π Is AI eating my lunch or not?
For the past few years the same people that brought you, "Truck Drivers need to learn to code", have started beating a new drum:
"White-collar wageys needed to head to the breadlines", because the Silicon Valley priesthood believe that they are headed for the same fate as the horse & buggy.
Master Dario and Scam Altman have both been sounding the alarm that the Machines are marching one by one (hurrah, hurrah) ... I mean, until they weren't.
Last week Ramp (the bad-a$$ credit card company) went out on a limb, ran the numbers, and looked at what companies were actually paying for.
The Silicone Valley priesthood has yet to comment.
The Deets:
β³ π§Ύ The Ramp paper: Ramp's economics lab shared its firm-level AI spending data with Revelio Labs' workforce records across 21,559 U.S. companies. Not a survey. Receipts.
β³ π The finding: Heavy AI adopters grew headcount about 10% in the two years after adoption. Entry-level headcount grew 12%. Light adopters saw nothing statistically meaningful.
β³ β³ The kicker: Gains showed up 6β12 months after adoption, and extended beyond engineering into sales, admin, finance, and customer service.
π Now For The Fine Print
β³ ποΈ The Medici rule: Faster-growing companies are still hiring people. This has been true for six centuries.
β³ βοΈ The caveat Ramp printed themselves: It's correlation, not causation. AI adopters were already bigger, faster-growing, and more technical before they touched an AI model, so it's possibly not correlated.
β³ π The other data: ADP's numbers show a ~16% employment decline for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed roles, and tech and finance are shedding ~28,000 jobs a month.
Meanwhile in the π₯ boiler room
While the mid-market quietly spends about $400 per employee per year on AI (lunch money for SMBs), the true believers have been setting their money on fire.
- Uber incentivized adoption with internal leaderboards, then watched 84% of its engineers pile into Claude Code, and torched its entire 2026 coding budget by April.
- Microsoft yanked Claude Code licenses from a division because the bills stopped making sense.
- Walmart rationed its own in-house tool.
- Accenture, having threatened employees with stalled promotions if they didn't use AI, now begs them to stop using it to turn PDFs into slides.
Somewhere, someone, at some company, reportedly ran up a $500 million bill in a single month because nobody set a cap.
Nero had a fiddle π». These people have an API key π.
πΏWhat's this mean for the rest of us?
Maybe the robots aren't taking the jobs.
They are just rent seeking the IT budget, for the Frontier AI labs.