I'm an enterprise consultant: Here's what you don't know about AI-related layoffs.

Max Votek, an enterprise consultant with a direct line to Fortune 500 CFOs, has done the public a small mercy: revealing that the narrative around AI layoffs is, shall we say, *embellished*. According to Business Insider, his private conversations paint a rather different picture from the breathless headlines. The grand story of machines making humans redundant is often just a handy excuse for the same old cost-cutting, reorganisation, or, heaven forbid, poor management. Because nothing says "we're at the frontier of innovation" like blaming the chatbot for the redundancy you planned anyway.

Votek doesn't name names, but the pattern he sketches is familiar: a company announces AI-driven restructuring, the stock gets a bump, and a few quarters later the same headcount reduction is quietly refiled as "operational efficiency." The real play? CFOs are using the AI sheen to soften the blow of layoffs that would have happened regardless — or, worse, to justify headcount cuts they've wanted for years. It's a masterclass in narrative arbitrage: take a disruptive technology, wrap your downsizing in its glow, and watch the media parrot your script. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief in corner offices: "Thank goodness for machine learning."

The truly dark joke is that this probably works brilliantly. The public loves a good techno-horror story, so "AI took my job" gets more sympathy than "private equity squeezed my division." But a few more years of this, and when the actual AI-caused layoffs arrive — the ones driven by genuine capability leaps, not rebranded restructuring — nobody will believe them either. Crying wolf with a neural network. Lovely. And Votek's candid assessment? Probably the only honest thing any consultant has said all year.