issue-briefing
White-Collar Employment and Organizational Restructuring Accelerate Amid AI Expansion
In May 2026, regular workers in South Korea decreased for the first time in 26 years and 5 months since the Asian financial crisis, with notable declines in professional, scientific, and technical services as well as among the younger generation. As global big tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce continue layoffs into 2026, Salesforce revealed that it reduced its customer support workforce by 45%, from 9,000 to about 5,000, following the adoption of AI agents. A 'Great Flattening' trend of shrinking middle management is corroborated by Gartner's forecasts and empirical data from Gallup and Live Data Technologies. The shock of restructuring is first manifesting at the entry points of the labor market—specifically fresh hiring—with Stanford studies showing relative declines in employment for newcomers aged 22-25 in high AI-exposure roles. However, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and other industry leaders caution against blaming AI alone for layoffs, offering a balanced diagnosis that the current white-collar contraction is a complex phenomenon driven by a combination of economic slowdowns, cost-cutting, and over-hiring adjustments.
In May 2026, regular workers in South Korea decreased for the first time in 26 years and 5 months since the Asian financial crisis, with notable declines in professional, scientific, and technical services as well as among the younger generation. As global big tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Salesforce continue layoffs into 2026, Salesforce revealed that it reduced its customer support workforce by 45%, from 9,000 to about 5,000, following the adoption of AI agents. A 'Great Flattening' trend of shrinking middle management is corroborated by Gartner's forecasts and empirical data from Gallup and Live Data Technologies. The shock of restructuring is first manifesting at the entry points of the labor market—specifically fresh hiring—with Stanford studies showing relative declines in employment for newcomers aged 22-25 in high AI-exposure roles. However, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and other industry leaders caution against blaming AI alone for layoffs, offering a balanced diagnosis that the current white-collar contraction is a complex phenomenon driven by a combination of economic slowdowns, cost-cutting, and over-hiring adjustments.
Pressure Begins at Entry-Level and Middle Management… Driven by a Complex Mix of Economic Slowdown, Cost Reduction, and AI Transition While predictions that artificial intelligence (AI) would shake up the labor market have long been written in future-tense sentences, the employment indicators of 2026 are turning those sentences into the present tense. In the United States and the United Kingdom, job postings for typical white-collar professions such as lawyers, financial analysts, and software developers have noticeably declined. In South Korea, regular employment—which had not dropped once for 26 years and 5 months following the Asian financial crisis—has turned downward for the first time. In an article last October titled 'AI Is Swallowing White-Collar Jobs,' The Wall Street Journal diagnosed that AI is replacing office and professional workers rather than simple manual laborers, ther…