Investors are coalescing around a near-term labor shock from artificial intelligence, about 2026 being the year AI moves from “copilot” to fully managing tasks. “One thing’s undeniable,” say venture partners and growth equity investors: Enterprise adoption is moving beyond pilot projects to production as automation budgets head on a collision course with headcount.
The mood is not just hype. A recent MIT study estimated that 11.7% of current jobs can already be automated with current AI, and the International Monetary Fund has warned that close to 40% of global employment is exposed to AI in some way, with advanced economies bearing a greater burden.
Why 2026 Is the Year of Transition for Enterprise AI
For general partners like Eric Bahn at Hustle Fund, 2026 is a breakpoint because two curves are crossing: models are becoming cheaper and better, and enterprises now trust governance and security to deploy them at scale. That unlocks automation for repetitive jobs and, more and more, for nuanced, rules-based work.
Investors such as Marell Evans at Exceptional Capital and Rajeev Dham at Sapphire say the practical effect will be budget shifts. From the CFO’s perspective, they’ll move line items from hiring to inference and integration — which includes compute, orchestration layers, data pipelines, tooling — pressing companies to do more with fewer people.
Budgets Pivot From Headcount to Compute in 2026
Anticipate AI budgets to cannibalize labor budgets first in process-heavy, high-volume functions. Investors’ watchlists have customer support, sales ops, AP/AR, payroll, basic compliance and IT help desks at the top. Those are the sorts of areas in which benchmarks are more easily measurable, and where LLMs plus workflow automation can show tangible cost-per-ticket or cost-per-case reductions.
Real-world signals are already visible. Its artificial-intelligence assistant, Klarna said, manages the bulk of customer chats, doing work that is comparable to hundreds of full-time agents. IBM has said back-office jobs will be reimagined as AI assumes routine tasks. BT forecast that its workforce would shrink by leaps over the next decade, some of it explicitly related to AI. Investors want these case studies to be the new enterprise standard, not the outliers.
From Copilots to Agents: Toward Autonomous Workflows
Battery Ventures’ Jason Mendel, among others, expects a move away from productivity tools and toward fully autonomous agents that carry out end-to-end workflows. Think AI that not only drafts an email, but also ranks a queue, queries internal systems, updates records and closes the loop — doing what it does without a human in the mix. That’s the distinction between augmentation and displacement.
The enabling stack is coming together fast: retrieval-augmented generation for trustworthy context, tool-use frameworks to plug into enterprise systems and monitoring layers for safety and audit. Boardrooms will OK more autonomy as error rates decline and governance improves, especially where SLAs can be closely monitored.
Displacement Counts, and Where It Ends Up
According to the OECD, around 27% of jobs are considered to be at high risk for automation. The World Economic Forum has predicted a net fall in demand for roles such as data entry, administrative work and basic accounting at the same time that demand for AI specialists, data engineers, cybersecurity workers and advanced operations will rise. According to McKinsey research, generative AI would be able to automate tasks that currently take up 60%–70% of working hours today and could only speed the transition period we are already facing in occupations.
In reality, investors are bracing for the near-term impact to be uneven. The fastest compression is felt in the hourly knowledge work (contact centers, claims processing, logistics scheduling). Trades, such as plumbers and on-site service roles, are less immediately exposed; however, AI-powered robotics and computer vision are evolving at a rapid pace.
Layoffs and the AI Scapegoat Risk for Companies
Not every “AI layoff” will in fact be the result of AI. Antonia Dean of Black Operator Ventures warns that AI may be used by executives to explain a round of layoffs brought on by overhiring in years past or falling demand. Investors anticipate both dynamics: legitimate displacement where automation shows ROI, and opportunistic labeling where AI becomes a handy explanation for cost-savings.
The difference is important for policy and planning. If AI gets the blame for what are cyclically based layoffs, responses will be miscalibrated. If the cuts really are coming from automation, then we’ll need retraining and wage insurance and talent mobility programs more urgently.
Workers and Leaders: How to Prepare for AI Changes
For employers, “investors are encouraging them to use 2025–2026 as a redesign window: mapping task inventories; quantifying automation candidates; redeploying funds into roles that expand capacity (not just cut it).” Transparency around metrics and change-management plans will minimize backlash and hasten adoption.
For workers, the hedge is a combination of skills. Job descriptions that are hybrid domain/AI—humans, who know what the machine doesn’t, manage system design for enterprise systems; they steward data; they engineer workflows with and around models; and they oversee humans in the loop—are going to command good value. There are already unions and professional associations negotiating guardrails around AI; expect more contracts to include commitments on training and disclosure.
The message of the core investor call is unambiguous: AI will cease nibbling at the edges of the org chart, and begin redrawing it as soon as 2026. Whether that decision will come in the form of layoffs, a hiring freeze or swifter job-to-role pace will depend on the company. But the effect on labor is no longer theoretical — and capital is migrating as a result.
