companies. We're at about 3,000 now so we have a long way to go.

We also run the GTMarketplace — connecting CEOs with 100+ certified fractional CMOs, CROs, and ops leaders all over the world who know the GTM Operating System.

With that intro, let's get moving!

Oracle cut 21,000 people while spending $50 billion on AI infrastructure.

GitLab cut hundreds of jobs. Grew 23%.

Google Cloud cut go-to-market and IT teams. Revenue grew 63%.

97,000 tech layoffs in May alone. Thousands more in June. Every week, another headline: AI is destroying jobs. The market is collapsing. Your role is next.

Except in that same month, 69,000 new tech jobs were added. Tech unemployment dropped to 3.1%. And there are still over 600,000 open roles sitting unfilled right now.

So what’s actually going on?

PWC analyzed over 1 billion job postings.

Their conclusion: companies that are hiring are outgrowing the companies that are cutting. 52% headcount growth observed vs. 36%. That's not my opinion. That's the data.

So why are the layoffs happening?

Here's what the research actually shows: 40% of the so-called "AI layoffs" have nothing to do with AI. They're right-sizing from the over-hiring boom of 2021 and 2022. Companies hired like crazy during the good times. Now they're cleaning house. And AI is a convenient excuse.

Oracle didn't cut 21,000 people because AI replaced them. They cut 21,000 people because they over hired — and AI gave them cover.

GitLab cut aggressively, then grew 23%. They didn't shrink because of AI. They were bloated before AI arrived.

I was sitting in a CEO roundtable last week. One CEO asked me: "Should I cut more of my go-to-market team and make them do more with AI?"

Before I could answer, another CEO jumped in: "We just hired four senior executives from our competitors."

I analyzed which businesses and jobs are growing and worth considering, and here is the video.

PWC breaks it down into what they call professionalized and democratized roles. Here's what that actually means.

Track 1 — Professionalized Roles
These are jobs where AI amplifies human expertise. AI handles the routine. You handle the judgment.

Examples: the radiologist who uses AI to diagnose faster but still makes the call. The recruiter who uses AI to source candidates but still has to read people. The go-to-market strategist who uses AI to analyze markets but still has to build a plan that works — and put their name on it.

These roles are seeing 2x job growth and 42% faster salary growth. Meta just hired AI talent at $45 million in salary, stock, and options. That's not a headline anomaly. That's the direction of the market.

Track 2 — Democratized Roles
These are jobs where AI makes the task easy enough for anyone to do. Less expertise required. More commoditized.

Examples: IT service managers doing ticket routing. Medical secretaries doing documentation. SDRs following AI-generated scripts. Marketers executing playbooks they didn't design.

These roles are seeing slower growth, flatter wages, and in some cases, elimination.

Here's the part that keeps me up at night.

PWC found over 2.4 million entry-level roles in the US alone — and those roles are now seven times more likely to require senior-level skills.

Read that again. Entry-level jobs. Requiring senior skills. That's not a hiring bar being raised. That's a category disappearing.

Junior roles — SDRs, coordinators, junior marketers — are declining. Senior roles, executives, fractional leaders, operators with 10 to 20 years of judgment built up, are growing 35% since 2021.

If you have that experience and you're not monetizing it at the level you should be — that's not an AI problem. That's a positioning problem.

Some of the fractional go-to-market leaders in our network are making half a million to a million dollars a year. Not because AI hasn't touched their work. But because they bring the thing AI can't replicate: judgment under pressure, pattern recognition from real failures, and the credibility that comes from having done it before.

Stop cutting to look efficient.

I’ve seen this movie. Short-term, your board loves it. Long-term, you’ve cut the people who knew how to grow. And you’re left with a lean team that doesn’t know where to go.

The CEO in my roundtable who’s hiring from competitors is playing a different game. While everyone else is slashing headcount, she’s quietly grabbing the best talent in her market. Talent that’s available precisely because her competitors panicked.

The talent grab is happening right now. The question is whether you’re doing the grabbing or getting grabbed from.

If you’re a GTM leader worried about your job:

Upskilling is real, but not the kind you’re thinking about. The skills that protect you aren’t technical. They’re judgment, creativity, and leadership.

If your work is mostly execution, that’s the exposure. If your work is mostly strategy and decision-making, you’re in the professionalized track. Stay there. Get better at it.

And if you’re an individual contributor spending hours on AI prompts at midnight, AI won’t take your job. But someone who knows how to use AI and lead will.

Partner with that person. Or become that person.

love,
sangram

p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more strategies like this, follow along at runongtmos.com — and let's get moving.