An AI consultant says he cut 27 of the 30 students on his sales team, and that AI "doesn't ask for a pay raise"

Elijah Clark, a consultant who advises companies on putting AI to work and describes himself as a chief executive, told Gizmodo in July 2025 that he had laid people off because of AI himself. Leading a sales-enablement team of 30 student workers, he recalled, he let 27 of them go: "We can get done in less than a day, less than an hour, what they were taking a week to produce." He was open about the appeal: "AI doesn't go on strike. It doesn't ask for a pay raise. These things that you don't have to deal with as a CEO." And he described his current work the same way: "I am hired by CEOs to figure out how to use AI to cut jobs. Not in ten years. Right now." Two cautions belong with this. The interview does not name the organisation where the student team worked, so there is no employer to attach it to and no job figure is added to the tracker. And the account is Clark's own: Gizmodo published nothing independent on whether the three who remained, with AI, matched the output or quality of the thirty. What makes it worth recording is who is speaking. Most employers reach for words like efficiency and restructuring; this is the person who made the cut saying outright that the work went to software and that labour which cannot negotiate is the point.