The fear is everywhere. Scroll through LinkedIn on any given day, and you will find another post about AI replacing writers, analysts, coders, and customer service teams. The question of whether artificial intelligence is coming for jobs has moved from an academic debate to dinner-table anxiety.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But is the panic warranted? Can the Agentic market actually take our jobs? In an interview, Andrew Isaacs, co-founder of agentic trading platform Neyro, talked more about what most market leaders actually think about how AI is going to influence our future.<\/p>\n
AI Won\u2019t Take Down the Job Market. It Takes Care of Itself.<\/p>\n
IBM and Salesforce estimate that more than one billion AI agents will be operational worldwide by the end of 2026 alone. But AI isn\u2019t the main job market crisis catalyst, and, actually, the opposite, it\u2019s a way out, sort of.<\/p>\n
AI hype and the Agentic market have 2 things in common:<\/p>\n
The job market downturn started during COVID cost cuts. Major tech firms woke up to the new reality. I mean, why pay for 4 office floors in NY or Silicon Valley, when they don\u2019t need to? They started to cut costs, and look where to cut even more costs.<\/p>\n
COVID added a major catalyst to the market: cheap corporate loans from the Fed. For a brief moment in time, the Federal Reserve rate reached its lowest level in more than 70 years. In 2020, the USA lowered the Fed rate for Corporate Loans to the lowest level ever at 0.25%.<\/p>\n
Source: Federal Reserve<\/p>\n
The layoffs of the past few years are usually blamed on AI. Isaac disagreed. According to him, the trend had started much earlier, long before ChatGPT entered the conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lower the rate, the cheaper the loans, the more companies take loans, and this is generally a good thing when done in moderation. Plot twist, nobody took loans in moderation,” Isaac said. “In 2019 alone, total corporate loans grew to $3T, dipped to only $2.4T, then reversed and continued to grow, and so did the FED rate.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, Where Does AI Enter the Picture?<\/p>\n
At this point, the market needed a way out of the loan circle. According to the Federal Reserve, in 2020, every S&P 500 title had some kind of loan they needed to repay, and shareholders demanded more profits.<\/p>\n
With companies already under pressure to repay cheap COVID-era loans and satisfy shareholders demanding returns, something had to give. AI walked in at exactly that moment, and it was very noticeable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn 2023, ChatGPT and similar tools gave false hope: replace some workers with AI and cut some costs. Add tariff wars and real wars on top of it, just because why not add more pressure?” Isaacs said.<\/p>\n
The co-founder added that many companies were forced to exit certain markets, change their revenue models, and adapt to sanctions, leaving them with little choice but to cut costs.<\/p>\n
Mass layoffs in top tech firms followed. Oracle, Google, Amazon, Payoneer, Intel, HP, Apple, Meta, Fiverr, xAI, Salesforce, CISCO, Peloton, according to TechCrunch\u2019s list<\/a> for 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n In total, over 100,000 layoffs were attributed to AI in 2025, and in the first six months of 2026 alone, more than 150,000 additional roles have been cut.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to him, lots of people lost jobs because companies wanted to cut costs and repay cheap COVID loans they took in a panic. “LLMs and AI were just an obvious scapegoat,” and it provided a way out for these companies.<\/p>\n Why Will Humans Remain Relevant In the AI age?<\/p>\n Few frameworks capture the lifecycle of emerging technology better than Gartner\u2019s Hype Cycle. The pattern repeats itself with remarkable consistency: a new technology arrives, people get their hopes up, place every bet on the new thing, burn out, realize it\u2019s still useful, research some more, and find an applicable solution.<\/p>\n Source: Gartner<\/p>\n Neyro\u2019s founder shared that the sentiment is currently bouncing around inflated expectations and disillusionment.<\/p>\n \u201cWith AI, we\u2019re somewhere between the peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment, where companies start to look at actually productive use for the tech,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n