Companies Are Investing Billions In A Future Employees May Not Be In
Employers who commit billions toward an AI-empowered future at the expense of their workforce are finding that they are losing institutional knowledge
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There’s a certain irony in layoffs being framed as efficiency while companies continue to invest in the future of work. Big Tech has seen thousands of layoffs this year–the largest number since the pandemic–with each workforce restructuring often tied to furthering AI initiatives and streamlining leaner teams.
Meta cut about 10% of its workforce this year while simultaneously redirecting investment towards its AI infrastructure budget and incentives for its top shareholders.
Amazon slashed 16,000 roles in its efforts to reduce management layers and operational bottlenecks as it sought to reallocate resources to their biggest bets within AI and cloud services (AWS).
Oracle led the way with the largest single tech layoff of the year, cutting about 30,000 employees from its workforce.
Atlassian, 10%. Intuit, 17%. Cisco, 4,000. And the list goes on.
With each of these layoffs, the public framing has been the need to redirect investment into AI capabilities, including data centers, automation, product development, and other aspects of AI enablement.
Now of course, there is the very real suspicion of AI-washing when it comes to layoffs, which is when a company cites AI as the primary driver for workforce reductions that would have happened anyway from factors outside of AI such as poor financial performance.
After all, AI-washing makes a company look good on paper, and gives it a plausible framing for layoffs.
In my last article, I talked about the cost in quality reduction when employers bet too much too soon on the AI boom, and lay off workers because of the hype and promise of AI, only to regret their decision later.
Today, I’m expanding this conversation, turning my attention to: How is it possible for employers to be investing in and designing the future, while the very architects of that future are eliminated from the design process?
Human intelligence is just as essential as artificial intelligence
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The Cost Of AI Layoffs
In an early 2026 survey of about 600 HR leaders, over a third of organizations that made AI-induced cuts had already rehired more than half of eliminated roles.
Specifically:
- Only 21.4% said AI fully replaced roles without any operational issues.
- A third (32.9%) shared that they had lost critical skills and expertise, leading to more than half (52.1%) rehiring for previously eliminated roles within six months.
- Even more striking, is that nearly one-third said the cost of rehiring exceeded the savings from layoffs.
Not only does an organization lose quality when they take humans out of the equation and place them as an afterthought, but more than this, organizations lose a most invaluable resource: context and institutional memory and knowledge.
AI absorbing a job at the task level is one thing; but there’s much more to a role than the performance of mundane tasks that can be automated by a robot.
The other side of the future of jobs that we often tend to overlook is the quality of the tasks, not only from a standpoint of “the AI agent didn’t deliver what I prompted,” but also from the perspective of, how can agents fully support organizations with half-filled teams when it lacks institutional knowledge?
When you cut your workers, you cut the very ones who have spent years embedding your systems, working on the problem, identifying solutions from the ground up, and building trust, credibility, and relationships on your behalf. Those relationships, combined with close proximity to the problem and a deep understanding of the organization and its layers, create nuances that only a human can interpret, apply, and understand fully.
As the Careerminds survey suggests, slashing your workforce as you invest in the future may look like a smart move for shareholders and stocks, but you create a gaping hole that no robot can fill.
Designing an intelligent future of work can only be fully realized when human intelligence is viewed as equal to, not less important than, artificial intelligence.