Work

AI doesn't only replace jobs. It also stops new ones from being created.

One of those makes headlines. The other doesn't.

You may feel it yourself: AI makes you more productive, you handle work that used to need two people. Your company sees it too. At the next growth step it posts fewer openings than it would have without AI. Those jobs that never appear are the invisible side of the AI wave.

The visible side is well documented. Allianz Partners, the Allianz subsidiary, is cutting call-centre jobs in several countries because an AI assistant takes over the calls. The German insurer Ergo is shedding jobs spread over several years, and its HR board member names AI explicitly as one driver. Axel Springer cut production and administrative jobs at Bild and Welt; CEO Mathias Döpfner had already declared AI an existential question for journalism.

These jobs get talked about. They have names, they have severance plans, they have headlines, often also the promise of retraining. But they are only part of the picture.

The other side is Klarna. The company kept growing but froze hiring. Anyone who left was not replaced. No mass layoff, no public outrage, and yet a much smaller workforce. What is interesting about Klarna is not the jobs that were cut. It is the jobs that would have come with the growth in an AI-free world and simply aren’t there. You can’t count those jobs. They show up in no layoff statistic. Nobody mourns them, because nobody ever had them.

The Austrian labour market shows exactly the pattern this mechanism predicts: the number of vacancies falls while unemployment rises. How much of that is AI and how much is the economic cycle can’t be cleanly separated. That is in the nature of the thing: a job that was never posted leaves no evidence.

Politics responds to the visible damage. To the severance plan, to the layoff, to the insolvency. There is no answer to the job that was never posted, because there is no one to address. Whoever never got the chance to apply doesn’t enter the statistics of the losers, but stays in the statistics of expectation.

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In depth

Who communicates openly, and who doesn't

Three examples from 2025 and 2026 in which companies named AI explicitly as a driver of job cuts.

Allianz Partners, November 2025: Allianz's travel and assistance subsidiary is cutting 1,500 to 1,800 call-centre jobs over 12 to 18 months, mainly in France, Spain and the UK. The reason is an AI assistant that, according to the company, can run hundreds of conversations at once in more than 20 languages; around 200,000 calls come in every day. A company spokesperson told Handelsblatt: "It is unavoidable that our business will change in this new reality."

Ergo (a Munich Re subsidiary), February 2026: In a Handelsblatt interview, HR board member Lena Lindemann announced plans to cut around 1,000 jobs in Germany by the end of 2030, roughly 200 a year. She names AI explicitly as one of the drivers; the affected work is simple and repetitive, in phone service and claims processing. No compulsory redundancies, about 500 reskilling places.

Axel Springer, February 2023: Mathias Döpfner in an internal memo: "Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than ever before - or simply to replace it." The result: job cuts at Bild and Welt in production, layout, proofreading and administration, with a savings target of around 100 million euros over three years. Reporters and specialist editors explicitly exempted.

Klarna as a case study in phantom growth

Klarna is the best-known case of a company whose business kept growing while its headcount shrank. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg in December 2024: "We stopped hiring about a year ago. We were 4,500, now we're 3,500." A 22 percent reduction, almost entirely through normal attrition.

In May 2025 Klarna started hiring customer-service staff again, because the AI solution had quality problems. At its lowest, headcount was still about 40 percent below the pre-AI peak. The reversal shows that the promise of "AI replaces people completely" is often made faster than it is kept. It changes nothing about the underlying mechanism.

What is visible in Austria

Statistik Austria reports an annual average of 173,800 job vacancies for 2024, down 15.8 percent on 2023. In the first quarter of 2025 the figure fell further, to 154,100. At the same time, unemployment is rising. In July 2025 the AMS Salzburg spoke of unemployment rising while vacancies fell, a sign that job-seekers and open positions no longer match (known in economics as the Beveridge kink).

Austria was in recession in 2024, and AI is one driver among several. What stands out anyway is that Austrian companies communicate AI-related staffing plans far more cautiously than their German or British counterparts. Whether the effect is smaller here or just communicated more quietly cannot be told from the outside. Either way, it is a reason to ask.

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