Despite the rampant doomsday rhetoric that artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to the disappearance of a large number of jobs, so far there is little evidence to suggest that AI is causing massive unemployment in the telecommunications or other industries.

The latest example is Telstra, an Australian telecommunications company. According to reports, the company plans to significantly lay off employees due to its shift towards AI, sparking a lot of speculation.

But the reality is that Telstra has only cut 550 positions in its struggling corporate division. A spokesperson explained to Reuters that the layoffs are a “reset” of the company’s business and have nothing to do with AI.

We can see that the entire telecommunications industry is striving to reduce the number of employees, but this is mainly driven by operational expenditure management and restructuring, rather than AI transformation. For example, AT&T and Verizon cut 15000 jobs last year, but no one believed that these layoffs were directly caused by AI.

From a broader perspective, the number of layoffs in the United States has reached its highest level in five years, but a new survey has found that AI is not the culprit. Recruiting company Challenger, Gray&Christmas stated in its latest report that the main factors are government spending cuts and tariffs. The company can only confirm that 75 positions have disappeared directly due to AI.

Andrew Challenger, Senior Vice President of the company, stated in an interview with NBC News that “some positions may indeed undergo significant changes due to AI, but not many HR leaders I have spoken with have indicated that AI is replacing job positions. ”

This is not to say that the AI job tsunami has not accelerated unconsciously, but it is currently difficult to directly find jobs that have disappeared due to AI.

This is in stark contrast to grand claims, such as AI being able to bring a profit margin of 80% to 90%. The literature on the impact of AI on employment is almost entirely composed of absurd confident predictions rather than actual events.

But the widespread expectation of large-scale layoffs has become a convenient tool for companies looking to downsize. This includes Telstra, which announced a layoff plan in its new five-year AI driven strategic plan.

More notably, Allison Kirkby, CEO of British Telecom (BT), directly linked large-scale layoffs to AI. She told the Financial Times last month that her predecessor’s plan to cut up to 45000 jobs by 2030 “does not reflect the full potential of AI. In fact, she believes that AI may help to lay off approximately 10000 more positions before the end of this decade.

AI as a job evaporator may not have arrived yet, but the era of AI as a scapegoat has truly arrived.