One of Estonia's success stories, Pipedrive, announced on Thursday that most of the people working at the company would lose their jobs. However, the changes brought about by artificial intelligence in the labor market are only just beginning.

Microsoft recently offered voluntary severance packages to around 60,000 employees to cover the costs of AI and data centers. Amazon has cut around 30,000 office jobs in a year, while social media giant Meta has laid off 10 percent of its employees. The International Monetary Fund warned that AI would affect around 40 percent of jobs.

Telia, located next door to Pipedrive, recently announced the elimination of 100 jobs. Business is changing and AI is doing more and more.

"If I had to be an oracle, I would rather think that we will be able to do the same work with increasingly fewer people," said Telia CEO Andre Visse.

Young people have been hit hardest by the change. In Estonia, employment among under-25s working in IT has fallen by nearly a quarter in three years.

"Obviously, we are seeing these changes here, and it is considerably more difficult for young people to enter the labor market today than it perhaps was three years ago," said Urve Mets, head of research at OSKA.

However, Sergei Anikin, who years ago grew Pipedrive's engineering department from 10 people to more than 400, believes that young people are flexible and adopt new ways of working more quickly.

"If I compare young people who had no baggage with someone who, for example, has a stable job, a family and a mortgage, and then suddenly realizes that their skills are no longer actually needed because there is a machine that can do their work better and hundreds of times faster, then I think those people will find it considerably harder to cope with this situation," Anikin said.

Could Estonia soon find itself in a situation where there is no longer a shortage of programmers, but rather a surplus?

"If around 400-500 people are laid off from the sector at once, then that will certainly have an impact on the structure of the workforce, and unemployed people will appear on the market for some time. But I think that will correct itself quite quickly," Visse said.

One distinctive feature of Estonia is that IT specialists are concentrated narrowly in the IT sector, Visse said. AI could change that.

"There is actually quite considerable room for development in bringing more technologically knowledgeable, IT-savvy workers into other sectors and helping us digitalize the entire economy and automate these processes more quickly," Visse said.

There will also be high demand for technology skills in the future, but simply writing code will no longer be enough, Mets said.

"IT knowledge alone is not enough, meaning that every young person could think a little about whether, for example, they see their future work as being more connected to technology in the medical field or perhaps in the industrial sector," Mets said.

Whereas good ideas previously went unrealized because there were not enough people to implement them, AI has eliminated that bottleneck, Anikin said.

"We joke here that no stupid idea will go unrealized, so what will actually become important is the ability to distinguish stupid ideas from good ones," Anikin said.

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