SAN FRANCISCO — AI industry insiders want workers to code smarter, think harder, and lean into their humanity — but still dodge the question of how many jobs artificial intelligence will destroy.

The reassurance rang out across HumanX, a four-day conference drawing some 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs, and tech executives, even as a blunt advertisement at the entrance set the tone: “Stop hiring humans.”

On the main stage, May Habib, chief executive of an AI platform called Writer, told the audience that Fortune 500 bosses are having a “collective panic attack” on the subject.

The anxiety is well-founded. More and more companies are directly citing AI in announcing job cuts.

High-profile examples are on the rise: Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support workers, saying AI now handles 50 per cent of its work.

Block chief Jack Dorsey announced plans to cut the company’s headcount nearly in half, citing “intelligence tools” that have fundamentally changed how companies operate.

Not all claims have gone uncontested — some economists say firms are pointing to AI to rationalise layoffs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has spoken of “AI-washing,” and most speakers at the San Francisco event similarly dismissed the invocation of AI as a false pretext for job cuts — even as they freely predicted disruption was just around the corner.

AI is going to “transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.