Notes ·
The AI Manifesto Is Becoming the Second Half of the Layoff Memo
This BBC piece got me thinking about the sudden abundance of CEO manifestos explaining what our wonderful AI-powered future is going to look like.
I am increasingly skeptical of them.
Not because AI isn't transformative. I use these tools every day and think they are enormously useful.
It is because there is a much less philosophical story happening at the same time:
Companies are figuring out how many fewer people they can employ.
Block cut its workforce from more than 10,000 people to fewer than 6,000. Its shareholder letter explicitly said smaller teams using AI could "do more and do it better."
Atlassian eliminated about 10% of its workforce while saying the restructuring would help fund investment in AI and change the skills and number of roles the company requires.
Coinbase cut about 700 employees, roughly 14% of its workforce, as part of what it called optimizing operations "for the AI era."
Rackspace cut about 15% while shifting resources toward enterprise AI, expecting $75 million to $85 million in annual savings.
Then we get the manifestos.
Mark Zuckerberg recently published thousands of words describing a future where AI creates businesses, opportunities and eventually more jobs even if individual companies become smaller.
That message is also quite literally part of a Meta public-relations campaign. Axios reported that Meta's "Future is for Everyone" messaging was a paid and earned media effort intended to present an optimistic vision of AI.
That does not automatically make Zuckerberg wrong.
But it does mean we should recognize what we are reading.
These CEOs are not neutral futurists observing technological change from a mountaintop. They run companies spending enormous amounts of money on AI while simultaneously deciding how much labor they can remove, reorganize or avoid hiring.
There is also plenty of evidence that "AI layoffs" are not always purely AI layoffs. Companies are correcting pandemic over-hiring, reducing costs, changing strategies and responding to slower growth too. AI can be both a genuine organizational change and an extremely convenient explanation for decisions management already wanted to make.
Research is beginning to see that reorganization directly. One 2026 study of U.S. job postings found firms responding to generative AI by both moving hiring between occupations and redesigning the tasks inside remaining jobs.
That is probably the story worth watching.
Not whether AI eventually creates millions of jobs in some hypothetical 2035 economy.
Watch what companies are doing right now.
Who gets laid off?
Which positions disappear through attrition?
Which junior roles stop being posted?
How much more output is expected from the people who remain?
And how much of the resulting productivity ends up with workers rather than shareholders?
Maybe the optimistic future these CEOs describe arrives.
I hope parts of it do.
But when the person explaining how wonderful the future of employment will be is also responsible for making today's employment numbers smaller, I am going to treat the manifesto for what it is:
interested testimony.
Some of these essays contain thoughtful ideas.
Some of them are also pure tech-bro bullshit wrapped around a restructuring plan.
Both things can be true.