The Corporate Playbook of Large employers for 2026 is: don’t hire.

At a gathering of CEOs in Midtown Manhattan this month organized by the Yale School of Management, 66% of leaders surveyed said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year. Only a third indicated they planned to hire.

“You’re going to see a lot of wait and see,” said Chris Layden, chief executive of staffing company Kelly Services. “Some of the looming uncertainty will mean that we’re going to continue to see an investment in capital over people.”

The reluctance to add staff reflects concerns about the economy, along with the belief that artificial intelligence could handle more work inside major companies. Other employers hired too many people after the pandemic and are still correcting for that.

“We’re close to zero job growth. That’s not a healthy labor market,” Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at the Yale summit. “When I go around and talk to CEOs around the country, everybody’s telling me, ‘Look, we’re not hiring because we’re waiting to try to figure out what happens with AI. What jobs can we replace? What jobs do we don’t?’”

The pause in hiring could be temporary if companies decide they do require more people to meet their growth goals. But the mood now, Waller said, is that companies simply don’t need any extra labor.

“Everybody’s afraid for their jobs. I’m dead serious,” said Waller, a candidate to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve.

At a conference recently, a top executive at Shopify was asked to describe the company’s hiring plans and he gave an increasingly common answer. “I don’t see us next year needing to increase head count in any way,” Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffmeister said. “It has been over two years we’ve been at this head count. As I look to next year, I think we can continue to be disciplined on head count.”

At Wells Fargo, CEO Charlie Scharf said this month the bank expected to have fewer people as it heads into next year. The company’s workforce has fallen from roughly 275,000 people in 2019 to about 210,000 today as executives have cut costs and overhauled the bank.

Scharf said he expects AI’s impact on staffing levels to be “extremely significant,” though it could take years to play out. He said many executives have been afraid to lay out the damage that AI could do to the job market. “No one wants to stand up and say that we should have—we’re going to have lower head count in the future,” Scharf said. “It’s a difficult thing to say.”

Change in Small, Medium, Large Employment Year-Over-Year

Large Employers Were the Only Bright Spot in 2025.

Change in Small, Medium, Large Employment Details

• Small: -197,000
• Medium: +275,000
• Large: +1,012,000

If large employers go on a hiring freeze, the 2026 outlook looks bleak.

Unlike large employers, small businesses have fewer means of tariff avoidance and less ability to hold inventory or eat the tariffs.

On December 1, I commented Value City Furniture Goes Bankrupt, Cites Tariffs, 120 Stores Will Close

American Signature, Inc., parent of VCF, filed for Bankruptcy. Fallout in 17 states.

Warn Notices

Value City is just one case. Warn notices are soaring. Newsweek reported Mass Layoff Warnings Climb to Highest Level in Nearly a Decade

According to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) alerts, which employers must issue before conducting mass layoffs, have ticked up in recent weeks. Outside of the initial spike which occurred during the pandemic, the bank said these are now at their highest level since 2016.

In addition to WARN alerts, Goldman’s economists analyzed earnings calls from Russell 3000 firms, finding that “the share of companies mentioning layoffs has increased recently.” In conversations about staffing levels, artificial intelligence has also emerged as a major theme, with “about half of layoff-focused discussions in the last two reporting quarters in the tech sector” including references to the technology.

Of course, CEOs might not do what they say their plans are. But it’s a good bet that they do,

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