For much of the past year, the loudest voices in tech warned that AI was coming for the workforce, The Wall Street Journal reported July 5.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May 2025 that AI could wipe out half of entry-level jobs. Ford CEO Jim Farley predicted AI would replace half of white-collar workers in the U.S. That tone has shifted.
According to the publication, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told CNBC that the industry had underestimated how much it would be able to “keep people at the center of everything.” Mr. Amodei has since pointed to more optimistic scenarios for companies that adopt AI well, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy have both talked up AI’s job creating potential, even as their companies cut thousands of positions.
A May survey by EY-Parthenon found the share of CEOs who expect AI to cause significant headcount reductions fell from about 46% in January 2025 to 20% this May, per the Journal.
Health system CIOs speaking to Becker’s have told a more consistent story throughout, and it looks a lot like where Big Tech has landed: augmentation over replacement, with real caveats about which roles are exposed.
Lisa Stump, executive vice president and chief digital information officer of New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System, told Becker’s in June that her health system is using AI to expand IT capacity “without expanding headcount at the same rate,” pairing that with a larger hiring pool created by big tech layoffs.
Mouneer Odeh, chief data and artificial intelligence officer of Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai, told Becker’s in June that healthcare AI’s “second wave” is less about productivity gains and more about restructuring how work gets done.
“It’s changing the way we work and as a result, changing the jobs that we have,” he said.
Will Landry, senior vice president and CIO of Baton Rouge, La.-based FMOL Health, said in March that he doesn’t “think mass job replacement in healthcare is likely,” though he expects duties to shift from “back end” to “front end,” with more focus on patient experience and human connection. Reid Stephan, senior vice president and CIO of Boise, Idaho-based St. Luke’s Health System, pushed back on the popular idea that “AI won’t take your job, someone using AI will,” calling it the wrong mental model. Rather than simply making existing workers more productive, he said, AI is reshaping the systems those jobs sit inside, shifting where humans add the most value toward “care, judgment, and patient relationships.”
So far, healthcare has largely been spared the AI-linked layoffs hitting other sectors. Challenger, Gray & Christmas attributed 40% of the roughly 97,000 U.S. job cuts announced in May to AI, concentrated in tech. Healthcare job cuts were up 17% year over year through May, but hospitals and health systems have mostly pointed to state and federal funding reductions, not AI, as the driver.
Separate research covered by The Washington Post in March found healthcare has largely avoided AI driven job cuts to date, based on an analysis of task level AI exposure across more than 350 occupations.
Where Big Tech’s messaging has swung from doomsday predictions to reassurance in the space of about a year, healthcare’s IT leadership has held a steadier position: AI is already touching coding, documentation, scheduling and parts of diagnostics, hiring is shifting toward AI literate and cloud skilled staff, and most CIOs describe the goal as doing more with the same headcount rather than doing the same with less.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ai/big-tech-softens-its-ai-jobs-warning-health-system-cios-were-already-there/
