They had a story about this. AI transformation. The robots would do the work, profits would climb, shareholders would cheer, and the humans — well, the humans would figure it out. It was always a tidier story for the people who write the memos than for the people who receive them.
Gartner just studied 350 companies — all over $1B revenue, all running AI tools — and found that the ones cutting the most workers saw no better return than the ones that kept people. Zero correlation. The study dropped May 5. The layoffs kept coming anyway. 38,000 jobs gone in the first ten days of May alone. Meta cutting 8,000. Microsoft offering “voluntary retirement” to 8,750 people — a buyout dressed in healthcare benefits. Coinbase turfing 700 workers and calling it an “AI-native restructuring.”
The workers take the hit. They always do. If the bet pays off, the equity goes to the top. If it doesn’t, the humans absorb the loss and the executives write another memo about transformation. Gartner says the companies that got real returns used AI to make their people more productive — not to replace them. The ones that just fired people got a smaller headcount and worse outcomes. Budget room shows up this quarter. Worse outcomes show up later, when there’s nobody left who remembers how anything works.