A Metaintro survey found that 59% of hiring managers use AI as a scapegoat for layoffs, while only 9% admit AI has actually replaced roles outright. Yet when companies announce cuts, AI is almost always in the headline. Worth asking whether we are watching genuine transformation or a very convenient narrative.
Take Block. In February this year, Jack Dorsey announced around 4,000 jobs gone from a 10,000-person workforce, crediting their internal AI tool Goose with saving teams 50-75% of development time. Hard to argue with that productivity story. But Block also made a very large bet on bitcoin. They poured hundreds of millions into cryptocurrency as part of their strategic identity, and that has not played out the way they hoped. The bitcoin price drop hurt. Combined with the structural mess of running Square and Cash App as overlapping businesses for years, redundancy was inevitable. The AI story is real, but it is doing a lot of heavy lifting to cover for decisions that did not pan out.
Atlassian cut around 1,600 roles and replaced their CTO with two AI-focused executives, pointing to investment in their Rovo AI assistant as the driver. Atlassian does report GAAP net losses every year, but that is largely a function of how they account for stock-based compensation rather than a sign the business is struggling. They generate strong cash and over a billion dollars in operating profit on a non-GAAP basis. So the cuts are not obviously about financial pressure either. This feels more like a structural reset with AI providing a convenient headline.
What about others? Oracle is running the same playbook at much larger scale, with thousands of roles going while the company talks up AI infrastructure and data centres. They aren't the only ones.
These three companies have something else in common beyond the AI narrative: their share prices went up after the announcements. If nothing else this makes me think hard about who the messaging is really aimed at.
None of this means AI is not real or not changing how work gets done. It genuinely is. Entry-level roles are shrinking because senior staff can use AI to do what they used to delegate. But companies that actually adopted AI well have also increased hiring, just for different skills. The story that AI kills jobs and that is the end of it is too simple, and frankly it suits executives who need a clean explanation for messy decisions.
This "AI washing" BS approach has real world knock-on effects. If people keep hearing that AI eliminated jobs that were actually cut because of bad crypto bets or structural inefficiency, they develop legitimate grievances against the wrong target. The backlash to anything labelled AI-generated is already visible. Blaming AI for problems it did not create accelerates that.
If we want people to engage seriously with what AI actually changes, and to develop the skills that the next wave of roles will need, companies need to be straighter about why they are making the decisions they are making. That is probably too much to ask. But it matters.
A Metaintro survey found that 59% of hiring managers use AI as a scapegoat for layoffs, while only 9% admit AI has actually replaced roles outright. Yet when companies announce cuts, AI is almost always in the headline. Worth asking whether we are watching genuine transformation or a very convenient narrative.
Take Block. In February this year, Jack Dorsey announced around 4,000 jobs gone from a 10,000-person workforce, crediting their internal AI tool Goose with saving teams 50-75% of development time. Hard to argue with that productivity story. But Block also made a very large bet on bitcoin. They poured hundreds of millions into cryptocurrency as part of their strategic identity, and that has not played out the way they hoped. The bitcoin price drop hurt. Combined with the structural mess of running Square and Cash App as overlapping businesses for years, redundancy was inevitable. The AI story is real, but it is doing a lot of heavy lifting to cover for decisions that did not pan out.
Atlassian cut around 1,600 roles and replaced their CTO with two AI-focused executives, pointing to investment in their Rovo AI assistant as the driver. Atlassian does report GAAP net losses every year, but that is largely a function of how they account for stock-based compensation rather than a sign the business is struggling. They generate strong cash and over a billion dollars in operating profit on a non-GAAP basis. So the cuts are not obviously about financial pressure either. This feels more like a structural reset with AI providing a convenient headline.
What about others? Oracle is running the same playbook at much larger scale, with thousands of roles going while the company talks up AI infrastructure and data centres. They aren't the only ones.
These three companies have something else in common beyond the AI narrative: their share prices went up after the announcements. If nothing else this makes me think hard about who the messaging is really aimed at.
None of this means AI is not real or not changing how work gets done. It genuinely is. Entry-level roles are shrinking because senior staff can use AI to do what they used to delegate. But companies that actually adopted AI well have also increased hiring, just for different skills. The story that AI kills jobs and that is the end of it is too simple, and frankly it suits executives who need a clean explanation for messy decisions.
This "AI washing" BS approach has real world knock-on effects. If people keep hearing that AI eliminated jobs that were actually cut because of bad crypto bets or structural inefficiency, they develop legitimate grievances against the wrong target. The backlash to anything labelled AI-generated is already visible. Blaming AI for problems it did not create accelerates that.
If we want people to engage seriously with what AI actually changes, and to develop the skills that the next wave of roles will need, companies need to be straighter about why they are making the decisions they are making. That is probably too much to ask. But it matters.