Through August, U.S. employers cited artificial intelligence in more than 116,000 announced job cuts. Tech companies alone announced more than 155,000 layoffs. Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 positions while reorganizing around AI.
Atlassian cut about 1,600 roles and said, plainly, that AI changes how many people it needs. Some companies name AI as the reason. Others point to “business needs” while the AI investment sits in the same filing.
Either way, employees understand the message: The company believes machines can now perform work people once did. That is a business decision. How leaders communicate it is a human one.
At this moment, as companies replace people with technology, many are communicating the decision in ways that make those people feel even more disposable. Employees learn of their fate through mass emails, locked accounts or disappearing Slack profiles. Managers sometimes cannot explain what happened to their own teams.
Those who remain receive little acknowledgment of what they have witnessed, or what they are now being asked to absorb. I’ve spent my career helping leaders communicate through their hardest moments, and I’ve sat in rooms where layoff announcements get drafted. Layoffs are the hardest thing a leader ever has to say.
AI has made them more frequent and, at a growing number of companies, less human. Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote that it would be “disingenuous” to pretend AI doesn’t change the number of roles required in some areas. He named the reason and signed his name.
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