How this ex-Meta AI exec is tackling the entry-level hiring squeeze

AI has finally been knocked off its perch as the number one excuse for firing people, falling to fourth-most cited reason for job cuts in August, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's right: after a five-month reign of terror atop the list, the machines are now merely the fourth thing executives blame when the quarterly numbers look peaky. The other three reasons are presumably "vibes," "the weather," and "we saw a LinkedIn post about efficiency." It's a heartwarming reminder that when you've got a scapegoat, you can always find another.

But don't break out the champagne just yet, because AI still leads for the year, cited in 22% of all 2026 US layoffs so far. That's nearly a quarter of every "we're streamlining" and "role redundancy" email, which means the robots are still very much in the room, they've just learned to share the credit. Twenty-two percent is a modest figure only if you're not one of the thousands of people who were told their job was being "AI-enabled" out of existence. And the year isn't over, so there's plenty of time for a fourth-quarter comeback.

Enter our hero: an ex-Meta AI executive, whose name the article doesn't bother to share, is "tackling the entry-level hiring squeeze." Presumably this involves a white paper, a pilot program, and a conference panel titled "Human-AI Collaboration in the Mailroom." The person who helped build the systems now being blamed for the squeeze has decided to fix the squeeze, which is a bit like the fox volunteering to redesign the henhouse. The article doesn't say what they're doing, but we can assume it involves a lot of synergy and at least one podcast. The entry-level squeeze, for the record, is what happens when companies stop hiring juniors because AI can do their tasks and seniors are too expensive to train them. But sure, let's hear from the ex-Meta exec.