Soft skills becoming ever more important in the AI era?

Just take one job that requires judgment and knowledge.

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In recent months, Meta, X—and just this week TikTok—have trimmed human moderation roles in favor of AI, thus outsourcing judgment. TikTok's workers in Germany just went on a day's strike in solidarity with the 150 members of the trust and safety team that got laid off in August to be replaced, according to Euronews, by China-sourced AI models which parent ByteDance trained on behalf of the company.

These developments in Germany follow last October's announcement that TikTok would let go 500 content moderation employees in Malaysia.

These shocks are not easily wished away. Companies are aware of the social blowback the job-shedding is causing and so dress it up in anodyne language—“right-sizing,” “future readiness,” “realignment of priorities” and so forth.

As Ms Christina Inge, a highly rated instructor at the Harvard University division of continuing education, told CNBC recently “very few organizations are willing to say, ‘We're replacing people with AI,’ even when that's effectively what's happening.”

But whatever name you may give it, it all translates to the same disaster: a pink slip, and prospects of months of search for alternative employment.

A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT

Microsoft has shed 15,000 employees since mid-May, and another 2,000 deemed under-performers are also reportedly on the way out. And it is not that Microsoft was bleeding; the stock is up 26 percent in 2025 amid soaring profits.

“This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a widely quoted memo to staff. “Progress isn't linear. It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”