I have placed Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite talent for more than twenty-five years, and I have never watched two letters do this much work in a press release. Every workforce reduction this year seems to arrive wrapped in the same explanation, and that explanation is almost always “AI.”
As I have verbally been telling candidates over the last number of months, I don’t really buy it and feel companies are using AI as a handy excuse for their desire to cut costs during these macro-economic uncertain times we have been experiencing for the last 2 1/2 years.
Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in two years recently, with roughly forty thousand cuts, and AI was the most-cited reason across every industry for the third straight month. That stat sounds damning until you read what tech leaders themselves are now admitting.
Marc Andreessen recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are, in his words, really about mismanagement; he argued that essentially every large company is overstaffed, some by as much as 550-75%.
Jack Dorsey first credited AI for the deep cuts at Block, then conceded under pushback that the company had simply overhired during the pandemic. Robinhood announced a ten percent reduction and, notably, made no mention of AI at all; its CEO framed it as flattening the organization from a position of strength.
Here is why I think this matters for anyone hiring in the ERP ecosystem, and it is not the conclusion most people reach. The correction we are watching is a generalist correction. Companies that hired broadly and loosely during the boom are now downsizing the roles that were never tied to a clear outcome. That is a very different thing from saying senior ERP judgment is being automated away, because it is not. If anything, the opposite is happening in the corner of the market I work in every day.
When a Dynamics 365 or NetSuite environment breaks during a close, or a migration stalls, or a finance team cannot reconcile what the system is telling them, no one solves that with a thinner org chart and a chatbot. They solve it with a person who has seen the failure mode before and knows which lever to pull. That person is getting more valuable, not less, precisely because the surrounding layer of routine work is thinning out.
I ran a poll on hiring outlook in the ERP recruiting space, and the results lined up with what I hear in conversations all week. The plurality said the outlook was about the same as before, not the collapse the layoff headlines would predict, with the rest split fairly evenly between more pessimistic and more optimistic. That is not a market in freefall. That is a market repricing what it actually needs.
So if you are a hiring manager or an operating partner reading the same layoff coverage I am, I would offer one piece of advice.
Do not let the market noise and doom and gloom we are all hearing about AI taking over the need for actual humans talk you out of hiring the veteran ERP or CRM person you actually need. The headlines are describing a generalist surplus. Your problem is almost certainly a specialist shortage, and those are not the same market at all.
This is the part I keep saying, and I will keep saying it. The premium is moving toward the people who can carry judgment across the finance, operations, and technical sides of an ERP at the same time, not the people who only knew how to do one routine task that software can now handle.
If you build your next hire around that reality instead of the layoff narrative, you will be ahead of nearly everyone else competing for the same talent.
If you are sizing up a Microsoft Dynamics or NetSuite hire right now and want a clear-eyed read on what the market actually looks like beneath the headlines, I am more than happy to chat.