AI adoption is already taking its toll in a variety of areas, the latest casualty being the gig economy freelance marketplace, fiverr, a site at which companies and/or individuals can hire out talent for a wide variety of tasks, from mowing lawns to babysitting to website development, graphics, and coding.
The company (FVRR) released its latest quarterly earnings report Wednesday morning. While able to surpass analyst estimates, the company issued a discouraging forecast, citing AI as one of the main causes for caution moving forward.
Micha Kaufman, the company’s founder and CEO, emphasized that the company is experiencing a major shift in AI adoption, with the marketplace evolving to make human talent more essential.
The above quote, taken from this Benzinga article which outlines the company's financial condition, doesn't make a load of sense. CEO Kaufman recognizes the shift toward AI, but in the same breath offers the opinion that his company will focus on making "human talent more essential," which is the exact opposite of what AI does. It degrades human talent. In some cases - and these will grow as AI becomes more robust - AI eliminates human interaction altogether.
Now, if all you need is somebody to do window washing or lawn care, fiverr is probably a good place to look. But, if you're a business manager seeking to expand opportunities, increase market share, create content, do sales analysis, or any of the hundreds of business activities that constitute day-to-day operations, AI can do them at a fracton of the cost of what these freelancers on fiverr are charging, many of them already pitching AI tools and integration themselves.
Taken through a lens that filters out the burgeoning impact of AI, Fiverr's metrics weren't all that bad.
Fiverr reported adjusted earnings per share of 86 cents, beating the analyst consensus estimate of 72 cents. Normally, that would be positive. However, given the current climate, with the view that AI is going to eliminate much of the business need for human interaction, it's a bummer.
Shares are down some 22-24% in pre-market trading. What's worse is that the compnay's stock is down some 97% from where it was five years ago. Pre-market quote for FVRR is $10.33, down from an all-time high of $323 in February, 2021. Ouch!
That's where the rubber meets the road. Most savvy business managers want to keep costs down, while having the ability to delegate tasks and keep the managers time open to pursue more important activities, like smoozing with upper management, playing golf, or actually improving the business. Such a manager might hire a fiverr freelancer for a specific task, and, if professionally performed, might keep the freelancer on call for other jobs. Meanwhile, this manager is firing all of his full-time employees as he finds free-lance replacements.
On an tangetial level, Ai is going to wreak havoc on accounting, reporting, and employment firms, especially ones like Paychex (PAYX) which handles all the government filings and payroll for many small and medium-sized companies. Another area of impact will be in HR departments. With the need for personnal management degraded, there will eventually be no need to have much more than a single person overseeing the human workforce. The days of nagging HR compliance overseers are soon to meet their just reward: the unemployment line.
The fivrr experience is far from an isolated case. AI is going to rupture corporate myths and the need for human labor. AI, and the emergence of robotics in the workplace will make human interaction almost an afterthought. This ongoing, dramtic change in the business landscape is certain to have long-lasting effects. The companies which embrace AI and robotics at the fastest pace are most likely to aviod becoming irrelevant, but many will fall by the wayside simply by not keeping up with rapidchanges in corporate structure. Forget the horrors of DEI. The blue-haired tattooed lowlife demanding a living wage will become a forgotten relic from an era of massive stupidity.
Wise investors will be looking to firms which adopt AI in crafty ways and send their legacy employees - at least at entry level for now - packing.
At the close, Tuesday, February 17, 2026:
Dow: 49,533.19, +32.26 (+0.07%)
NASDAQ: 22,578.38, +31.71 (+0.14%)
S&P 500: 6,843.22, +7.05 (+0.10%)
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