June 2026 · Anthony Sogg

The Layoff A(I)libi

Sequel to “Nobody Got Fired for Blaming AI.” Same villain, bigger budget, and this time the data showed up.

A couple of weeks ago I argued that nobody gets fired for blaming AI. Consider this the reboot. And since every film and game studio is rebooting, why shouldn’t I?

When I made the original case, the AI-washing read was a hunch with good circumstantial support. I hedged on purpose. This time the data means I don’t have to. Gartner ran the numbers, and the numbers do not flatter the keynote.

The numbers showed up

Gartner surveyed 350 executives at companies clearing at least a billion dollars in revenue. Eighty percent of the ones piloting AI had reduced headcount, with cuts averaging between 1% and 15%.

Then the part that should stop you cold: there was no correlation between the cuts and the return (Gartner, reported by CIO and Fortune).

The companies posting the strongest ROI were not the companies doing the cutting. Helen Poitevin, the Gartner analyst behind the study, said it without hedging: “There seems to be no link between laying people off and getting ROI from AI investments.” Her advice was blunter. “Do not use AI as an excuse, especially if you want to get AI value.” Robespierre has entered the chat.

Sit with that, because it flips the entire pitch. The story on stage is that AI makes people redundant, so you cut, and the savings are the win. If that were true, the heaviest cutters would be the biggest winners. They are not. The cutting and the winning are happening in different rooms. Guillotine sharpening intensifies.

An alibi needs three things

It was the C-suite, in the boardroom, with a red pen.

So, if AI is not producing the returns, what is it producing? Cover.

A good alibi needs a suspect, a story, and a witness who will not check. AI supplies all three. The suspect, which is the decision to cut, gets a clean story, which is that the software did it, handed to a witness who applauds instead of auditing, which is the market.

Block, Atlassian, and Cloudflare all watched their shares move when they pointed at AI (TechCrunch). As we’ve come to see, truth is a suggestion in our society, so the witness rewards the story with thunderous applause. It must be told with a straight face.

Now even the cast agrees

The people closest to the money have started saying it without the costume on. Marc Andreessen, no one’s idea of a technophobe, called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are really about pandemic-era over-hiring (Fortune).

His words: “Every large company is overstaffed… Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.” Sam Altman admitted the same thing he is selling against: “There’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do” (Fortune). Even Jack Dorsey, after thinning Block by thousands, conceded the company had over-hired during the pandemic (TechCrunch). Have you heard the one about a walking, quacking duck?

The powder keg is the optics

Here is where the sequel rolls out the cannon. The cuts are landing in the worst possible room. Tech has shed close to 150,000 jobs so far this year, roughly 974 a day, about 44% faster than last year (TrueUp, via TechCrunch). Last month alone ran near 40,000, with AI the most-cited reason for the third month running (Challenger, Gray & Christmas). And the timing is the tell. At the same moment those workers get walked out, the IPO window is minting fortunes: SpaceX public near a $2.1 trillion valuation, an AI chipmaker minting billionaires on its first trading day, OpenAI and Anthropic circling the trillion-dollar line (TechCrunch). L’État, c’est moi.

Meanwhile 76% of Americans now rank the cost of living as their top economic worry, up from 58% a year earlier (CNN/SSRS), and 65% say a middle-class life is out of reach (NYT/Siena). But yes, tell me again how Wall Street is the only barometer for financial health.

You do not need a history degree to feel the charge in the air. The last time the gap between “we are fine” and “you are not” got this wide, it ended in 2008. I need not remind anyone of how that went. Though I do believe I hear some commotion over at the Bastille…

And? So? Therefore? (Reprise)

Anyone smell grapeshot?

To be perfectly clear, my position is not that AI has not touched the labor market. It certainly has, and the impact is not only financial. We are balancing on a fine edge, watching how the speculation around these tools moves wealth, power, and standards of living.

What bothers me most about the lazy version of this story is that it is condescending. We have seen this script before, across centuries and cultures and causes. We are also the most informed, most transparent generation that has ever lived, and these figureheads still think they can fool us with a drugstore magic act.

And yes, I am mixing my French history: the Sun King, the Terror, Zola, the cake. Pick the century. The script never changes.

None of this means AI is fake, or that the work stays the same. It means the layoff is not the AI strategy. It is the move companies make in lieu of aforementioned strategy.

Blame the software all you like, but the software is dumb, the way every computer is dumb. It only does what we feed it. The firms banking returns understood that and did the unglamorous thing: they reinvested in the people they kept.

Gartner calls it “people amplification.” The operators in the trenches put it more sharply. “You cannot automate expertise you no longer have,” one CTO said. “Cutting headcount is easy to measure. Building the operating model that makes AI actually deliver value is not” (CIO). A cut is easy to count, so it gets counted as progress. It is not progress. It is a press release.

The companies that win the next stretch will be the ones with an actual strategy: reskilling talent, building efficiencies that move people up instead of out, and refusing to set what little public trust remains on fire for everyone to watch.

An alibi only must hold until someone checks the receipts. Gartner just checked. The cuts and the returns sit in two different ledgers, and the gap between them is the whole story, same as it was the first time I wrote it. The honest few will say what the cut was really for and admit the machine only ever did what it was told.

The true culprits are those screaming “j’accuse!” while stuffing their faces with cake.

Anthony

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