Post #4865527 · Elektrine

@CaptDust@sh.itjust.works

2026-09-20 00:16 UTC

Wouldn’t replacing employees with AI actually be catastrophic for businesses? Say I’m a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. Suppose the agents cost roughly $80k, where an employee costs $100k. I take that deal because it saves real money and replace, say, 500 employees with agents. Now let’s assume just for the sake of argument that these AI agents do exactly as promised and truly do replace those workers and all of their responsibilities. Things seem great, I decreased my costs a lot and my business is buzzing along. Now anthropic comes to me and says they’re going to increase their prices to $100k/agent. What now? Since you’re trading individual employees for a company that’s providing the service at a cost, it’s effectively like these agents are unionized, in a way. They ask for a raise and you don’t comply? Okay fine. No work for you. Nothing you can say or do will get these agents back Not only that, anthropic can leverage the absolutely insane amount of data they have to squeeze you for everything you’re worth. They probably have actuaries on staff who can figure out the maximum possible amount they can charge you before you leave. Going to a competitor is easier said than done. There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure with AI that needs to be changed and adjusted to make it work. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So maybe, you go to a competitor and it’s back to 80k/year, but now, code has a 10% higher error rate and you start losing money idk. it just seems like this desire to get rid of labor entirely can only backfire. This is one way, but there are so many others too. Duplicated from source: reddit.com/…/wouldnt_using_replacing_employees_wi…

Replies (6)

@hackzag@feddit.it 2026-09-20 01:03

Also, you are destroying the market: these 500 people will not afford to buy your products anymore and AI will not replace them as customers. Multiply that for every company in the planet: who is going to buy anything anymore?

Open ##4865526
@OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 2026-09-20 05:49

Not thinking big or evil enough. You’re a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. You accept and let them train models on your processes. They launch a company and put you out of business. End of story.

Open ##4869283
@JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 2026-09-20 05:55

Some other scenarios to consider: AI company decides to up the profit by switching your agents to a cheaper, worse model behind the scenes while keeping your costs the same AI company deciding that your business is plenty lucrative and now that you’ve onboarded their agents and they know your day to day, what do they need you for? You’re just a shell around their agents. So they cancel the contract, create their own competing business and poach all your customers. the interesting bit is, 90%+ of ai revenues come from a few big companies, not regular Joes. And i think ai is a way for some companies to just extract every drop of values from other companies, now that people are squeezed dry. So companies turning on each other, which might be fun to watch. It’s the logical next step in capitalism, if you run out of peopleto cheat and rent seek from, there’s plenty of easy corporate victims. Sure at firsst it’s, smaller mom and pop stuff, but no reason not to do it for bigger companies, might even have less overhead. And ai is perfect for that.

Open ##4869404
@phx@lemmy.world 2026-09-20 06:38

I’ve tried to make the same argument understood with cloud services and vendor lock-in generally. It’s crazy how companies find a few percent pay increase for employees onerous, but are perfectly willing to give the life-blood of their services to a vendor who can arbitrarily raise prices down the road. Lots of companies are seeing this already with Broadcom and VMWare

Open ##4871047
@Strider@lemmy.world 2026-09-20 07:04

Who cares about future issues. I’ve got my golden parachute until then!

Open ##4871820
@Lysergid@lemmy.ml 2026-09-20 08:26

You go bankrupt, AI company buys you and all your competitors. Other AI companies do the same. Each product includes AI costs like other raw materials. All costs passed down to consumers (which have no money to buy shit coz they were replaced by AI). AI companies just trade between each other in walled gardens. Business is fine. People are screwed.

Open ##4875756