Businesses rush to rehire staff after regretted AI-driven cuts

[Dexter Tilo in Human Resources Director]

Not a surprise. Careerminds polled 600 HR professionals from organizations that had made layoffs in the last year.

“It found that 32.7% of organisations that conducted AI-led layoffs had already rehired between 25% to 50% of the roles they initially let go.

Another 35.6% said they had already rehired more than half of the roles that they cut.”

Say it with me: AI can’t replace the skill, judgment, creativity, and taste of real people. Replace the word “AI” with “spreadsheet” and the nonsense behind AI-led layoffs becomes even clearer. AI is a potentially very powerful tool, but it’s just a tool, and it works better when more highly-skilled people are using it.

Which organizations are beginning to find out:

“According to the findings, more than half of HR leaders said AI required more human insight than anticipated.”

It’s worth saying that around 21% of respondents did report that their layoffs went okay. It’s possible that they’re lying. They could also have been employing people to do very manual, repetitive data work without any degree of insight, which seems like a poor use of a workforce. But generally speaking, the study found hundreds of orgs that saw the potential to save costs and were so blinded by dollar signs that they didn’t go beyond the marketing claims about what AI could actually do:

“What ties all these findings together is that the organisations that struggled the most were making significant, irreversible decisions without the full picture of AI capabilities and what a reduction would do to their workforce.”

These organizations treated people poorly. The real tragedy is that they seem not to have understood the skills and value of their own employees. There’s a deeper problem there than just AI.

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