The International Energy Agency, one of the world's most important energy groups, has issued 10 measures it says governments, businesses, and consumers can take immediately to help ease the impact of disruptions in oil markets.

These include working from home, avoiding air travel, and encouraging the use of electric cooking equipment.

Other steps include reducing highway speed limits by at least six miles per hour, car sharing, cutting air travel, and using public transport more.

The IEA said in the report that "the demand-side measures highlighted in the report cannot match the scale of disrupted supply."

However, it said "they can play a meaningful role in lowering costs for consumers, reducing markets strains and preserving fuels for essential uses until normal flows resume."

The Philippines has taken several measures in order to bring down energy use, including a four-day workweek for government staff and orders to cut the use of electricity and fuel costs in government agencies.

Government offices were told in early March to implement flexible working arrangements where practical, turn off lights and computers during lunch breaks, and adjust air conditioning unit thermostats to no lower than 75 degrees.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said in a video message that the four-day workweek would be temporary and does not include emergency services.

"With the expected global oil price increase, the government is preparing measures to reduce its impact on Filipino families," the Facebook caption for the video said.

The Philippines is vulnerable to disruptions caused by the conflict, as it "relies on the Middle East for almost 90% of its oil supply," according to ING Think.

On March 18, Marcos said that the country is seeking alternative sources of petroleum products and asked the public not to worry.

"We are trying to find different methods to provide subsidies to give assistance," said Marcos in a press address. "The problem is that oil prices are very volatile. We can't anticipate them. So we are still adjusting right now."

While no official rationing has been implemented in Australia, local media in at least two of the country's states reported that some fuel stations had begun limiting the amount of fuel customers can buy.

In comments to the media on Monday, March 9, Australia's energy minister Chris Bowen said that there is no shortage of fuel in Australia, but there are "some supply chain issues which are really being caused by a spike in demand of people seeking to buy extra diesel."

The president of the AA, the UK's largest motoring organization, advised drivers on Monday, March 9, that although they "should not change their refuelling habits," they could "consider cutting out some non-essential journeys and changing their driving style to conserve fuel."

Edmund King, AA's president, added: "Any time Brent Crude passes 100 dollars per barrel raises concern across the markets, for the haulage industry and drivers.

"There will be gradual increases in pump prices, but this shouldn't happen overnight as fuel has been purchased at previous prices."

Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, said that the government would support citizens during the oil price spike.

"No matter the headwinds, supporting working people and their families with the cost of living is always top of my mind," he said.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul urged citizens not to stockpile fuel. His comments came after long lines formed at gas stations across the country last week.

In early March, Anutin and the country's energy minister gave assurances that the diesel price would be capped for at least 15 days. He said that the Commerce Ministry was closely monitoring oil prices to prevent customer exploitation.

"Stockpiling fuel is dangerous. If you store it at home, it could accidentally cause fire — it could lead to all sorts of problems," he said. "There is no need to do that today."

The Indian government invoked emergency powers on March 10 to divert liquefied petroleum gas supplies away from industrial users and toward households.

This was an expansion of previous measures. On March 9, India had ordered oil refineries to produce more LPG and said it was prioritizing that supply for households.

India's Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said in a tweet on Monday that non-domestic supplies from imported LPG were being prioritized for essential sectors, such as hospitals and educational institutions.

Vietnam has urged local businesses to encourage employees to work from home in order to save fuel.

This comes after the country said it would remove tariffs on fuel imports.

Pakistan has ordered measures to conserve fuel and reduce government spending, including implementing a four-day work week, having half of public sector employees work from home, and closing schools for two weeks.

Other measures include a pause on salaries for cabinet ministers and cutting government spending by 20%, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced on March 10.

Sri Lanka has made Wednesdays a public holiday to conserve fuel as the country braces for potential fuel shortages, according to the BBC.

"We must prepare for the worst, but hope for the best," President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said on March 9.

The shortened workweek will apply to schools and universities, but "essential" services like hospitals will keep the lights on.

Denmark is urging citizens to reduce fuel.

"What the Danes should please, please, please do is that if there is any energy consumption that you can do without, if it is not strictly necessary to drive the car, then don't do it," Lars Aagaard, Denmark's energy and utilities minister, said during an interview with a local broadcaster on Wednesday.

"Firstly, it can be felt in the private wallet, and secondly, it can help stretch our reserves so that they last longer," Aagaard added.

Bangladesh's university students just got an early start to their Ramadan holidays, thanks to fuel conservation measures.

The country announced by mid-March that main colleges could cancel classes until later in the month. The government has shut down campuses completely to save electricity and has started imposing temporary blackouts for other facilities.

Egypt is enforcing some lifestyle changes to conserve gas and oil.

For a country that is used to shopping and dining well into the night, malls, restaurants, and retailers are being asked to shut down at 9 p.m. on weekdays starting on March 28.

The country also announced plans to turn off illuminated billboards and reduce public lighting, and to close government buildings by 6 p.m.

Spain's government has approved a $5.8 billion aid package to ease the economic effects of the war in the Middle East, Bloomberg reported.

The plan includes reducing VAT on electricity and gas from 21% to 10%, slashing the special electricity tax from 5% to 0.5%, and suspending the tax on electricity production, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.

A subsidy of 20 cents per liter of fuel is being introduced for transport operators, farmers, and fishmongers, while the government will cover 80% of the electricity-grid charges for energy-intensive industries.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that AI-driven efficiency gains would shrink the retail giant's workforce in the coming years — but in the company's two recent mass layoffs, Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.

"Our ambition is to be the world's largest startup," Amazon executives wrote in two memos viewed by Business Insider in January. "That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation — which requires us to continue evolving how we're structured."

An Amazon spokesperson also previously reiterated to Business Insider that the cuts last October were not driven by AI.

When the October layoffs were announced, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology wrote in a blog post that the move reflected a continued effort to run the company "like the world's largest startup." The SVP, Beth Galetti, also referenced a need to be leaner in the age of AI.

"This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," Galetti wrote in the post.

Atlassian announced cuts of 1,600 jobs in March, totaling about 10% of its global workforce. The move comes as the Australian-American software company says it is restructuring to focus on AI and enterprise growth.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the reduction was part of a broader effort to reposition the business for what CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes described as the "AI era."

"It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does," Cannon-Brookes wrote in a message to employees.

On the "20VC" podcast in October last year, prior to the cuts, Cannon-Brookes said he planned to have more engineers at the company in five years.

"They will be more efficient, but technology creation is not output-bound," Cannon-Brookes said.

In a post on X last month, billionaire and Block CEO Jack Dorsey said he was slashing nearly half of Block's workforce, cutting its over 10,000-person staff to under 6,000. The move came as he said business was strong and profits were growing, but a new way of working was emerging.

"We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey said in his memo on X.

In the company's earnings call that followed the memo, Dorsey said that more companies will follow suit in using AI to drive efficiency gains. Block is already ahead of the trend that "all companies will eventually" adopt, the CEO said.

Micha Kaufman, the CEO and founder of Fiverr, said last September that the company was slashing roughly 30% of its workforce. The cut would affect about 250 team members, and the freelancing platform had 762 full-time employees as of 2024, according to an SEC filing.

The CEO said that the cuts were needed to help turn Fiverr into a leaner and faster "AI-first company."

Kaufman said in a staff memo last April that AI was "coming for your jobs," and in May, he told Business Insider that Fiverr would only hire people who know how to use AI.

"If you don't ensure that you sharpen your knives, you're going to be left behind. It's that simple," Kaufman said.

HP said it's reducing the size of its corporate workforce as a result of AI initiatives. In an earnings report last November, the company said it plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of 2028, estimating the changes would save around $1 billion.

HP's earnings presentation at the time said part of its strategy was to cut costs through "workforce reductions, platform simplification, programs consolidation, and productivity measures" and to increase customer satisfaction, innovation, and productivity with "artificial intelligence adoption and enablement."

Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, told The Wall Street Journal last year that it had replaced hundreds of human resources employees with AI.

More recently, the company announced last November that it would cut thousands of workers in the fourth quarter of 2025, affecting a "single-digit percentage of its global workforce." Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, said the company is shifting priorities to hire more people around AI and quantum. He also said the company plans to increase hiring among recent college graduates over the next year.

Krishna has also said AI adoption has led to the company hiring more employees in programming and sales.

In 2023, Krishna told Bloomberg that IBM had halted or slowed hiring for back-office roles, like in human resources, that could be replaced by AI.

"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he told the outlet at the time.

Klarna's CEO says its workforce has halved over the last four years and will shrink further in the coming years.

In an interview with Harry Stebbings on the "20 VC" podcast on Monday, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there are about 3,000 employees at Klarna, and he expects the company's workforce to drop below 2,000 by 2030. The company had 7,000 employees in 2022, he said.

The CEO said the reduction is a result of layoffs and "natural attrition," which is when the company doesn't replace workers who leave.

Siemiatkowski said on Monday that "human connection" will be vital for the company, and jobs involved in that will not be replaced by AI.

"Those jobs will remain, but for the rest it's going to be definitely smaller," he said.

Klarna declined to comment further when contacted by Business Insider. A spokesperson previously said that its AI assistant handles the equivalent workload of 853 full-time agents, up from 700 at launch. The spokesperson said it was saving the company an estimated $58 million annually.

Salesforce cut fewer than 1,000 workers in February, including employees from marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI product.

In an episode of "The Logan Bartlett Show" released last August, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company was using AI agents in its customer support division to replace humans and help the company work through more sales leads.

"I was able to rebalance my head count on my support," he said in the interview. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads."

A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider previously that Benioff was referencing an organizational transformation that took place over several months to reshape its customer support function.

After deploying Agentforce, the company no longer needed to "actively backfill support engineer roles," the spokesperson said, adding that it successfully redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas of the company, like professional services, sales, and customer success.

Zubin Appoo, the CEO of Wisetech, said the logistics software maker is cutting 2,000 jobs, or 30% of its staff, because of AI-led efficiency.

In a conference call on February 25, Appoo said that AI enables greater productivity in less time and with fewer employees. The Sydney-based company employed about 7,000 people, according to an annual report released in October.

"I am prepared to say this clearly: the era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over," Appoo said. The technology is "unlocking levels of efficiency gains across WiseTech that were previously out of reach."

In some parts of the workforce, such as customer service, one in two workers will disappear, he added.

Correction: December 1, 2025 — The bullet points of this article have been updated to clarify Amazon's statements about how AI may affect its workforce.