🦔55% of companies that laid off workers citing AI now regret it, according to Forrester. Two-thirds are already rehiring. A survey of 600 HR leaders found over a third had rehired more than half the roles they cut, often within six months and at higher cost. Klarna bragged about replacing 700 customer service workers with AI, then quietly started hiring humans again when quality collapsed. Ford is rehiring engineers to fix problems automated systems couldn't handle. Forrester projects AI automates about 6% of jobs by 2030. Six percent. My Take Companies fired people, replaced them with AI, watched things break, and are now paying more to bring people back than they saved by cutting them. I think it exposes how poorly most executives understood what their own employees actually did. The work that's easy to see, writing code, answering tickets, processing claims, looked like the expensive part. The work that's hard to see, the institutional knowledge, the judgment calls, the context about why things are done a certain way, turned out to be what held everything together. This reminds me of the offshoring wave in the 2000s. Companies moved everything they could overseas, discovered the hidden costs a year later, and quietly brought it back under a different name. Same impulse, same blindness to what the people they cut were actually doing all day. The difference is that offshoring at least put humans on the other end. This time they replaced humans with a tool that hallucinates, can't handle edge cases, and has no memory of why the last three attempts at solving this problem failed. Forrester says 6% by 2030. Over half the companies that swung bigger than that already regret it. Hedgie🤗