Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to perform tasks once handled by human employees, including customer service, data analysis, writing, design, administration, logistics, and software development. For businesses, automation can reduce operating costs, increase productivity, improve consistency, and allow services to scale more quickly. However, when companies replace workers with AI systems, the economic benefits often flow primarily to owners and investors, while displaced employees may face unemployment, retraining costs, lower wages, or difficulty finding comparable work. An automation tax would require companies to pay a fee when AI directly replaces human labour. The revenue could potentially support unemployment programs, professional retraining, wage insurance, education, or other forms of economic adjustment. Designing such a policy would raise several practical questions: how to prove that a job was eliminated because of AI, how to distinguish replacement from productivity enhancement, how the tax should be calculated, and whether smaller firms should be treated differently from large corporations.