Then there is Axon Enterprise President Josh Isner, who recently emailed the Taser maker’s more than 5,000 staffers and told them to essentially breathe: AI won’t trigger layoffs anytime soon, he assured them.

“I am thinking of AI as the thing that allows our teams to do more, not the thing that replaces our teams,” Isner wrote. Even if the technology lets staff be twice or even three times as productive, there will be additional problems to solve. So, he added: “Block out the noise and keep kicking ass.”

The message arrived at a moment of extreme anxiety in American corporations over how many jobs could be lost to AI’s powers to speed up and supplant much of white-collar work. Among executives making such decisions, a split is emerging: Use AI to shrink the workforce or stretch it?

Those diverging philosophies have been on display on earnings calls and in other recent announcements. Armstrong said Tuesday that Coinbase would eliminate hundreds of jobs as AI becomes more embedded in the cryptocurrency exchange’s operations. Staff will manage agents to do more of the work, he said.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s CEO told investors last week that with AI, “we’re going to experience significant reduction in head count.” Meta Platforms’ chief financial officer, Susan Li, questioned how many employees the social-media company would eventually need as AI is able to do more.

“We don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” she told investors last Wednesday.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies that say they can keep head counts flat—not necessarily hiring, but not firing, either—by achieving more with existing teams.

Spotify Technology co-CEO Gustav Söderström puts the choice companies face like this: They can translate productivity improvements right away into cost savings by trimming staff. Or, “the other thing you could do is to say we’re going to be roughly the same amount of people—we’re just going to do more.”

Spotify is doing the latter: “We’re keeping our head count roughly flat and just doing much more shipping, more value to consumers,” he said.

Business leaders risk missing out if their use of AI is overly focused on efficiencies, said Nickle LaMoreaux, chief human resources officer at International Business Machines.

“In your leadership discussions, are you having this idea of moving from AI to productivity to AI to growth?” she said in a recent interview. Though it is hard to predict how many people IBM will employ three years from now, “if I had a crystal ball,” LaMoreaux said, it would be “more.”

Yet some companies have more room to maneuver than others. At Meta, massive investments in data centers and other AI infrastructure are driving plans to lay off 8,000 people, about 10% of the workforce, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said. Mass layoffs are also a swift way to boost the bottom line and a flagging stock price. Block and Snap shares both jumped following AI-related job cuts.

About 80% of companies using AI agents, intelligent automation or autonomous technologies said they are cutting staff, according to a recent Gartner survey of 350 people in midlevel positions and above.

Coinbase’s Armstrong told employees that though there would be fewer staff, AI would allow them to get more work done. Getting leaner was necessary in a down crypto market, he said. Plus, the restructuring would better position the company for growth.

“Over the past year, I’ve watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks,” he wrote to staff. “This is a new way of working.”

Justin Briley, who was laid off Tuesday from his content-strategy and technical-writing role at Coinbase, questioned whether fewer employees would enable growth. “We were already pretty bare bones,” the 39-year-old said of his team.

Briley said he used AI to find efficiencies while working on the back-end of the company’s help website, and the technology allowed him to do more.

“AI has been marketed as a solution to labor,” he said, though he predicts the technology will ultimately create “more work, not less.”

At companies that say they are committed to keeping staffers, change is still coming. Many positions will look much different or combine the responsibilities of a few roles at once, human-resources specialists say.

At Synchrony Financial, which issues credit cards on behalf of companies such as PayPal Holdings, Sam’s Club and Lowe’s, human-resources chief DJ Casto said he was already coaching employees to prepare not for layoffs, but for “redeployments” to new assignments. In some cases, they might be permanent shifts; others could be just for a few months.

“We’re going to have to be a lot more agile,” Casto said. “I talk about this openly in our workforce: We’re going to have to be a lot more comfortable that it’s not going to be so black and white.”

At Axon Enterprise, some managers say their teams have anxiety about potential job cuts, Isner said. Axon makes software in addition to security products such as Taser and body cameras, and its shares have fallen roughly 30% this year on investor jitters that AI could fuel a software apocalypse.

In his note to staff, Isner said that the company’s business remained strong and that people would still be necessary even in an AI world.

“My guess is we will still need a bunch of hires,” he wrote.

If anyone is in doubt, he told them, just browse OpenAI’s careers page. “There’s like 800 job listings,” he said.