CEOs have been saying the exact same thing for the entire history of automation. Take computing, for example, an industry that's always been unusually amenable to automation:

— in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers.

— in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch."

— in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer."

While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.

While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath.

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html