The Light and Shadow of AI-Driven Efficiency
The Era When IT Companies Reduce People the Most
Reports that Amazon will cut up to 30,000 jobs through AI utilization are attracting attention.
The company is advancing business automation through AI and restructuring its organization to be smaller and more agile. This is positioned not as mere layoffs but as “organizational redesign for the AI era.”
This movement isn’t limited to Amazon alone.
Major IT companies worldwide are experiencing successive personnel reductions as a result of AI-driven efficiency improvements.
Successive AI-Driven Personnel Reductions Worldwide
Microsoft: In May 2025, reduced approximately 3% of its global workforce (about 6,000 people). The purpose was to concentrate resources on AI investment and streamline the organization.
Tata Consultancy Services (India): The world’s largest IT outsourcing company implemented a reduction of approximately 12,000 people. The background includes automation of code testing and support operations through AI.
Autodesk: The major design software company reduced 1,350 people, about 9% of all employees. This is a “structural reform” to accelerate AI utilization and transition to cloud models.
Meta, Intel, and others: Over 100,000 reductions have been confirmed in 2025 alone , all citing “AI transformation, not economic recession” as the reason.
These reductions indicate not mere responses to poor performance, but that work itself is being redefined through AI.
In other words, it’s not about “reducing people,” but rather “transforming into a new organizational structure premised on AI.”
Can Japanese Companies Do the Same?
What I want to consider here is whether Japanese companies can achieve similar efficiency.
In my view, it will be difficult for Japan.
Japanese companies have a deeply rooted culture of treating employees “like family,” and they tend to choose to “share pain with everyone” rather than rational restructuring.
In other words, they tend to consider personnel reductions only when facing a crisis.
However, this is “life extension measures,” not “efficiency”.
While overseas companies are transforming their very structures using AI, Japan ends up focusing on cost reduction for crisis avoidance.
Japan’s Structure of “Unrecoverable” IT Investments
This difference lies in the essence of IT investment.
In overseas companies, IT investment outcomes have a structure that clearly leads to investment recovery in the form of “business efficiency → personnel reduction → profit improvement.”
On the other hand, what about Japan?
Even though “DX promotion” and “tool implementation” appear to be advancing, there are many cases where only operational costs increase without producing results.
Many companies are satisfied with “having implemented tools themselves,” losing the “creative ingenuity” part of utilization design and restructuring.
The “Creative Ingenuity” Japanese Companies Should Reclaim
Japan’s strength in the world once came from the power to maximize results through ingenuity with limited resources.
That was “the mindset to optimize systems,” not “imitating other companies.”
What Japan needs now is not an AI implementation race like overseas, but structural redesign tailored to each company.
Not implementing tools, but how to leverage them and connect them to results.
Here lies the hint for reclaiming the strength that was once characteristic of Japan.
Conclusion
The productivity improvements generated by AI are certainly attractive.
However, “for whom” and “for what purpose” are they being done?
As long as companies continue implementing tools without having answers to these questions, Japan’s IT investments will only continue to pile up without being recovered.