The Boomerang Nobody Put in the Press Release
Klarna laid off 700 customer-service employees in 2024, handed their jobs to an AI assistant, and told the world it was the future of work. Even now, the future of work apparently still needs a human on the line, because Klarna quietly brought people back after the bot's answers drove customers up a wall. According to new research from outplacement firm Careerminds, Klarna is not an outlier. Two-thirds of companies that cut staff for AI are now rehiring some of the very people they let go.
The press release for the layoffs, one presumes, is not getting a sequel.
Same Desk, Smaller Paycheck
Forrester Research predicts that half of all AI-attributed layoffs will be quietly reversed by the end of 2026, and that 55 percent of employers already regret making them. The reversal, though, is not a rehiring in the generous sense. Forrester's analysis notes that returning roles tend to reappear offshore or at significantly lower salaries — the job comes back, the org chart line item does not. Gartner puts a similar number on the trend, projecting that half of companies citing AI for headcount cuts will be restaffing by 2027.
Sources within the Labor Analytics Community note that a pay cut for doing the same job you were fired from doing is not usually described as progress. And yet — as if this were not enough — Careerminds also found that a third of employers spent more money restaffing than the AI layoffs ever saved them.
Amazon's Robots Have a Phone-a-Friend
The pattern is not limited to obvious chatbot flops. Amazon's "Just Walk Out" checkout system, marketed for years as a triumph of computer vision, has relied in no small part on remote workers in India manually reviewing camera footage to make the technology actually work. The AI, in other words, was frequently a person watching a screen, just one paid far less and credited far less than the AI given full billing.
In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, "AI-powered" has quietly become a marketing term that sometimes means "human-powered, but cheaper and uncredited."
The Skills Were Never Actually Optional
Industry analysts quoted in the coverage put it bluntly: when asked whether companies making these cuts actually had functioning AI ready to replace the workers, the answer nine times out of ten was no — and the systems in question hadn't even been built yet. The layoffs, in that light, were less a technological leap than a bet placed with someone else's rent money. Entry-level roles in AI-exposed fields have already shrunk substantially since 2018, meaning the jobs coming back are not always the jobs that existed before.
The machines did not take the jobs so much as get lent the jobs on a trial basis, with humans quietly asked to keep the seat warm and, apparently, take a pay cut for the privilege.
Sources: HR Executive · Yahoo Finance
