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

Tech With Soleyman4/4/202678,680 viewsDeep Sift
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Soleyman argues that recent AI-driven layoffs are largely backfiring and are often misattributed, serving instead as a narrative wrapper for other corporate objectives. He cites reports from Gartner, Forrester, and McKinsey indicating that many companies regret replacing humans with AI, are not seeing meaningful impact from AI, and will rehire for roles previously cut due to AI. Amazon is presented as a prime example, where AI tools like Kira and Q's AI contributed to significant outages and lost orders in late 2025 and early 2026, forcing the company to implement a 90-day safety reset and reintroduce friction into its processes. Soleyman identifies three core problems: poor process and governance, the loss of organizational knowledge due to laying off experienced engineers, and AI's current lack of product fit for messy, real-world production environments, as evidenced by Scale AI benchmarks showing low success rates for top AI models on complex tasks. He further explains that layoffs are driven by Wall Street's reward for "AI washing" (attaching AI to cost-cutting), the need to fund massive AI infrastructure investments, CEO ego, and a copycat strategy inspired by Elon Musk's Twitter workforce reductions. Soleyman highlights that in 2025, less than 5% of 1.17 million layoffs were directly attributed to AI. He concludes that AI is not replacing engineers but changing expectations, requiring one engineer with AI tools to produce the output of two or three. To thrive, he recommends becoming a systems thinker, being AI-native (not dependent), and mastering cloud engineering, citing a significant global shortage of cloud professionals and OpenAI's own plan to nearly double its workforce by 2026.

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