The Declining Power of Your Human Capital in the Age of AI

Amazon, Salesforce, Allianz and HP have all cited AI as a driver of recent job cuts. This seismic shift in staffing reflects the fact that human expertise is no longer necessary for certain jobs or tasks, and that AI’s processing speed far exceeds what.

A working paper suggests AI is also changing what employers look for when hiring. UCLA Anderson’s Auyon Siddiq and Niuniu Zhang, a Ph.D.

What Happened

They find that in fields where AI can do plenty of the work, clients are placing less value on the strong credentials, polished pitch and great reputation of more experienced — and more expensive — freelancers. Instead, more work is going to.

• The arrival of generative artificial intelligence in late 2022 is transforming how businesses operate.

• JPMorgan Chase recently said that AI has enabled it to reduce staffing in some departments by 30% to 40%.

• The researchers analyzed nearly 50,000 Upwork freelancers over 21 quarters, from the start of 2021 through early 2026 — a window that straddles the November 2022 public launch of ChatGPT.

Key Details

As AI narrows the gap between what a highly skilled worker can produce and what a less-experienced worker armed with AI can, those workers seem to now be more interchangeable. “If generative AI has a commoditizing effect on labor, workers with stronger.

• The researchers estimate that for jobs highly sensitive to being replaced by AI, the human capital measures became about 7.8% less important in predicting who got hired than in unexposed categories.

• Overall demand for freelancers in AI-exposed fields fell 7%, but clients also changed whom they hired for the jobs that remained.

• By the final year of the sample, the combined importance of self-presentation, credentials and reputation had fallen about 10.1%, while the importance of price had risen about 1.8%.

Why It Matters

While the research focuses on freelancing, the implications would seem to extend to the much larger universe of people who work for an employer. The AI-driven staffing moves at Amazon, Salesforce and JPMorgan Chase suggest that shift may already be underway.

• But after ChatGPT was out in the wild of the business world, that edge narrowed by 6.2%, and by early 2026 it had shrunk by 10.3%.

• In the most AI-exposed types of jobs, there was a 7.9% increase in contracts won by less expensive workers by the end of their test period, suggesting interchangeability is indeed a factor.

What Reports Say

Coverage of the story so far points to:

• Continued reporting by UCLA Anderson Review as more details emerge