Meta's Muse AI Puts Labor Displacement Back in Focus

Uber said it would lay off 10% of its workforce to achieve "significant efficiencies" — the latest in a string of AI-driven job cuts that has swept corporate America this year.

The wave has hit some of the market's most prominent names. Billionaire Jack Dorsey's Block (XYZ) slashed 40% of its staff this year. Layoffs have also rolled through Amazon (AMZN), Dell (DELL), Oracle (ORCL), Coinbase (COIN), Cloudflare (NET), and Meta (META) itself.

At the center of the current debate sits Meta's (META) Muse AI agent, whose early success is exposing the labor market displacement coming for many workers. The logic is blunt: if Muse can speedily perform tasks inside a company, why bother with humans?

"I do think that it's a waiting game for this [impact of AI] to eventually begin to show up," Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk said on Yahoo Finance's Sozzi Unleashed. (Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)

Sløk argues the story is more complex than pure displacement. AI is simultaneously destroying and creating work.

"On the one hand, yes, products such as Muse will indeed be saving maybe some jobs, but on the other hand, new products that are coming to the market because of AI will absolutely also be creating more employment," Sløk said. "So that's why it becomes not only a labor displacement story, but also what AI will do to business dynamics and ultimately therefore to aggregate employment."

The macro data so far supports his case that not everything is doom and gloom. Through August, the US economy has added roughly 640,000 net nonfarm payroll jobs, averaging roughly 80,000 new jobs per month.

Corporate behavior, though, may be shifting in ways that the headline payroll numbers do not yet capture. A new Gartner survey projected that by 2029, 30% of employees laid off due to AI will need to be rehired — at a significantly higher cost than their original positions carried.

That projection implies companies may discover that AI cannot fully replace certain roles, and that reversing course will carry a price. Firms that cut too aggressively could face a costly scramble to rebuild expertise within five years.

The open question, according to Sløk, is how deeply businesses will actually deploy these tools. Muse's impact depends less on its technical capabilities than on corporate appetite to apply them.

"The question still is whether, in the practical world, is this [AI like Muse] mainly going to be used by consumers or will it also be used by corporates?" Sløk said. "How much will corporates in your world unleash this product on everything that they're doing?"

The answer will determine whether Muse and its peers trigger a genuine shakeout in aggregate employment or merely reshape how existing work gets done inside companies.