Ian Verrender

And artificial intelligence has taken on all of those lower-level roles.

But where does it stop?

I mean, once the senior people retire and the mid people work their way through, does artificial intelligence work its way up into the mid levels until you've finally and only got a company that's got a couple of people at the top of it?

We just really don't know where this is going.

Nobody's asking the questions, let alone contemplating what the potential solutions to this is going to be.

So we're talking about...

really quite severe impacts on the workforce.

You know, you've seen a couple of big companies.

I mean, Atlassian, you know, you mentioned software companies.

Atlassian is probably one of the hardest hit.

Its share price is now 84% down from its peak in 2021.

It just laid off 10% of its workforce.

But Block, that's Jack Dorsey's company.

He's the guy who started Twitter.

He's now, you know, got Block, which owns the Australian company Afterpay.

It decided to lay off more than 40% of its workforce a month or so ago.

And that was a week after Australian employees were at an off-site meeting down on the Victorian coastline there, where they were celebrating the company's success and how well it was doing.

And they got back and were told, you're fired.

But that's a kind of interesting story.

contrast because you've got a software company that's laying off people because they are in deep trouble.