I’ve been watching this trend for months now, and it’s honestly getting ridiculous. Companies are cutting tens of thousands of jobs and pointing at artificial intelligence as the culprit. Over 50,000 layoffs in 2025 alone were supposedly because of AI. Amazon, Pinterest, and a bunch of other tech giants all used the same playbook.
But here’s the thing that nobody wants to say out loud: most of these companies don’t actually have the AI systems in place to replace those workers.
The Convenient Scapegoat
A Forrester report from January called this out pretty directly. They found that many companies announcing AI-related layoffs don’t have “mature, vetted A.I. applications ready to fill those roles.” That’s corporate speak for “we’re lying to you.”
This is what researchers are calling “AI-washing.” It’s a convenient narrative that sounds forward-thinking and technologically sophisticated. Tell investors you’re cutting costs because you’re implementing cutting-edge AI automation, and suddenly you’re not a failing business. You’re just being disruptive and efficient.
Molly Kinder from Brookings Institute nailed it when she pointed out that blaming AI is an “investor-friendly message.” The alternative would be admitting that leadership made terrible decisions during the pandemic hiring spree. Or that the business model isn’t working. Or that growth projections were fantasy numbers designed to pump the stock price.
What This Means for Developers
As someone who works in tech, this trend pisses me off for a few reasons. First, it creates this false narrative that AI is actually displacing workers at scale right now. Sure, artificial intelligence is changing how we work. But the idea that companies have deployed sophisticated AI systems that can replace entire departments? That’s mostly fiction at this point.
Second, it lets executives off the hook for their own incompetence. Remember when every company was hiring like crazy in 2020 and 2021? When they were throwing money at anyone with a pulse and a GitHub account? Those weren’t AI-driven decisions. Those were humans making bad bets on permanent remote work trends and infinite growth curves.
Now those same executives get to wave their hands and say “AI did it” when they need to fix their cap tables. It’s intellectually dishonest, and it poisons the conversation around what AI is actually capable of doing.
The Real Automation Story
Don’t get me wrong. AI is transforming work. I use language models every day. Code generation tools are legitimately useful. Customer service is being automated in meaningful ways. But the gap between “this AI tool makes developers more productive” and “we can fire the entire engineering team because GPT-7 writes all our code now” is enormous.
The companies doing real AI implementation aren’t the ones making splashy announcements about AI-driven layoffs. They’re quietly integrating tools, retraining workers, and figuring out what humans are actually good at in an AI-augmented workflow. That’s boring and doesn’t juice the stock price, so you don’t hear about it.
What you hear about instead are these performative layoffs dressed up in AI language. It’s theater designed for investors and board members who don’t understand the technology well enough to ask hard questions.
The worst part is that this charade makes it harder to have honest conversations about the actual labor market impacts of AI, because now every discussion starts from a place of mistrust and inflated numbers.