AI didn't fire those people. The board did. AI just gave them a press release.

PayPal cut 4,760 jobs last week and called it an AI overhaul. Fidelity laid off 800 the same week. GM trimmed 600 in Austin and Warren and said AI was part of the decision, though not all of it.

Strip the press releases away and the picture gets uglier. Most of these companies have not deployed enough production AI to fire one person, let alone five thousand. What they have is pilots, dashboards, a handful of automated workflows in finance and IT, and a 12-month roadmap.

The cost programme was already on the board agenda. AI is just the cleanest way to brief the analysts on the call.

I see the same thing in PE portfolios. Every IC memo this year has an AI line. Every operating plan has an AI workstream. Almost nobody can show me a clean dollar of AI EBITDA from last quarter.

The latest FTI numbers say two-thirds of firms plan to spend over a quarter of their budget on AI this year. Most of them cannot tell you what they got back from the last quarter's spend.

AI is doing two things at the same time. It is producing real productivity gains in narrow workflows. And it is giving every CFO and every COO the cover story to run the headcount cut they have been queuing up for three years.

A restructure used to need a memo and a consultant. Now it needs a slide that says Agentic AI.

The market loves it. Analysts cheer the margin. Boards approve the plan.
The people who used to do the work just have to find new jobs in an economy that has decided their function is a punchline in someone else's deck.