My concern here is that they'll mix two things:

1) workforce reduction

2) AI spend (reduce tokenmaxing)

They'll expect fewer people to do more with even less, while "more" is continuously increasing.

When I say "more", I mean that the deluge that engineering teams deal with comes from two sources:

1) the business side of companies - marketing, sales, solutions teams, etc.

2) outside actors, mainly security threats

The first source can now move to generate work for engineering faster than ever. They expect the nerds to do what they're told and get the features out now. The more features, the better the product, right? The saving grace here is that they're bound by the same management concerns that engineering has. There's only so much money that they themselves can throw at generating more work for engineering teams, and that might also come under scrutiny from management, so that acts as a brake.

The second source has no such brake, especially not with security threats. Either there's good money to be made by holding company data hostage, or there's an endless supply of resources (read: nation-state resources) dedicated to the effort to attack the company's digital assets. And of course, they're using AI to enable this, just without the "but what about the shareholders!?" handwringing.

If you aren't very, very careful with your token cutting, you're going to put yourself at a disadvantage against that second group.