Bezos says get ready for talent shortages, not mass AI layoffs

AI skills have overtaken all other capabilities to become the hardest for employers to find globally, according to ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey of nearly 40,000 employers across 41 countries. For the first time, AI model development and AI literacy lead the global ranking of hard-to-fill roles – ahead of traditional engineering and IT. The global talent shortage, at 72 per cent of employers reporting difficulty filling roles, remains near historic highs.

At the same time, AI has been cited in 87,714 US job cut announcements since January – already exceeding the 54,836 AI-attributed cuts across all of 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In May, AI was the stated reason for 40 per cent of all announced positions eliminated, up from 7 per cent in January.

Yet a Gartner survey of 321 customer service leaders found that only 20 per cent had actually reduced staffing because of AI, despite it being cited across tens of thousands of public layoff announcements. Forrester has warned that up to half of AI-attributed cuts may be quietly reversed as organisations discover the technology cannot yet substitute for the human judgment they removed.

The talent war is already here

Whatever the macro outcome over the next decade, the war for AI-capable talent has arrived – and Prometheus is Exhibit A. The company has recruited from OpenAI, xAI, Meta, DeepMind, and Nvidia, with senior AI researcher compensation regularly exceeding $5 million per year. When asked whether he would personally make soup to attract a hire – a reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s now-famous recruitment gesture toward an OpenAI engineer – Bezos was unambiguous: “If they want me to make soup for them, I will. That request has not been made.”

Bajaj pitched the company’s appeal in terms that will be familiar to any HR leader trying to retain technical talent: “deep empathy for the unsung heroes who are engineers that really build the world around us.”