“They don’t go on strike.” CEO cuts 27 of 30 student workers on sales team and replaces them with AI.

Elijah Clark, a CEO who advises companies on AI implementation, has publicly celebrated firing employees and replacing them with artificial intelligence, telling Gizmodo he’s “extremely excited” about laying off 27 of 30 student workers on his sales team. His candid enthusiasm reflects a broader corporate trend where executives are increasingly transparent about their intentions to displace human workers with AI technology, despite mixed results and potential long-term consequences.

What they’re saying: Clark’s comments reveal the cold calculus behind AI adoption decisions among business leaders.

• “AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise,” Clark explained. “These things that you don’t have to deal with as a CEO.”
• “I am hired by CEOs to figure out how to use AI to cut jobs,” he added. “Not in ten years. Right now.”
• Clark claimed his reduced team now gets “done in less than a day, less than an hour what they were taking a week to produce.”

The big picture: Corporate America is rapidly embracing AI as a workforce reduction tool, with some companies planning significant headcount cuts regardless of technology’s actual effectiveness.

• Tech startups are advertising AI “sales agents” with billboards reading “Stop Hiring Humans” in major cities like San Francisco and New York.
• AI company CEOs including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have warned their technology will displace millions of workers.
• Peter Miscovich of JLL, a real estate firm, reports that “20 percent of the Fortune 500 in 2025 has less headcount than they had in 2015.”

Why this matters: The rush to replace human workers may be premature, as current AI technology remains fundamentally limited and prone to significant errors.

• AI chatbots continue to fabricate information and break their own safety guardrails, while autonomous AI agents remain slow and restricted in capabilities.
• Companies don’t need perfect AI—they can fire workers and force remaining employees to use AI tools while checking for mistakes, effectively increasing workloads.

When AI replacement backfires: Some high-profile AI adoption efforts have already resulted in costly reversals and customer dissatisfaction.

• Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Swedish buy-now-pay-later company Klarna, initially boasted that AI could “do all the jobs that we as humans do” after replacing customer service teams with AI agents.
• Customers quickly lost patience with the AI bots, and Klarna’s first-quarter losses doubled compared to the previous year.
• “Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor,” Siemiatkowski admitted, acknowledging “lower quality” results.

The bottom line: Companies that have already eliminated large portions of their workforce may struggle to reverse course, as Klarna discovered after cutting 40 percent of its employees—a percentage many Fortune 500 companies are reportedly targeting for reductions.