AI Layoffs Have Completely Backfired (here's the proof)

Gartner predicts that 50% of companies who laid off workers because of AI will rehire for the exact same roles by 2027.

Forrester surveyed over 1,000 executives and found that 55% of companies regret replacing humans with AI.

McKinsey's 2025 state of AI report found that 88% of companies claim they are using AI, but only 6% are seeing any meaningful impact on their bottom line.

Nearly two-thirds of companies using AI are still stuck in experimentation or pilot phases.

Soleyman has been working in tech since 2015, starting at 18 years old.

Soleyman has helped more than 900 people master cloud engineering and land six-figure jobs, including at companies like AWS, through his education company.

Soleyman believes Amazon is the best example of how things can go horribly wrong when replacing engineers with AI that is not ready.

In December 2025, Amazon's Kira AI coding tool partly caused a 13-hour outage on AWS.

In March 2026, Amazon's Q's AI contributed to an incident that caused nearly 120,000 lost orders and roughly 1.6 million website errors across Amazon's marketplaces.

Amazon now requires engineers to get a two-person review before making any changes to production, and junior engineers must get AI-generated code reviewed by senior engineers.

Soleyman believes the biggest problem with AI going wrong is process and governance, as companies lack proper review processes, automated testing, staged rollouts, and rollback plans.

Soleyman states that AI dramatically increases the speed and volume of changes, which exposes weak processes faster and at a much larger scale.

Scale AI benchmarked top models (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI) on real multi-file software engineering tasks using actual production-grade code, finding they solved only 20-30% of tasks.

Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block's workforce.

Bumble announced AI layoffs and saw a 25% stock price bounce.

That is after $320 billion in 2025.