Ricardo(@Ric_RTP):AI was the perfect excuse to fire people, and companies just stopped using it. In May, US employers blamed AI for 38,579 job cuts. In October, they blamed it for 1,265. That's a drop of about 97% in 5 months. But companies still announced 43,994 job cuts in October, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. AI was the reason given for fewer than 3% of them. I think that tells us what AI was really doing in all those layoff announcements... It let executives present a cost cut as a bet on the future. And Meta is the best example I've seen: In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Meta would have an AI that could work like a mid-level engineer that year. Then Meta drew up a plan called Project OT that considered shrinking some teams by as much as 60% and handing their work to AI agents, according to Reuters. On May 20, it cut about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its staff. The night before, Zuckerberg cancelled a second wave that was planned for November. So what happened when the agents took over more of the work? Here's what Meta's own internal numbers showed: - Code changes to internal systems rose 220% from a year earlier. - Changes that turned into new or better features for users rose just 36%. - Major technical and security incidents rose 40%. - Time spent fixing those incidents rose 70%. One internal post warned that the agents were taking huge, disruptive actions that a human would almost never take. In July, Zuckerberg told staff at a town hall that agent-driven work hadn't sped things up the way Meta expected. And this was a company with internal leaderboards, some of them unofficial, ranking employees by how many AI tokens they used. So I'd say Meta measured how much AI its people used, and the AI produced a mountain of activity and a lot more cleanup. Now The Guardian reports Meta is rehiring managers. Meta isn't the only one walking it back though: - In a Robert Half survey of 2,000 US hiring managers, 32% said their companies brought back the exact roles they had cut because of AI. - An Atlanta Fed paper surveying nearly 750 executives found little evidence of near-term job losses across the economy due to AI. Meanwhile, 121,401 job cuts this year were announced with AI as the reason. That's about 1 in 5 of all the cuts Challenger has counted in 2026. Those people paid for the AI story, whether or not the AI could do their jobs. Companies should report revenue per employee 12 months later. If it didn't go up, explain what the AI did instead. How many of this year's AI layoffs were ever really about AI?

2026.11.08 14:00

AI was the perfect excuse to fire people, and companies just stopped using it. In May, US employers blamed AI for 38,579 job cuts. In October, they blamed it for 1,265. That's a drop of about 97% in 5 months. But companies still announced 43,994 job cuts in October, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. AI was the reason given for fewer than 3% of them. I think that tells us what AI was really doing in all those layoff announcements... It let executives present a cost cut as a bet on the future. And Meta is the best example I've seen: In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Meta would have an AI that could work like a mid-level engineer that year. Then Meta drew up a plan called Project OT that considered shrinking some teams by as much as 60% and handing their work to AI agents, according to Reuters. On May 20, it cut about 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its staff. The night before, Zuckerberg cancelled a second wave that was planned for November. So what happened when the agents took over more of the work? Here's what Meta's own internal numbers showed: - Code changes to internal systems rose 220% from a year earlier. - Changes that turned into new or better features for users rose just 36%. - Major technical and security incidents rose 40%. - Time spent fixing those incidents rose 70%. One internal post warned that the agents were taking huge, disruptive actions that a human would almost never take. In July, Zuckerberg told staff at a town hall that agent-driven work hadn't sped things up the way Meta expected. And this was a company with internal leaderboards, some of them unofficial, ranking employees by how many AI tokens they used. So I'd say Meta measured how much AI its people used, and the AI produced a mountain of activity and a lot more cleanup. Now The Guardian reports Meta is rehiring managers. Meta isn't the only one walking it back though: - In a Robert Half survey of 2,000 US hiring managers, 32% said their companies brought back the exact roles they had cut because of AI. - An Atlanta Fed paper surveying nearly 750 executives found little evidence of near-term job losses across the economy due to AI. Meanwhile, 121,401 job cuts this year were announced with AI as the reason. That's about 1 in 5 of all the cuts Challenger has counted in 2026. Those people paid for the AI story, whether or not the AI could do their jobs. Companies should report revenue per employee 12 months later. If it didn't go up, explain what the AI did instead. How many of this year's AI layoffs were ever really about AI?

unusual_whales@unusual_whales

2026.11.07 20:01

The AI layoff gamble is backfiring. Companies that rushed to replace workers with AI are now cleaning up the mess, per The Guardian. Meta scaled back plans to cut staff and use more AI agents after employees spent growing time cleaning up the agents’ technical and security errors. It’s now rehiring managers. Microsoft and McKinsey are limiting employee AI use as costs pile up. Walmart workers say AI scheduling and task tools set impossible standards and generate false alerts. The payoff isn’t showing up: 90% of executives say AI hasn’t yet boosted productivity at their companies, per an Atlanta Fed working paper. Yet more than 112,000 US job cuts this year have cited AI, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

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