MY TAKE: Microsoft gave rise to the ‘knowledge worker’—and now it’s rendering them obsolete – Source: www.lastwatchdog.com

By Byron V. Acohido

When Chris Sacca declared that AI would decimate professional services, he wasn’t exaggerating. He was just early.

Related: Are we Super F**ked by AI?

Now, with Microsoft laying off 15,000 workers in two months, we have confirmation that this is not theoretical. It’s happening. And it’s not just happening somewhere abstract. It’s happening in Redmond.

Sacca’s quote has become shorthand for a kind of radical clarity: “We are super f**ked.” He wasn’t talking about Skynet. He was talking about accountants, salespeople, and junior coders. The middle layer of knowledge work. The connective tissue of the professional class. Obsolete, he said. And Microsoft—the very company that helped digitize professional work—is now quietly dismantling it.

So yes: Sacca was right. And that truth now lands with the full weight of a corporate restructuring memo.

But if we stop there, we miss the more important question. Because even if this is the default path—AI as decimation engine—we still have to ask: is that the only path?

Microsoft’s new model

Let’s be clear. Microsoft is not being subtle. It’s cutting jobs at scale, across engineering, sales, support, and operations. At the same time, it’s investing more than $80 billion in AI infrastructure and embedding Copilot into every tool it offers. Internally, the company is mandating AI integration across teams and re-evaluating roles based on how well employees use these tools.

Against this backdrop of transformation—one part aggressive efficiency, one part AI evangelism—Microsoft has unveiled a new initiative it calls Elevate. It’s a five-year, $4 billion philanthropic campaign aimed at helping schools and nonprofits “adapt” to AI. But look closely: Elevate is packaging the whole disruption in a $4 billion philanthropic wrapper—reskilling the very people it no longer employs.

This is what Sacca meant. AI isn’t creeping in. It’s kicking down the door. These jobs aren’t evolving. They’re vanishing.irony And the same companies doing the displacing are branding themselves as redeemers.

That’s not irony—it’s choreography.

Outlier — or blueprint

Microsoft’s playbook is not unique. It’s already being echoed across Big Tech:

At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy recently confirmed that corporate headcount reductions are on the horizon as more than 1,000 internal AI tools displace tasks across HR, software, and customer service. The company is actively shifting workforce planning around AI-enabled operations, asking remaining employees to reskill while quietly phasing out mid-tier professional roles.

At Meta, the company cut approximately 5% of its workforce—nearly 4,000 employees—and is redirecting hiring toward AI research and infrastructure. AI systems now handle 90% of product risk assessments, slashing demand for human oversight. It’s a clear example of white-collar automation being normalized, even incentivized.

At Salesforce, roughly 1,000 workers were laid off as leadership cited that up to 50% of the company’s workload is now handled by AI. Job cuts are paired with a talent pivot: hiring only into AI-literate roles tied to new product lines.

Together with Microsoft, these moves confirm that we are seeing not an anomaly but a strategic alignment: AI adoption as justification for workforce reengineering—layoffs on one side, retraining pipelines on the other. And at every turn, it’s the same pattern: disrupt, rebrand, redeploy.

Packaging the inflection point

Microsoft Elevate is important not because it will change everything—but because it signals how Big Tech plans to manage the disruption. Don’t pause. Don’t question. Just reroute the displaced into credentialing pipelines that keep them inside the ecosystem. This is the sugar cube strategy: sweeten the burn.

From a PR standpoint, it’s brilliant. From a systems-design standpoint, it is deeply cynical. It accepts Sacca’s premise, retools it for investor slides, and gives it a benevolent sheen. And if every other Big Tech player follows suit, we won’t just see a workforce transition. We’ll see a wholesale narrowing of what counts as work, and who gets to do it.

An alternative scenario

But here’s where my reporting diverges. I’ve spent the last 18 months embedded in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, and enterprise IT environments. I’ve talked to engineers, CISOs, analysts, founders. And what I’m seeing is a different pattern—a grassroots recalibration.

At Corelight, AI isn’t replacing analysts. It’s simplifying their environment. Turning terabytes of network telemetry into plain-language narratives. At Anetac, AI is exposing dormant service accounts—something a human would miss without hours of manual correlation. At Simbian, autonomous agents are triaging alerts, freeing up human cycles for actual decision-making.

In each case, AI isn’t displacing judgment. It’s scaffolding it.

This is where Sacca’s model doesn’t quite land. Because while he sees decimation, I see a chance to reassert intention. Not everywhere. Not universally. But in pockets. In design choices. In defaults.

The epistemological shift

The real story isn’t that jobs are going away. It’s that the definition of work is being rewritten. AI compresses output but exposes judgment. It strips away process, but in doing so, reveals what humans are uniquely good at: discernment, timing, moral framing.

That’s not a universal protection. Judgment alone won’t save everyone. But it’s a lever—a fulcrum around which a different kind of labor design can emerge.

Microsoft isn’t wrong to deploy AI. But it is making a choice in how that deployment lands. And that choice—to displace first, reskill later, and frame it all as innovation—is one we should be dissecting, not just accepting.

Stories from the edge

What gives me hope isn’t what Big Tech is doing—it’s what ordinary people are doing, often far from the spotlight.

Take Adam Lyons, a father of five who jokingly calls himself the “Chief AI Officer” of his household. He’s not a software engineer. He’s a parent who uses generative AI to tutor his kids, debug household systems, and co-design video games with his teenagers. He argues that shielding kids from AI is a mistake—that it can actually cultivate agency and creativity, not stifle it.

Running Wolf

Or Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne software engineer who’s harnessing AI to preserve endangered Indigenous languages. Through cultural-language apps and speech tools, he’s using machine learning to protect something the tech industry rarely considers: heritage. Not for profit. For continuity.

And it’s not just individuals. Small businesses and local industries are quietly rewriting their own AI narratives:

In Kenya, smallholder farmers are using apps like Virtual Agronomist and PlantVillage to make crop and fertilization decisions with data once reserved for agribusiness giants. One farmer tripled his coffee yield using AI-driven guidance. Another uses image-based diagnostics to identify pests in real time—eliminating costly guesswork.

In Ghana, an AI chatbot called Darli—built on WhatsApp and trained in 27 local languages—offers regenerative farming advice to over 110,000 farmers. It’s not just a tool. It’s a lifeline to localized, ecologically sound agriculture.

In California, a startup called FarmWise builds autonomous weeding robots for small-acreage farms. These machines remove invasive plants without herbicides—freeing farmers to focus on soil health and sustainability. The value here isn’t scale. It’s care.

These aren’t stories of AI at scale. They’re stories of AI at eye level—of human agency augmented, not overwritten. They reflect a different kind of value: contextual judgment, local wisdom, reclaimed time.

What happens now

The layoffs at Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce are a wake-up call. Not just because they validate the doomsayers. But because they clarify the stakes. Treat Sacca’s model as inevitable, and we’ll get systems optimized for speed, not meaning. Accept Elevate as sufficient, and we’ll inherit pipelines that credential without empowering.

But if we hold the line—on judgment, on design, on the quiet power of grassroots agency—we might still have time to shape a future where AI reveals what we value, instead of just replacing it.

Big Tech has shown us what the dominant path looks like. It’s up to the rest of us to carve the other one.

I’ll keep watch — and keep reporting.

Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Byron V. Acohido is dedicated to fostering public awareness about how to make the Internet as private and secure as it ought to be.

(Editor’s note: A machine assisted in creating this content. I used ChatGPT-4o to accelerate research, to scale correlations, to distill complex observations and to tighten structure, grammar, and syntax. The analysis and conclusions are entirely my own — drawn from lived experience and editorial judgment honed over decades of investigative reporting.)

July 9th, 2025 | My Take | Top Stories