CEOs shift messaging around AI and layoffs

Ah, marvellous. CEOs have discovered the oldest trick in the corporate grammar book: if the word 'AI' starts attracting awkward questions, swap in the beautiful, untouchable phrase 'economic worries.' The Axios report tells us that business leaders are now being more careful about linking AI to job cuts — which is rather like a burglar becoming more careful about mentioning the window he clambered through. Meanwhile, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a name that sounds like a firm of Victorian undertakers, informs us that AI was the most commonly cited reason for U.S. job cuts in July for the fifth consecutive month. The data may be what it is, but at least the press release now has plausible deniability.

One has to admire the choreography. For five months running, AI has been the star of the layoff announcements, and only now, with economic worries climbing, have CEOs remembered that words have consequences. It is a beautiful inversion: the technology is still doing the firing, but the humans are now pretending they have nothing to say about it. 'Economic worries' is gloriously unsueable — go and picket that.

The really exquisite detail is that nothing underneath the messaging has changed. Workers are still being handed their coats; AI is still the reason on the internal paperwork; the only tenderness is reserved for the external wording. One imagines a CEO, batting away a journalist's question, intoning 'economic headwinds' with the same sincerity as a man blaming his parking ticket on the phases of the moon. Challenger, Gray & Christmas will keep collecting the receipts either way, because the receipts are in the data, not the spin. And the data has now spent five straight months pointing at the same suspect, no matter how carefully the C-suite avoids uttering its name.