Executives don't understand technology, and how complex and high maintenance modern corporate infrastructure is.
They also don't understand how company specific a lot of it is.
All they see are the dollar signs of the salaries of expensive IT specialists and are overeager to listen to any snake oil salesman promising to eliminate those awful expenses.
For 20 years I've seen clueless senior leaders try to cut IT costs with contractors and offshoring. For 20 years I've seen it backfire spectacularly time and time again. I can only think of a few instances where those efforts had a neutral or better outcome, and those were cases where very simplistic tasks were offshored (ones that could be fully scripted and defined, with no gray areas). Most cases a year or two later, onshore teams would be painfully and expensively restaffed to pick up the pieces. In one case, they had to sell off the entire business unit.
I expect the shortcomings of this latest flavor of cost cutting replacement strategy will burn quite a few companies in the next few years.
Can advanced automation and machine learning (I hate the phrase 'AI' because it's not actually intelligent) increase efficiency in IT development and operations? Absolutely. Can it do away with those expensive experts? Not really - because you are simply trading some of the hands on data analysis and code grunt work for increased testing and maintenance and overhead of the models of the new toolset. If anything you might reduce headcount slightly, but need even higher skilled people who are able to understand what the 'AI' is doing and what its limitations are. Not to mention increased security needs as the toolsets of potential malicious actors have improved dramatically as well.
Improved automation absolutely will kill a lot of jobs in the next decade, but the people able to build and maintain sophisticated systems are not going to be the ones successfully eliminated.
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