27% Layoff, Productivity Soars by 9.6%! Morgan Stanley's Global Survey Reveals: AI Has Officially Reshaped Corporate Profit and Employee Rosters

Zhihui Finance APP notes that Morgan Stanley, based on an AlphaWise survey covering the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Australia, focusing on five key industries—banking, software & services, technology hardware, semiconductors, and professional services—has reached a conclusion: AI is no longer just a narrative; it has already begun to reshape corporate employee rosters and profit statements.

The survey shows that over the past 12 months, the companies surveyed have directly cut 12% of positions due to AI, with an additional 15% of positions left unfilled after staff departures, leading to a combined impact on 27% of jobs. Offsetting this, there has been 22% new hiring, 25% of employees retrained, and 16% reassigned internally—resulting in an average net staff reduction of 5% across the five countries.

By country, Japan has the most severe net staff reduction (10%), followed by the United Kingdom (6%), United States (5%), Australia (4%), while Germany is the only country to see a net staff increase (1%), and also has the highest retraining rate.

Industry divergence is also notable. The semiconductor sector leads with an 8% net reduction, followed by software & services (7%), technology hardware (5%), professional services (4%), and the banking sector with the smallest net reduction at only 3%. However, banking has the highest employee retraining rate at 26%, making it the most proactive industry in both cutting and retraining staff.

It is worth noting that offshore positions are most affected: 41% of offshore staff positions have been eliminated or left unfilled, with large companies employing over 10 thousand staff cutting offshore teams most aggressively. Junior and mid-level employees with 2 to 5 years of experience are the hardest hit by layoffs and not being replaced, but they are also the main force behind new hires and internal transfers—AI is eliminating not a particular group of people, but rather specific skill sets.

What truly concerns investors is productivity. The report shows that over the past 12 months, surveyed companies achieved an average net productivity gain of 9.6%: UK companies performed best (10.3%), with software & services leading all sectors at 10.4%, and semiconductors at the bottom with 8.2%. Small companies with fewer than 50 employees saw the largest gains (11.3%).

From a functional standpoint, IT/software development and customer service/support are the two areas where AI efficiency gains are most concentrated: banking’s gains are focused on IT/software development and finance/FinOps, while professional services see customer support at the top (52%), followed by IT/software development (49%) and legal compliance (48%). Looking ahead to the next 12 months, all countries and industries expect the greatest efficiency gains in IT/software development—among U.S. companies this proportion is 71%, with the software sector at 92%, and the semiconductor sector at 86%.

The report includes another easily overlooked set of data: surveyed companies have implemented AI solutions for an average of 2.9 years, while U.S. companies have the shortest implementation time (2.7 years); companies with more than 500 employees and annual revenues above $5 billion adopted AI earliest. This suggests that AI penetration in the U.S. is still in the early to middle stages, and “moving from pilot projects to scaled production” remains one of the main challenges companies acknowledge themselves, compounded by hurdles in trust and security, data preparation, and legacy systems integration—the spending on AI infrastructure and tools is far from reaching its peak.

Following this data logic, the direction for U.S. stock market beneficiaries is already quite clear: the software sector sees the highest productivity gains (10.4%), with 92% of software companies expecting the greatest efficiency improvements in software development itself over the coming year. The penetration of AI programming and intelligent agent platforms will only continue to rise. Platforms such as Microsoft (MSFT.US), ServiceNow (NOW.US), Salesforce (CRM.US), Palantir (PLTR.US), and Adobe, which embed AI capabilities directly into workflows, are the clearest beneficiaries under this trend.