CEOs across industries are falling into two groups over artificial intelligence use: those who plan to cut roles or those who will make the workforce do more, The Wall Street Journal reported May 5. Neither group is planning to increase hiring in the near future.
The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase Global, for example, said the organization will reduce its workforce by 14% as AI changes “how we work.” Meanwhile, the president of technology company Axon Enterprise recently told employees that AI will allow teams to do more — not replace them, the Journal reported.
Across U.S. industries, AI was the second-most common reason cited for layoffs in October. The technology contributed to 48,414 cuts between January 2025 and October, including 31,039 in October alone, according to a November report.
However, many hospital and health system CEOs are landing closer to the second camp — using AI to expand services and access without expanding the workforce at the same pace — but largely without cutting jobs.
The calculation is different in healthcare. Clinical labor shortages mean widespread cuts are not a viable lever even when margins tighten, and rising demand means standing still is not, either. Hospitals and health systems have remained largely insulated from AI job losses facing other industries. Researchers at GovAI predict patient care roles — such as physician assistants, surgical technologists and registered nurses — have low vulnerability to AI job losses, while roles such as medical secretaries and administrative assistants have the highest vulnerability.
That math is shaping how CEOs are talking about AI investment. Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, president and CEO of Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt Health, framed the tradeoff directly at the system’s spring leadership forum.
“Our vision for AI is not to reduce our workforce,” Dr. Balser said. “But given the cost pressures on healthcare, it is imperative to leverage AI to expand our services to support our growing communities without expanding our workforce as much as we did in the past.”
The same logic is playing out in radiology, where AI capabilities have moved faster than in other areas. David Lubarsky, MD, president and CEO of Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network, told Becker’s in April that AI will not replace radiologists, but will help fill gaps amid ongoing shortages.
“You can never substitute the patient-physician or patient-nurse partnerships in their care, the human compassion and concern, or frankly, an understanding of an individual’s unique circumstances, which really can only be processed by people with that emotional capacity, which are human beings,” Dr. Lubarsky said.
He added that supplementing tasks with AI, such as those involving “simple pattern recognition,” makes financial sense, too.
“We always talk about the cost of care exploding,” he said. “Well, it’s very expensive to hire a radiologist to do something that in a specific set of circumstances — low-risk patient, negative scan — can be done just as well with a computer evaluation as a human evaluation. Why pay a ton of money for that when you can pay the money to get them to really look at the scans where their expertise is invaluable and irreplaceable?”
Beyond radiology, the same pattern is showing up across administrative and back-office work — but with hiring, not headcount, as the lever. Lee Schwamm, senior vice president and chief digital health officer of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health, told Becker’s that AI is reshaping roles rather than eliminating them.
“Almost all of our AI and automations to date have shifted the nature of the daily work done by our staff, or allowed us to eliminate vacancies, rather than laying off existing staff,” Mr. Schwamm said.
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