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the company’ s AI could learn it. Step by step, she had recorded the instructions for her own replacement.“ It really makes you feel used and abused,” she says.“ They’ re having you do something, it’ s recorded, and then they’ re going to replace you with whatever you just built.”
A precedent that travels Oracle is only conspicuous for saying out loud what the rest do quietly. AI has now been the single largest stated reason for job cuts in America three months running, a record 38,579 of them in May alone, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Add up the year and the country is shedding more than a thousand jobs every working day. The cuts do not land evenly either. Stanford’ s economists pull the payroll data and find that employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen almost 20 % since 2022, while their older colleagues in the same roles actually gained. Whatever is doing the cutting is remaking the bottom of the org chart first. What has been pioneered is not the AI layoff. It is a company admitting to one in writing, and precedents set in securities filings tend to travel. Expect more boards to reach for the same language, and expect sharper questions about the gap between the story a company tells its investors and the one it tells its staff. The cause may stay unknowable, some blend of the machine, the money and the mood. The disclosure will not. businesschief. com
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