Adecco’s CEO says AI is changing jobs, not destroying them

Denis Machuel runs the world’s largest staffing company, which makes his read on the labour market worth pausing over. This week the Adecco Group chief executive offered it plainly: artificial intelligence is remaking work, but it is not about to empty the offices.

“AI is bringing a massive evolution in the world of work, but a job apocalypse is not on the horizon,” Machuel told Reuters.

The reassurance lands in a year that has felt anything but calm, with tech layoffs mounting and a lengthening list of employers naming AI as the culprit. His case rests less on optimism than on a shortage of evidence that anything catastrophic is happening.

Nearly three and a half years after ChatGPT arrived, employment rates across the OECD’s 38 member countries sit near record highs and joblessness remains close to historic lows, according to the group’s own figures.

Even as AI reshapes desk work, the aggregate numbers have refused to buckle.

Previous upheavals, Machuel noted, followed a similar pattern. Steam, electricity, computing, and the internet each rewired work without producing the mass unemployment their critics forecast.

“It’s more about changing roles and tasks than eliminating jobs,” he said. “With the data we have so far, there’s no evidence we will have a different scenario with AI.”

The burden, in his telling, falls on employers to redesign roles so the technology augments people rather than displaces them, which is a slower and less headline-friendly project than a round of cuts.

The claim is not that nothing is changing. Machuel acknowledged that some entry-level positions are disappearing even as new AI-native roles surface elsewhere, and he warned employers that hollowing out junior jobs to save money now will starve the talent pipeline later.

Companies that stop hiring and training graduates, on his reading, are borrowing against their own future supply of managers and specialists.

There is a quieter accusation folded into his remarks, too. Some companies, he suggested, are using AI as a convenient cover for cuts driven by weaker performance or ordinary restructuring, dressing up plain belt-tightening as technological inevitability.

That framing matters most for the graduates arriving into a market where the bottom rungs are thinning.

The numbers give both sides something to hold. Employers blamed AI for nearly 25% of US job cuts this year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which has flagged the technology as a leading stated reason for redundancies for months.

By its count, AI has already been cited in more American layoffs in 2026 than in all of 2025. Microsoft has trimmed around 2.1% of its workforce, and HSBC, Amazon, and Standard Chartered have all made reductions of their own.

What that tally does not settle is cause. A job cut attributed to AI in a press release is not the same as a job destroyed by AI, and Machuel’s point is that the staffing market, where Adecco places hundreds of thousands of workers across dozens of countries, has not yet cracked the way the apocalyptic framing implies.

The redundancies are real, in other words, but so far they read as churn and restructuring rather than a structural break in the demand for people.

A degree of self-interest is worth naming. Adecco sells human labour for a living, and its own strategy leans hard on the technology it is playing down, with the company aiming for agentic AI to cover more than half of revenues by the end of 2026.

Investors have not been fully soothed either; the shares fell sharply last November on questions about that roadmap and the dividend.

For now, the labour data is on Machuel’s side, even where the layoff headlines are not. The open question is not whether AI changes work, which it plainly is doing, but whether the executives writing the redundancy memos are describing the future or simply blaming it.