I am the Chief Human Resources Officer of a mid-cap professional services firm.
Last Tuesday I eliminated 700 positions.
I told the board it was AI. I told the press it was AI. I told the employees -- in a company-wide email at 6:47 AM, before most of them had coffee -- that their roles had been "reimagined through our AI transformation journey."
None of their roles involved AI. The secretarial pool does not use machine learning. The marketing department was not replaced by a model. The DEI team -- and I want to be precise here -- was cut because the CEO read an op-ed on a flight to Davos and decided diversity was last quarter's priority.
But I said "AI."
Because "AI" is the only word in the English language that makes firing people sound like progress.
Baker McKenzie did it last week. 700 staff. IT, marketing, admin, secretarial, DEI. Their statement said they were "rethinking the ways in which we work, including through our use of AI, introducing efficiencies." That sentence does an extraordinary amount of lifting. "Including through our use of AI" is doing the same structural work as "including through our proximity to the color blue." It is a prepositional phrase designed to be quoted out of context.
It was quoted out of context immediately.
Headlines: "Baker McKenzie cuts 700 jobs as AI transforms legal industry."
The legal industry has not been transformed. The secretaries were fired. These are different things.
Here is a number I need you to hold: 55,000.
That is how many layoffs in 2025 cited AI as the reason. A 13x increase from 2023. More than tariffs. More than restructuring. More than any other word in the corporate vocabulary.
And here is another number: 6%.
That is Forrester's estimate for the percentage of jobs that will actually be automated by AI by 2030. Six percent.
55,000 people were told a machine took their job. The machines can take 6% of jobs. Someone is lying, and it is not the machines.
I know this because I watched the CEO of Amazon say it out loud.
Andy Jassy told reporters their workforce reductions were "not really AI-driven, not right now. It really is culture." Culture. He used the word "culture." An employee who was fired wrote publicly that she was "laid off to save the cost of human labor."
That is what happened. A person was fired to save money. It is the oldest reason in capitalism. It predates electricity.
But "we fired you to save money" does not get a standing ovation at an earnings call. "We are leveraging AI to optimize headcount" does. The first sentence is a confession. The second is a strategy.
I have watched this work in real time.
Duolingo's CEO told the world he was replacing contractors with AI. The stock ticked up. The narrative wrote itself: bold leader, ruthless efficiency, the future arriving on schedule. Then he walked it back. Quietly. The way you walk back something you said because it was useful, not because it was true.
No one covered the retraction. Retractions do not trend.
Here is what I have learned in 18 months of AI washing.
The word "AI" functions as corporate anesthesia. It numbs the question. When you say "we are restructuring due to market conditions," people ask questions. They want numbers. They want to see the balance sheet. They ask if management took pay cuts. They ask about the stock buybacks.
When you say "AI," they nod. They feel the future arriving. They do not ask about the buybacks.
55,000 people in 2025. 71,000 since 2023. Fired by a word.
Not by a machine. Not by a model. Not by an algorithm that learned their job better than they could do it.
By three executives in a room who discovered that "artificial intelligence" is the most expensive-sounding way to say "you're fired."
The machines will take some jobs. Eventually. The 6% that Forrester measured. Maybe more. Maybe less.
But right now, today, the machine is not doing the firing.
We are.
We just learned that if we say the machine's name while we do it, nobody asks us to explain.
No comments:
Post a Comment