The AI Revolution Is Here. Turns Out It’s Just A Layoff With Better PR.

I work in HR Tech. Which means I spend a lot of time in rooms with people who have staked their careers on the idea that work can be better. That the relationship between an employer and a human being doesn’t have to be purely transactional. That technology can serve people, not just processes.

That argument is getting significantly harder to make. And I am going to need to put on “my angry eyes” about it before I try to figure out what to do with the anger.

I wrote this after I got back from Unleash and Transform. Two days with some of the most genuinely passionate people I have ever been in a room with, including recruiters, HR practitioners, and people builders who are scrappy, resourceful, and burning with purpose. The kind of room that makes you remember why this work matters.

Then I landed, checked my phone, and watched another round of headlines about another tech giant quietly walking tens of thousands of people out the door, because AI can do it cheaper.

The AI revolution isn’t disrupting the workplace — it’s just giving profitable companies better PR for the layoffs they planned anyway.

Let’s Be Honest

Alan Cohen at RationalFX has been tracking the 2026 tech layoff data, and the numbers are not abstract.

Since January 1, 2026, 78,557 tech workers have been laid off worldwide. March alone accounted for more than 33,000 of those, the worst single month since July 2025. If the pace holds, Cohen’s team projects the year-end total could hit 318,592 layoffs, surpassing 2025’s already brutal 245,000.

Here’s a number that will make you spit out your La Croix: nearly half of all 2026 layoffs, 38,279 jobs, are directly linked to AI adoption.

These are not companies bleeding out, they are doing just fine HUNNY. Oracle reported a 95% jump in net income to $6.13 billion and simultaneously laid off 25,254 people. Those employees, spread across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico, received termination emails with no prior warning from HR or their managers. The freed cash flow is funding a $156 billion AI infrastructure buildout.

Amazon, which posted record revenues of $716.9 billion in 2025, up 12% year-on-year, cut another 16,000 jobs in 2026. They also plan to spend $200 billion on capital expenditures this year.

Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey did not try to soften it. He stated explicitly that AI could now automate much of the work the 4,000 eliminated employees had been doing.

IDK why it surprises me anymore but OBVIOUSLY this is a deliberate, calculated, shareholder-first choice dressed up in the language of innovation.

AKA cowardice with a chatbot.

The Alternative Was Right. There.

Every single one of these companies had the resources to use AI differently adn frankly, COOLER. The technology exists right now to give people their time back. A 32-hour work week with no pay cut? Viable for knowledge workers. Real parental leave, not the “technically 12 weeks but please be back in 8” version that has become standard? Absolutely viable. Using AI productivity gains to close the salary gap that has been quietly bleeding workers dry through a decade of inflation? The math works. Investment in mental health support, career development, schedule flexibility? All of it, just there for the taking.

They chose violence, ahem, I mean, layoffs instead.

The audacity of watching a company post a 95% jump in net income, hand the CEO an eight-figure compensation package, and then tell 25,000 people their positions have been “eliminated due to organizational restructuring,” while expecting any of us to nod along like this is just the natural order of things, which of course, we DO.

It is not natural. And companies that had every option in front of them picked the worst one.

Meanwhile, Back in Reality

You want to know who is not doing this? Small and medium-sized businesses.

The ones with no war chest. The ones that DARE not automate their way out of a workforce and still hit quarterly numbers (because we’re sitting right there with them, we SEE who keeps the lights on). The ones keeping people employed through what is shaping up to be one of the most difficult economic stretches in recent memory, including possible recession territory, by bending into an Auntie Anne’s to make payroll. Getting creative with benefits. Getting flexible with schedules. Getting personal with communication.

These businesses are doing more with less, which is supposed to be the entire point of technological advancement in the first place, and they are doing it without vaporizing their workforce to prove an earnings-per-share figure to a room full of shareholders.

The companies with the most resources are doing the least for the people who built them. That is the real story, and not enough people are like, pissed.

Small businesses are doing more with less and keeping people employed — while Big Tech banks record profits and calls layoffs “AI transformation.”

The Human Cost Is Not Abstract

Every day I get updates from Reddit threads, LinkedIn groups, and job hunting communities, from real people. Not statistics. People.

People who have been searching for months. A year. Sometimes longer. People who are overqualified for entry-level roles and get told so directly. People who made it to final rounds, actual final rounds, and got passed over. People who are exhausted and frightened and are living in motels because they were laid off from a company that was posting record profits six months before handing over the box.

“I’m so tired of applying for jobs only to get rejected.”

“It happened so quickly. I had the day off today, but I decided to check my work email just in case.”

“After over a year of searching, I finally received and accepted a job offer.”

That one had a happy ending. It took a year. For someone who was doing everything right.

Cohen’s piece notes something that should disturb everyone in this industry: many companies appear to be restructuring ahead of the technology’s actual capabilities. AI systems are not fully deployed yet. The gap between expectation and execution is real, which means some of these layoffs may be quietly followed by rehiring in lower-cost regions. AI is the cover story.

Being in HR Tech Makes This Personal

I work in a space where people have spent their careers making the argument that the employer-employee relationship doesn’t have to be extractive. That data and technology can serve people, not just processes. That the experience of work can actually be good. Idealistic? Sure. Pollyannaish? Maybe. Possible? Fuckin right.

That argument got harder this week.

Because when the most well-resourced companies in the world use the most transformative technology in a generation to cut headcount instead of reimagine it, they don’t just hurt the people they lay off. They hand ammunition to every cynical executive who has ever called employees a cost center. They validate every worker who has been quietly suspicious of HR’s actual motives. They make the mission of making work human longer and lonelier for everyone trying to build something better.

And they do it with a press release and an earnings call.

Atlassian is a particularly bitter example. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes described cutting 1,600 jobs, 10% of the global workforce, as “becoming an AI-first company.” More than half the eliminated roles were in software research and development. Atlassian had publicly committed months earlier to hiring more engineers. Make it make sense.

If you want to understand the full scope of employment decision AI crisis — including how managers are increasingly letting AI make calls about raises, promotions, and terminations without human oversight — the pattern goes deeper than just headcount cuts.

What Should Have Happened

AI has more potential than this y’all!

It can reduce the cognitive load on workers who are drowning in administrative work, so they can hone their expertise. It can give parents more time with their children without asking them to sacrifice their careers. It can make workplaces more accessible for people with disabilities. It can eliminate the repetitive, soul-grinding work that burns people out, not to replace those people, but to free them up for the work that requires them.

The technology is not the villain here. The priorities are.

Why is no one asking “How can AI help us run better?” And I mean better for the people who show up every day, not just the people who show up on the shareholder report.

But no one asked and so no one answered and even if they did, someone overruled it somewhere on the way to the corner office.

So What Now

I do not have the answers. All I can do is try to influence my tiny little corner of the world, and hope the generations coming up will have a clearer outlook on things. I can’t wrap this with a framework (and I am pretty good at making those) or a three-step action plan, because this is not that kind of problem and this is not that kind of piece.

What I know is this. If you are an HR or talent leader, your job just got more important and more political. You can name what is happening. You can say: this is a choice, and here are the choices we didn’t make.

If you are a business leader outside the big tech world, what you are doing right now, keeping people employed, figuring it out, staying human, matters more than you probably know. Do not let anyone tell you that survival instinct is less sophisticated than an AI-powered efficiency play.

And if you are one of the people who logged into your work email and found out your position no longer exists: I am angry for you. You didn’t fail, the system failed you.

Nearly half of all tech layoffs in 2026 are AI-related. 78,557 people and counting. Projected to hit 318,000 by December.

✅ Record profits. Check

✅ Record infrastructure investment. CHECK

✅ ✅ ✅ Record executive compensation. CHECK CHECK with lots of zeros behind it.

The giants are not disrupting anything. They’re just outsourcing the cost of their ambition onto the people who can least afford it. The AI excuse is destroying entry-level careers too — and the workers paying the price are the ones who had the least runway to absorb the blow.