AI is killing the Great Resignation – but there’s one reason you should quit your job

AI is coming for our livelihoods. That is the fear wherever you look. I think it’s the reason that so many have now decided to sit tight in jobs they don’t even like and not make any sudden moves towards the exit door.

In fact, what’s become clear is that the Great Resignation, that boom in “quiet quitters” – and actual ones – that erupted in the pandemic is over. There’s a nice graph on Statista, a data website, looking at job-to-job quitters, so those leaving their current employer for a new one. It shows that at the peak of the so-called Great Resignation, when everyone was quitting in the second quarter of 2022, there were nearly 450,000 of these people. Then in November 2022, ChatGPT was made public. Roll on to the final quarter of 2025, that figure had tumbled to less than half at 205,000.

People naturally stay put when they’re worried about their jobs. Switching employer is risky, particularly if you’re doing well in your current job and feel reasonably good about it.

If the axe starts swinging, whether as the result of AI or something else, it might well be last in, first out, too, right? Best stay put and hold on tight. I’ve quit on four occasions, once without any job to go to. I don’t imagine that there is anything unusual about me in that respect. The idea of the ‘job for life’ died a long time ago.

How AI will impact workplaces is still not at all clear. In some cases it’s actually proving quite helpful. It played a role in this piece, helping with some the numbers I’ve used. It could do a lot of good in professions such as, say, policing or nursing, freeing those at the sharp end from a lot of highly tedious, if not actively vexatious admin.

But in Silicon Valley, and in other tech hubs, such as London, or Cambridge, where coders can also earn six figures, with juicy benefits packages on top, that fear is real and perfectly rational. AI can code, and much faster any human can. And that fear is spreading through every sector. Sam Altman, the controversial OpenAI CEO, this week said some companies are “AI washing” by blaming unrelated layoffs on the technology – but admits things may get worse soon.

The New York Times this week reported on fears in Silicon Valley – hyperbolic in some cases, self-serving in others, but nevertheless real – that AI will created a “permanent underclass”, triggering a jobs apocalypse. Some analysts, like the economist Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia and the Anthropic Institute, suggest that no human job is invulnerable in the long run.

Some are clearly taking the view that they’re best off battening down the hatches and stashing as much cash as they can, while they can, so when the hammer falls they can open that bougie B&B across the country in New England. Idaho, or Wyoming? In the UK, think the Cotswolds or maybe the Lakes? I call them super quitters. These are the people who are building wealth now believing that we have a limited window of time to build wealth before A.I. and robotics are advanced enough to fully replace human labor. It’s a niche, viral term for a theory doing the rounds online. But it’s growing – even among us normies.

A regular story in the world of money news concerns the number of Brits who have less than £1,000 in savings (roughly two in five, for fans of scary numbers). However, much less widely reported is the sizeable number who are the opposite.

Official figures show 2.7m people have between £50,000 and £100,000 stashed away. Some 15m Adult ISA accounts were subscribed to in 2023 to 2024, close to a record, and a sharp increase on the 12.4m in 2022 to 2023, itself comfortably ahead of the 11.7m on the prior year.

Cash ISAs are by far the most popular, but stocks and shares versions hit a record 4.1m in the aforementioned year, which is a very welcome development. That is where the returns are. It’s where my spare funds go.

Super savers (confession time – I’m one – most are over 55 and I’m knocking at that door) have the capacity to quit and find new, presumably less AI affected, careers, should that be necessary.

Former Elle magazine editor Lotte Jeffs recently wrote for The Independent about her experience heading back to uni to train as a psychotherapist as part of “the great re-education”. Yes, people have taken to using bots for that, too. However, I suspect most would prefer the human touch.

If the end result of getting the savings habit is a mid-life career shift to beat the bots? Hard to see a better reason for squirreling money away.