WILD HIRING WEST : A.I.'S STUDENTS ESSAY

THE DECLINE in hiring is visible right across the world. In the United States tech jobs declined by about 150,000 from 2020 through 2025.

'' The tech labor pool and talent pool is definitely reassembling,'' said Ted Egan, chief economist for the City and County of San Francisco. '' A.I. is a big reason for that.''

Part of tech's reassembly is happening at start-ups. Gone is the traditional process of raising a boatload of venture capital funding, not worrying about revenue or profit and hiring heavily.

Today's start-ups are tapping A.I. tools like agents - personal assistants that can take actions on their own - to make money and grow with fewer employees.

NOW, a software company can launch multiple agents, and each one can do the work of 10-20 employees,'' said Priya Saiprasad, an investor at Touring Capital.

On its way out, too, is the business model that has become the bedrock of a sector called '' software as a service, '' where customers subscribe to use software applications on the internet, rather than buy or install those apps on their own computers.

Over the past three decades, software providers have charged businesses based on the number of employees who used their software - and enjoyed regular revenue growth as those firms grew.

That business model, known as '' seat-based '' or '' per seat '' pricing, has been the centerpiece of tech giants like Salesforce, which makes sales and marketing software, and ServiceNow, which automates corporate processes.

But seat-based pricing is threatened by A.I. The business model is all predicated on the fact that, if a company does well, it needs a lot more employees, '' Ms. Saiprasad said.

'' The irony is that, in this A.I. world, that does not equal success '' because fast-growing companies might expand by adding so-called agents instead of hiring people.

Some software providers are predicting that A.I. will automate certain jobs, so their customers will have fewer employees to use their software.

Others are adding A.I. features that require more computing resources and are more expensive for them to offer. And they all are facing competition from '' open source '' or free-to-use, A.I. tools that could replace their products altogether.

'' Right now, with A.I. it's the wild, wild west,'' said Alex Zulkin, a software analyst at Wolfe Research. Software providers and their customers are '' in a state of massive, simultaneous experimentation.''

This Master Essay continues. The World Students Society thanks Kalley Huang, and Erin Griffith and Joe Rennison.