OPINION
Is Silicon Valley weaponising job-loss anxiety? With corporate AI bills spiralling out of control, one recruit-tech veteran exposes what he sees as hype—and reveals how recruiters and contractors can use AI to fight the system
“Every technology creates both excitement and fear, and Silicon Valley—what they’re pushing at the moment is fear,” said Nick Woodward, a software engineer and founder of back-office recruitment SaaS provider ETZ.
In a sharp assessment with some provocative statements on the current artificial intelligence boom, Woodward has warned business leaders to stop blindly buying into the hype coming out of Silicon Valley.
Speaking on a live panel with UK Recruiter on AI in Recruitment Strategies titled, Recruitment Smarts Live: UK Software Expert: Should Recruiters Believe the AI Hype? Woodward argued that the existential dread surrounding mass job displacement is largely a narrative driven by major tech companies to fuel excitement ahead of massive initial public offerings.
He noted that leaders at prominent firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have recently softened their rhetoric regarding immediate job losses. “It’s no coincidence that they’re going for an IPO. Read what you may from that,” said Woodward in the webinar.
According to Woodward, promoting the idea that traditional roles, such as software developers, will completely vanish serves a clear commercial interest. “They want that, because then guess who you’re going to go to write your code? OpenAI.”
Woodward also highlights an interesting perspective about upcoming tech and AI model IPOs:
The listing rules have changed, so these companies will all go in on NASDAQ… which means the free float is going to be minimal. It means that pension funds will buy their stock just through the index funds, which means that those stocks will not plummet like they should.
New AI narrative: From job loss to economic opportunity
“One thing I keep coming back to is that I think we are asking the wrong question about AI,” Woodward reflected to The Freelance Informer after the panel discussion. That question being:
Most people are asking whether AI will take their job. I think the better question is what opportunities AI will create for them.
–Nick Woodward, CEO, ETZ
Woodward doesn’t see the biggest AI story as the technology itself. To him, it’s the economics. Drawing lessons from history, he compared the current technological shift to previous industrial breakthroughs:
Intelligence is becoming dramatically cheaper and that changes everything. Every major technological revolution has increased productivity. The real question is what we do with the savings.
Woodward reflects that just as the Industrial Revolution increased the productivity of physical labour, AI will drastically increase the productivity of knowledge work. In both cases, productivity increases, costs fall, and society ultimately creates new opportunities that were not previously economic.
He suggests, “If AI doubles productivity, what do we do with the savings? That feels like the conversation society is only just starting to have.”
For Woodward, those savings should be spent leaning into human connection rather than hiding behind screens. “The more repetitive work we automate, the more time people have to spend solving problems and building relationships,” he says. “The winners won’t necessarily be those with the best AI. The winners will be those who figure out how to use AI to create more value for customers.”
Woodward isn’t alone in this line of thinking that AI will doom us all. David George, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote on the firm’s blog titled, “The ‘AI Job Apocalypse’ Is a Complete Fantasy”:
The macro story is not a jobless future, where we retire fat and complacent to our Netflix-scooters.
The future is cheaper intelligence, bigger markets, new firms, new industries, and higher-order human work. There is no fixed amount of work, let alone a fixed amount of cognition, and there never was. AI is not the end of work. It is the beginning of abundant intelligence.
–David George, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Big corporate token trap
While human value is the long-term play in Woodward’s best-case scenario, the short-term reality involves managing infrastructure costs. Woodward warned that relying exclusively on proprietary US tech giants can quickly push businesses into unexpected expenditures.
This concern reflects a wider global token crisis where escalating API usage by autonomous agents has triggered sudden bill shocks across enterprises, leaving corporate finance teams scrambling to enforce strict budget caps.
He cited that major platforms are finding that closed-source API tokens rapidly deplete budgets. Goldman Sachs projected monthly token consumption will multiply 24x to 120 quadrillion between 2026 and 2030, noting that “agentic AI requires a lot of tokens because many queries are repeated in sequence.”
Consequently, reports from Axios and The Wall Street Journal show enterprise AI spending exploding—some companies are exhausting their annual budgets in just three months, while others see costs double or triple. This surge is driven by tokens (the text units models charge for), where every input and output word incurs a cost.
Woodward’s strategy for businesses looking to maintain financial control is to focus on open-source alternatives. “If you use the open-source models hosted by Qwen, it’s about 10% of the cost. You get 10 times more, and you are in control.”
Woodward was equally sceptical of “vibe coding”. That’s the claim that non-technical users can build complex software entirely through natural language prompts.
Recounting an experiment where an employee attempted the method, Woodward labelled the result a major setback.
“Don’t believe the rubbish about vibe coding. You’re going to need a developer. If you’ve never coded, you’re not going to be able to do it. These models are good, but they’re not as good as people want you to believe.”
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas: The automation dilemma
Away from macroeconomic debates, Woodward claims the real disruption of AI will happen on the balance sheets of everyday businesses. That is, if the actual business owners step up to drive the strategy.
True productivity, Woodward defined, is increasing output without increasing costs. However, Woodward warns that delegating these technology decisions to middle managers or finance departments often stalls progress due to competing internal interests (and their jobs).
“A manager or everybody will be self-serving. That’s one thing about capital, it brings out self-interest,” Woodward said.
He used a historical parallel to explain why operational efficiency is routinely slow to implement within corporate hierarchies:
| Era / Technology | The pitch | Middle-management reaction |
| The Mainframe Era (IBM) | “This will revolutionize payroll.” | The payroll manager asks: “But what happens to my team, and what happens to me?” |
| The Modern AI Era | “This will automate the financial back office.” | The management layer requests a larger team to “better service” the newly complex system. |
“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” Woodward added. “A finance manager is not going to say, ‘Here is a proposal to the board… I can get rid of all my team,’ because the owners will go, ‘Why am I paying you?’ Managers love complexity and love saying, ‘I need more people.'”
Woodward revealed he enacted a lean protocol within his own enterprise to combat this:
I used to have a team of 20, most of them were C-level. I had a CFO; I had a finance team. At the end of the day, when I replaced them with technology, they didn’t do anything.
Re-engineering recruitment: A 5% open-book future
For the recruitment industry specifically, Woodward believes AI’s greatest impact isn’t the elimination of elite frontline talent, but the unwinding of traditional, opaque pricing structures that agencies have relied on for decades.
“For recruiters, I don’t see AI replacing the best recruiters,” Woodward predicted. “I see it removing low-value administration and allowing recruiters to spend more time on activities that actually create value.”
However, he warns that the mechanics of the job market are shifting rapidly for job seekers:
“For contractors specifically, I think there is a growing challenge around visibility. As AI makes it easier to generate CVs and apply for hundreds of jobs instantly, standing out becomes harder. Reputation, expertise, relationships and trust become more valuable, not less.”
Instead of fearing this transition, Woodward challenges entrepreneurial recruiters to take a blank sheet of paper, put AI at the structural core, and pass those massive efficiency savings directly to clients via significantly lower fees.
Reinvent the business model,” Woodward urged. Start a recruitment business with AI at the heart… and work on a minimal margin: 5%. If you can get 1,000 clients that you run yourself on 5%, that’s more than you’ll make working for a big recruiter, without all the headaches. In other words, create your own job security.
Woodward envisions a structural evolution away from a closed, hidden-margin marketplace to one defined by absolute transparency:
There will be the status quo. That will include agencies acting as opaque middlemen, keeping client fees high and candidate rates low to protect standard 25% margins.
There will also be a transparent future in which AI handles data transfer, timesheets, and sourcing seamlessly. This will allow a lean recruiter to operate on an “open book” 5% markup model where the free market decides pricing.
When asked if a 5% margin model represents an existential risk to the recruitment sector’s profitability, Woodward remained firm on the benefits of open market forces:
“There’s nothing wrong with competing on price. That’s just what people will tell you because they don’t want to compete. Transparency is the best disinfectant.”
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