Tech's jobs recession isn't over, and August's data proves it

Ah, marvellous. Challenger, Gray & Christmas — the corporate obituary-writers who count the bodies — have announced that 2026 is the year AI overtook every other stated excuse for the culling. Their chief revenue officer puts it with all the self-awareness of a press release: "AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs." Note the verb. "Give." Not "is." Not "demonstrably caused." Companies are handing out AI as the reason the way a Victorian butler hands out calling cards: it looks respectable, costs nothing, and nobody checks whether the guest actually exists.

And the sceptics have done the checking. Gartner's research finds that in the first half of 2025, a glorious one percent of layoffs could be attributed to AI actually increasing productivity. One percent. So the technology that is supposedly now running the entire restructure department is, on the productivity ledger, roughly as disruptive as a mildly efficient spreadsheet add-in. Yet somehow HR departments across tech have developed a sudden, touching faith in algorithmic displacement — a faith conspicuously absent when the claims are about, say, meeting diversity targets or paying suppliers on time.

This is not a capability leap; it is a language leap. AI has become the corporate equivalent of "restructuring for growth" and "synergy realisation" — a phrase that lets a manager fire an entire department and blame the robots instead of the spreadsheet. The worst part is the direction of travel: AI didn't even need to be good to become the leading reason for cuts. It merely needed to be fashionable. In a year or two, when the models are actually competent, the alibi will have hardened into accepted fact, and nobody will bother asking how many of those cuts were ever real. Marvellous. Pass the paracetamol.