We attended the first keynote of CES 2025 today, which you can find in this link:
What left an impression on me is the following chart.
So, according to this graph, 2024 wasn’t a bad year overall, with 2025 looking promising. Given the notably higher revenue than the past two years, 2022 and 2023, I can’t help but wonder why all brands complained about low sales and revenue for 2024. Either this chart is wrong, or the brands expected the high sales that they had back in 2021, which was due to the increased demand because COVID-19 had forced people to remain at home, so without spending money for traveling or going out, they “invested” on IT and other categories.
The problem is that despite the higher revenue in 2024 compared to the previous two years, many brands still fired thousands of people in an effort, as they stated, to remain competitive and healthy. Given the numbers, they did so, in my opinion, to please the shareholders by showing more profit rather than to survive as they claimed. AI’s wide adoption helps brands to cut down their workforce, and this makes me wonder whether programmers and IT specialists should pursue the further development of AI, knowing that, at some point, their jobs could be in danger as well from their creations. This might sound cheesy, but I fear it is the truth.
