We laid him off. Then we hired him back

Jonathan Vidales got brought back after being laid off, and the awkwardness was immediate. On a Zoom call, he said returning felt like “sneaking back in the house after I got kicked out.” When his account was reactivated, he also found the company’s restructuring note still in his inbox — cold, corporate, and, from his side, missing the human point entirely.

That remorse sits inside a bigger pattern. AI-driven job cuts peaked in May, when US employers announced 97,000 cuts and said AI was behind 40% of them. Zillow cut more than 500 people earlier this month, and the announcement came the day before earnings, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The message from executives is clear enough: move faster, get leaner, reorganize around AI. The problem is that the AI excuse is starting to sound awfully convenient.

Julie Averill, a former Lululemon executive, put two useful labels on the phenomenon: “AI wishing,” when leaders imagine AI will solve the problem in front of them, and “AI washing,” when they dress up layoffs as efficiency that doesn’t exist yet. Both instincts show the same flaw. Companies are acting on what AI might enable before they’ve figured out how to get there with the people already on the payroll.

The writer’s own company had to change too, shifting from a more pure software consultancy to an AI-centric technology company. Advisory work still matters, but the center moved, and that meant new roles and some restructuring. The lesson from the Jonathan episode isn’t that change is bad. It’s that leaders can get so fixated on the next model that they forget institutional knowledge, trust, and relationships are not spare parts. They are the thing.