The AI Did It: How a Buzzword Became a Layoff Excuse

Two weeks ago I wrote about Cognizant's 'AI-led restructuring' — a phrase so transparent it should have come with a laugh track. The company planned to cut five percent of its workforce and call it progress. Now, according to Forbes, AI is officially the go‑to excuse for layoffs for the second consecutive month. Coinbase, Meta, Oracle, and most recently BILL — whose CEO René Lacerte announced a 30% workforce reduction to 'sharpen focus on AI' — have all discovered the same convenient narrative. It is no longer a coincidence. It is a genre.

The genre goes like this: a company misses its numbers, or decides its stock needs a sugar hit, and rather than admit to mismanagement or plateauing revenues, executives point at a large language model and say, 'It's not us, it's the machine.' The beauty of the excuse is that it is unfalsifiable. If revenues rise after the cuts, AI gets the credit. If they don't, well, you didn't cut deep enough. Either way, the C‑suite collects its bonus and the worker collects the cardboard box.

But the real offence is not the dishonesty — corporate dishonesty is about as surprising as rain in Manchester. It is the way this narrative inflates AI's capabilities for commercial gain. Every time a CEO blames a chatbot for a 30% headcount reduction, they are implicitly telling investors: our AI is so powerful it can do the work of a third of the company. That claim, repeated often enough, becomes market reality. It drives up share prices and drives down scepticism. The companies that sell AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — benefit enormously from this feedback loop. Their products are portrayed not as tools but as job‑swallowing inevitabilities, which makes them harder to regulate and easier to sell.

Consider the absurdity. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon together employ millions of people. If their AI were truly capable of replacing entire departments, their own headcounts would be shrinking. They are not. Meta recently hired hundreds of AI researchers even as it laid off other staff. The layoffs are a redistribution of labour, not an elimination of it — and that redistribution is overwhelmingly toward the top. What executives call 'AI adoption' is actually a reshuffling deck: junior roles vanish, senior AI specialists arrive, and the net effect is a leaner, meaner payroll with fewer voices of dissent.

The Forbes piece quotes experts who suspect companies are lying. The word 'suspect' is doing heavy lifting. Of course they are lying. The lie is structural. It allows firms to frame wage cuts as technological progress, and to pre‑empt unionisation by making labour seem obsolete. But there is a risk here for the liars. If AI is truly the prime mover behind every layoff, then the public might reasonably ask why we are not seeing the productivity boom that should accompany such sweeping automation. GDP growth remains tepid. Real wages have not surged. The only thing soaring is the word 'synergy' in earnings calls.

Take BILL's 30% cut. The company did not specify which departments would be affected. It did not explain why AI, which is supposed to automate financial software, requires a third fewer humans to sell, support, or maintain it. The announcement was a magic trick: here is a number, here is a buzzword, now clap. No one asked whether the AI actually works, or whether the company simply needed to trim costs after a disappointing quarter. Because in the current climate, AI is not an explanation — it is a penance. You sacrifice jobs to the algorithm and hope the market forgives you.

The long‑term effect of this ritual sacrifice is twofold. First, it normalises layoffs as an AI‑driven inevitability, which makes it harder for workers to organise against them. Second, it entrenches the idea that AI is an unstoppable force, which gives the industry the political cover it needs to avoid meaningful regulation. Every time a CEO says 'AI made us do it,' they are lobbying for deregulation by proxy. And as the Pentagon prepares to use AI for military targeting, and chatbots replicate themselves in the wild, the last thing we need is a mythology that treats AI as an all‑powerful, uncontrollable entity.

This is not an argument against layoffs. Some companies genuinely need to restructure. It is an argument against the lie. The lie that AI is the cause rather than the convenient excuse. The lie that the technology is already good enough to replace a third of the workforce. The lie that the only choice is to cut or be disrupted. There is another choice: tell the truth. But that would require executives to admit that the emperor, in fact, has no AI. He just has a spreadsheet and a press release.