Workers face a ‘Darwinian Moment’: Palo Alto CEO

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — The CEO of Palo Alto Networks says workers are facing an evolutionary test driven by AI — and that 90% of employees at large companies will fail it because they lack AI skills, not because their jobs are being automated, Fortune reports.

When the survival test is self-taught AI, 90% of the workforce starts behind

“I think we’re back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who’s really good,” said Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks. His company maintains a 2% monthly attrition rate as Arora replaces staff through hackathon hiring, and he estimates 90% of employees at large companies currently lack AI proficiency.

The 90% AI proficiency gap is not a rounding error — it is the labor-market number that turns Arora’s evolutionary metaphor into a concrete workforce gap problem, and that 39% of business leaders have already solved through redundancy.

There’s no course to take — Arora says workers must self-teach or be cut

“I can’t send them to university; there’s no course you can take in any school anywhere,” Arora said. “They have to be able to learn on their own.”

Arora has structured his own company around this premise: “Give me 12 months,” he said, “and I’ll have transformed 20% to 25% of my team” — sourcing replacements through hackathons rather than traditional talent acquisition pipelines.

Thirty-nine percent of business leaders have already made employees redundant due to AI-driven workforce changes, per a 2025 Orgvue study — confirming the Darwinian pattern Arora describes is already in progress.

“It is most likely that most people will lose their job to somebody who uses AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said — recasting the threat as not AI itself but AI-proficient colleagues who absorb the roles of those who don’t adapt.

When 90% of the workforce lacks AI proficiency and the learning path is self-directed, the talent supply problem is not a reskilling challenge but a sourcing problem: companies cannot grow AI-capable teams at the speed Arora’s “Darwinian moment” demands.

For BPO and offshore staffing providers, Arora’s “Darwinian moment” is not a warning about their clients’ workforce — it is a demand signal. The companies replacing bottom-quartile staff through hackathon hiring pipelines need AI-proficient teams at speed; the companies that cannot run hackathons or build self-teaching cultures at scale need a plug-in alternative.

Offshore providers that train and certify teams in AI tools before day one of a contract are the plug-in alternative Arora’s framing — and the 39% of business leaders already acting on it — have created a market for.