The year 2025 made economic history not as a year of crisis, but as a moment of great reconfiguration. According to a recent report by RationalFX, the technology sector has eliminated almost 245,000 jobs worldwide during this time. These figures, while alarming at first glance, represent only the facade of a deeper process: a sustained shift from a scale-based employment model to one driven by artificial intelligence-driven efficiency.
Today, at the beginning of 2026, the key question for business leaders is no longer ‘how many people have gone out of business’, but ‘where is the capital that has been freed up by this transformation being invested’.
The balance of the “Great Reset”
Analysis of moves by giants such as Intel, which cut staff from 109,000 to 75,000 employees, and Amazon, eliminating more than 20,000 positions, indicates a move away from the ‘redundancy’ strategy that prevailed in the cheap money era. As RationalFX analyst Alan Cohen notes, last year’s cuts were different from previous waves of layoffs. They were not a short-term cost adjustment, but a permanent structural adjustment.
Companies have stopped treating job cuts as a defensive reflex to high interest rates. Instead, they treated them as offensive groundwork for ‘AI-native’ organisations. In this context, 2025 was the end of IT as we knew it – a sector where success was measured by the number of engineers. 2026 becomes the dawn of the era of integrated IT, where value is generated by a symbiosis of human strategy and machine execution.
Anatomy of a fallen position
The hardest hit were the departments that for years formed the operational ‘body’ of the corporation: customer service, administration and human resources. Salesforce’s decision to reduce its support staff by 4,000 people or the massive cutbacks in data processing areas at IBM and HP are clear signals – roles involving manual data translation and repetitive interactions have been permanently taken over by autonomous agents.
It is worth noting, however, that this elimination of roles has not always gone hand in hand with immediate success. The industry is currently facing a so-called ‘productivity gap’. Companies have got rid of old structures, but are still learning how to manage new ones. It is in this gap – between the potential of technology and its real implementation – that the new staffing needs for 2026 are born.
New bastions of growth: the competence of tomorrow
Although the RationalFX report suggests that the wave of redundancies may continue until the end of the first quarter of 2026, in parallel we are seeing the emergence of new competence centres. So where are the jobs being created?
1 Orchestration and Governance AI: The massive deployment of automation at companies like Accenture (11,000 redundancies with a gigantic commitment to AI) is creating a demand for governance experts. It is no longer about programming algorithms, but about ethical and operational orchestration – ensuring systems are secure, compliant with regulations and consistent with company strategy.
2 Value engineering and performance ‘recovery’: The market is looking for professionals who can fill the gap that Alan Cohen mentions. Companies need people capable of translating the raw power of AI into real margins. This is a new category of business-technology consultants who understand processes more deeply than old-school coders.
3 Transformational systems architecture: The example of HP, integrating AI across all operations, shows that hardware and software are no longer separate entities. There is a growing need for architects who can design entire ecosystems of hybrid (people-machine) work.
Survival strategies: the BT model versus shock therapy
An interesting reference point is the UK’s BT, which has chosen a strategy of a ‘steady pace’ of job cuts until 2030. This approach stands in contrast to the aggressive, one-off cuts in the US (which have concentrated nearly 70% of global redundancies).
There is a lesson here for business leaders: rapid downsizing, as in the case of Intel, allows for a quick financial reset, but carries the risk of losing intellectual capital. In contrast, an evolutionary model, based on reskilling (as at Tata Consultancy Services), preserves the domain knowledge needed to properly ‘feed’ AI models with data about the company’s processes.
A new profile for the IT worker
The year 2026 will not be a time of massive returns to old recruitment patterns. The IT job market is not shrinking in value terms, it is undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis. The place of the ‘task contractor’ is being taken by the ‘solution architect’.
The 245,000 redundancies are a tragic event on a micro level, but on a macro level it is a huge release of talent. For smaller players and startups, 2026 is an opportunity to recruit Big Tech experts who have hitherto been out of their financial reach. It is a time of democratisation of competencies that could result in a new wave of innovation, as long as business learns from the painful lessons of the past year.
