Believe it or not, companies are hiring again

American workers are scared that AI is going to replace them. Now they’ve got both another reason to worry—and some positive hedge against that angst.

Visa said today that it plans to cut roughly 2,600 jobs (7% of its workforce) mostly across its tech and product teams, as part of a broader restructuring. The payments giant says it wants to slim down after tripling its headcount over the past decade and redirect spending toward faster-growing areas like cross-border payments, stablecoins, and international expansion.

AI, of course, is a big part of Visa’s reasoning. “To capture the opportunities ahead and best position Visa to lead this transformation, we must continue evolving how we work,” CEO Ryan McInerney wrote in his company memo. “AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.”

The cuts spread

The headlines certainly paint a bleak picture of the labor market, as company after company seemingly turns to AI to do jobs once belonging to human beings—and nowhere is that more prevalent than in the tech sector. Last Friday, the Financial Times calculated that tech companies have canned just under 140,000 employees since the beginning of this year.

Some of the heaviest hitters on the market account for the lion’s share of those cuts: Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have combined to fire some 50,000 workers in 2026, even as capex climbs and they throw money at AI advances. More recent cuts have come from smaller firms, like cloud-based work platform Monday.com, which announced last Wednesday that it’s laying off 20% of its workforce as part of its “AI-driven growth strategy.”

Don’t panic yet

It’s no wonder, then, that consumer confidence fell again in July, while perceptions of the job market weakened for a third straight month, according to The Conference Board.

But things may not be as bad as you think.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that weekly initial jobless claims recently fell to their lowest level since 1969, and that many companies are hiring again after discovering that cutting workers isn’t a substitute for growth. Increasingly, employers want people who can work with AI, not simply be replaced by it: AI sales agents still need salespeople to close deals. Coding agents still need engineers to review and refine their work. And customer-service bots still need humans to step in when conversations go off the rails.

Tech companies like Alphabet are walking back their all-in-on-AI rhetoric, while blue-collar hiring is picking up, too. Companies from toolmaker Snap-on to railroad operator CSX are expanding their workforces; signs of a stronger and more resilient economy.

So if you’ve been doomscrolling layoff headlines and mindlessly refreshing the LinkedIn careers page, here’s to giving your F5 key a well-deserved break.—SY