Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Last week, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sent a shudder through every workforce conversation on the planet. He cut 4,000 employees from Block, the company behind Square and Cash App. That's nearly half the entire workforce. Gone.

His reason? AI. His exact words on X: he'd rather get there "honestly and on our own terms" than be forced into it reactively.

The shocker: Investors loved it, and stock surged 24% in after-hours trading.

The uncomfortable question nobody's asking

Is this actually about AI, or just the best excuse a CEO has ever had?

Bloomberg reported that Block’s move landed amid debates about whether AI will displace jobs and deep cynicism that companies are dressing up old-fashioned cost-cutting as technological futurism.

The data supports the scepticism: Block was one of those tech companies that bloated from 3,835 employees in 2019 to over 10,000 during the pandemic hiring spree. Cutting back could be less about the AI revolution and more about correction.

And yet, one in five tech layoffs globally is now attributed to AI and over 30,000 tech workers have lost their jobs since January alone.

The San Francisco paradox

Here's the part that should make every employer sit up: San Francisco (the undisputed capital of the AI boom) is haemorrhaging tech jobs. AI companies are leasing record amounts of office space, venture capital is flowing, but the jobs aren't following as the city lost 4,500 information-sector jobs in 2025, a 4% decline.

What this means for South Africa

Before you dismiss this as a Silicon Valley problem: South African law explicitly allows retrenchment for technological needs under Section 189 of the Labour Relations Act. And AI replacing roles qualifies as an operational requirement, but the process must be followed (consultation, alternatives, fair selection). The legal door is open, though.

And the Labour Laws Amendment Bill proposes doubling severance pay from one to two weeks per year of service. Which means the cost of getting this wrong is about to go up.

A PwC report found that employment is still growing in most AI-exposed industries, but at a slower pace, and the shape of the workforce is changing. We’re seeing fewer junior roles and more senior roles augmented by AI, with workers with AI skills commanding a 56% wage premium.

The workplace pyramid is flattening. The question is whether your people are ready for the new shape.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, published a detailed analysis of which jobs AI is actually performing versus which it merely could perform. Built from millions of real workplace conversations with Claude, cross-referenced against occupational data, it's the first major study based on what AI is doing, not what people predict it will do.

The surprising part is that the most exposed jobs are not factory workers or drivers. The ones most at risk are 16 percentage points more likely to be female, earn 47% more on average, and are nearly four times as likely to hold a graduate degree. 

We’re talking lawyers, analysts, software developers and, yes, HR managers.

The question worth sitting with: If the most exposed workers are your highest-paid, most qualified people, what does your leadership team's AI plan actually look like?

R3.7 billion

is the estimated annual cost of hiring the 10,000 new labour inspectors (roughly R10 billion over the medium-term) that President Ramaphosa announced at SONA. It’s important, ‘cos, over the past two decades, only 2–5% of SA workplaces have been covered by inspections, but that number is about to go up.

Source: Department of Employment and Labour

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