The 'Agentic AI Era' Excuse Strikes Again

Two weeks ago I wrote about how AI had become the go‑to layoff excuse, a tired corporate euphemism that makes the technology look powerful and workers look expendable. I had hoped the trend might at least develop some creativity. No such luck. Cloudflare has now announced it will eliminate 224 jobs at its San Francisco headquarters — part of a global cull of more than 1,100 positions — and the reason given is something called the ‘agentic AI era.’

Let us pause to admire that phrase. ‘Agentic AI era.’ It sounds like a PowerPoint slide that escaped from a basement workshop and started making policy decisions. It means nothing. Or rather, it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, which is the point. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince did not say: ‘We are cutting costs because the market is jittery and we overhired during the pandemic.’ He did not say: ‘Our shareholders demanded better margins and this is the easiest lever to pull.’ Instead, he invoked a vague technological epoch, as if the company were not laying off human beings but merely pruning its workforce to align with the inevitable march of autonomous agents. The workers are collateral damage in a historical shift — not the casualties of a quarterly earnings call.

This is the same pattern I identified in my first column on Cognizant: executives announce ‘AI‑led restructuring’ and the press largely lets them get away with it. The difference is that Cloudflare is not even pretending the new AI roles will absorb the displaced staff. The company is simply cutting. And it is doing so in San Francisco, a city already battered by tech layoffs and commercial real estate collapse. The 224 positions at headquarters represent a significant reduction to the home office — a symbolic amputation that signals: even the mothership is not safe from the ‘agentic AI era.’ But what exactly is that era? Cloudflare sells cybersecurity services; they have been using AI for years. The term appears to have been invented for this announcement, and it will presumably be retired once the layoffs are complete, unless some PR executive decides to file a trademark.

Perhaps the most galling detail is that Cloudflare cited the ‘agentic AI era’ internally before leaking the news to the San Francisco Chronicle. This is not a slip of the tongue; it is a conscious choice. The company could have said ‘we are reorganising to focus on growth areas.’ It could have said nothing at all. But it chose to blame an abstraction, because abstractions do not have to pay severance or answer questions at all‑hands meetings. Compare this with Goldman Sachs, which on the same day vowed to automate its ‘human assembly line’ with AI ‘robots’ while promising no mass layoffs. That promise is likely as durable as a wet paper bag, but at least Goldman’s president had the decency to name the activity he was automating. Cloudflare’s executives prefer the safety of the epochal frame: no one can argue with an era.

The deeper problem is that this rhetoric goes largely unchallenged. When a CEO says ‘the agentic AI era requires us to reduce headcount,’ the financial press reports it as a business decision rather than a semantic trick. But language matters. By framing layoffs as an inevitable consequence of technological progress, executives absolve themselves of responsibility. They are not making a choice; they are responding to forces beyond their control. It is the same logic that produced ‘downsizing’ in the 1990s and ‘rightsizing’ in the 2000s. AI is merely the newest decoration on an old lie.

What makes this iteration particularly insidious is that it also hypes the very technology that is supposedly causing the disruption. The ‘agentic AI era’ sounds important, futuristic, inevitable. It positions Cloudflare as a company at the cutting edge, bravely shedding the inefficient humans who can't keep up. In reality, Cloudflare is doing what every company does when the economic winds shift: it is preserving margins. The only novelty is the excuse. And as long as we continue to accept ‘AI’ as a legitimate reason for mass layoffs, we are letting executives off the hook. The next time you hear a CEO invoke a grand technological era to explain a headcount reduction, remember: eras don't fire people. Other people fire people.