A CEO told employees they won't get raises in 2026 because the budget is going to AI - Business Insider

Ah, January 2026: the month Teradata's 5,100 employees learned their annual salary raise was being sacrificed to the AI gods. The message is clear: you, the worker, are a cost centre; the chatbot, a divine investment. No raises for you, but rest assured, the model will be well-fed. Because nothing says 'we value our people' like telling them their compensation is now a trade-off against a probabilistic autocomplete engine. The gall of framing this as a reallocation rather than a wage freeze is the kind of creative accounting that would make an Enron CFO blush.

Teradata's decision is a microcosm of a broader trend: companies openly treating human salaries as a variable cost to be slashed in favour of AI subscriptions. The message to employees is not just 'you're not getting a raise' but 'your career progression is now optional.' At 5,100 people, that's a lot of disillusioned talent wondering if their next performance review will be conducted by a large language model. And the fun part? There's no guarantee this AI investment will yield a single dollar of profit. It's an act of faith, paid for with your pay rise.

But hey, at least the CEO can tell shareholders they're 'investing aggressively in AI' while the workforce stagnates. The workers, meanwhile, get the honour of funding the very technology that may replace them. It's the corporate equivalent of asking the condemned man to pay for his own rope. Teradata is not alone, but they've set a lovely precedent: 'Sorry, no raise — we're buying a shiny new AI.' Cheers to progress. Same as it ever was.