The role AI played in job losses at Australia’s NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian is far from clear – but it may prove to have more impact on the stock market than the jobs market
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In 1987, the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Solow remarked: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” At the time, computers had been around for 40 years. Real productivity gains did emerge in the 1990s after the arrival of the internet, but they were short-lived.
Four years after the launch of ChatGPT, the pattern seems to be much the same: lots of hype and excitement but with very little productivity growth. The main economic impacts, as in the 1990s dotcom era, have been a stock market boom and huge investment in infrastructure (fibre optics then, datacentres today), betting on future demand that has yet to emerge.
Still, the announcement of large-scale job losses at NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian, some of them explicitly blamed on AI, raises the question of whether the job apocalypse is finally here. The evidence suggests otherwise.
NAB has specifically denied that AI played a role in its decision, and there is no reason to disbelieve this. The NAB sackings seem to be business as usual for the bank which, since 2010, has announced a mass sacking in most years, sometimes more than one. Yet its total employment numbers have remained unchanged, even though many employees have quit or retired.
Quite simply, NAB’s business model, like that of other banks and big employers, is to hire employees when it needs them and sack them whenever it is profitable to do so. That’s capitalism after all, but it’s a far cry from the days when big employers like banks gave and expected loyalty in dealing with their workers.
Qantas has invoked AI but only, I would argue, to muddy the waters. The decision to outsource 850 jobs to India is consistent with the airline’s longstanding strategy of doing over Australian workers while claiming preferential treatment due to being a national flag carrier.
The claim by Qantas that the jobs will eventually be replaced by AI complicates reporting of what is in reality a simple case of offshoring, but if anything it weakens the Qantas case. If the jobs are going to be automated anyway, why go to the trouble of sacking existing staff ahead of time and setting up a new operation overseas? Let’s hope that members of the Australian political class give this some thought as they enjoy the hospitality of the Chairman’s Lounge.
Canva looks more vulnerable. The firm operates on a “software as a service” model, charging monthly annual subscriptions for access to easily usable graphics design software. This has been a highly successful model for users who don’t want to struggle with more powerful but complex packages. Now, however, anyone who wants, for example, a poster advertising an event, can do so in seconds, specifying the style, colour scheme and so on. The result may be recognisable as “AI slop” but many people will settle for that.
Atlassian’s business model is also under challenge, but its software offerings will be harder to replicate with the use of AI. Atlassian’s applications focus on project management and organisation-wide data. Piecemeal use of AI by individual workers is unlikely to replace these functions. It’s possible that AI will enable the reverse engineering of software packages, but this remains to be seen.
Finally, it’s worth observing that the AI hyperscalers themselves, firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, along with Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Alphabet (Google), aren’t safe. Cheap “open-weight” models such as DeepSeek (China) and Mistral (France) are running only a year or so behind the leaders, while investing a small fraction of the money. It’s entirely possible that LLMs (large language models) will become like email, an essential part of life for many people but not a source of profit. If that’s the case, we are more likely to see an apocalypse in the stock market than in the jobs market.
John Quiggin is a professor at the University of Queensland’s school of economics