My musings on AI, layoffs, and the opportunity hiding inside the chaos.
Let’s start with what’s actually happening. This may read like a winding road however it will all make sense at the end…I promise.
Let’s start with the companies that have done AI related layoffs: Meta. Bolt. Block. Disney. The headlines say: AI is replacing workers. But if you read past the press release, the real story is this: companies with record profits are using AI as a convenient costume for decisions that were always about one thing: shareholder value.
A hammer can build a house. It can also be used to hit someone over the head. The tool isn’t the problem. Who’s swinging it and why is the whole conversation. I’ve been looking at all of these headlines trying to make sense of what AI layoffs mean for workplaces and workers.
The Data Has Been Trying to Tell Us Something
Two reports landed in my inbox recently and together they paint a picture that should stop every leader in their tracks.
The 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report tells us the state of the worker. Only 20% of global employees are engaged — the lowest since 2020, declining for the second consecutive year. That means 80% of the global workforce is essentially present without being there also known as quiet quitting or doing the minimum. Low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year — roughly 9% of global GDP.
Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. The people responsible for energizing teams are themselves running on empty and burnt out. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and yet that’s exactly what we keep asking managers to do.
On AI specifically: only 12% of employees in AI-implemented organizations strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done. A recent MIT study found that despite roughly $40 billion in enterprise investment, 95% of organizations have seen zero measurable impact on profits.
The technology isn’t the problem. As the Gallup CEO said plainly: winning the AI revolution depends not just on the technology you deploy but on how well you lead the people using it. From the conversations I’ve had, it’s either we want you to use it so you can train the LLM despite not getting very much training. Or we haven’t given you very much access across the board because the token budget means everyone can’t use it just yet. Or my favorite we are still using outsourced talent from abroad and no one is really sure what they are using to get the job done.
Then Anthropic Asked 81,000 People What They Actually Want
I’ll be honest about what sent me down this rabbit hole. I recently watched Oprah interview Dario and Daniela Amodei, the founders of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. It made me curious about what their users actually think, which led me to Anthropic’s own research.
They conducted what is believed to be the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted — open-ended interviews with over 80,000 Claude users across 159 countries and 70 languages. The question: what do you actually want AI to do for you?
The top answers tell a story about what’s missing from the current workplace conversation entirely.
Nearly 19% wanted AI to handle routine work so they could focus on meaningful work. About 14% wanted personal transformation — growth, wellbeing, becoming a better version of themselves. Another 14% wanted relief from cognitive load — the mental weight of managing modern life. 11% wanted time freedom: not to work more, but to be more present with the people they love.
The number one thing people want from the most powerful technology in a generation is space — space to do work that matters, to grow, to be present.
Globally, 67% of respondents expressed net positive sentiment toward AI. And the most optimistic? People in lower and middle income countries, who see AI not as a threat to a comfortable status quo, but as a capital bypass, a way to build, learn, and compete without the funding or infrastructure, that would otherwise be required.
AI as equalizer. That’s the version we should be building toward. I could keep going on with AI as an equalizer for all the people who currently don’t feel seen or heard by our current workforce but I promised to stay on topic.
The Canary in the Coal Mine Has Been Trying to Tell Us
I work with organizations as an HR development professional and consultant basically someone who helps rearrange the pieces of people problems. I’m also a coach for women leaders. And the women I talk to have been sounding the alarm for years in addition to all the work I’ve done with ERGs that serve neurodivergent and differently abled folks, the LGBTQIA+, and all the ethnicities, faiths, and races of people who are at the margins.
When the workplace doesn’t work for people at the margins, it doesn’t actually work for anyone. It just works well enough for the people close enough to the center to ignore the cracks.
People at the margins = canaries in the coal mine. If they’re struggling, the air in the mine is bad for everyone.
The pandemic didn’t create these problems. It was a pressure cooker that made everything already broken impossible to ignore: inequity, systems built on norms that never fit most of us, the illusion of meritocracy covering up nepotism, cronyism, and favoritism. Covid was the record scratch. Suddenly we could all hear the song that had been playing the whole time.
The Anthropic study confirmed what the canaries have been saying: concern about jobs and the economy was the single strongest predictor of negative AI sentiment. The people most worried aren’t wrong to be worried. They’re the ones who’ve watched every “productivity revolution” redistribute gains upward while the actual workers absorbed the disruption.
The Pendulum Swings. So What?
The Great Resignation was workers saying: enough. Employers panicked, raised wages, offered flexibility, pretended to care about work-life balance.
Now the pendulum has swung back. Return-to-office mandates. Layoffs dressed up as “AI transformation.” The message from the C-suite: the leverage is ours again.
I believe we are in a reshuffling within our workplaces. Unfortunately, it’s at the expense of many talented and in some cases experienced people being given a pink slip because there’s either redundancy or optimization of their “responsibilities”. But here’s what I want you to sit with: no card gets thrown away in a reshuffle. It just moves.
The workers may disappear from the workplaces however the talent doesn’t disappear. The knowledge, the skill, the institutional memory are all still there. Just redistributed. And increasingly, the people whose needs were never centered are taking their talents elsewhere, starting things, choosing themselves and considering values aligned organizations. Oddly enough some roles won’t be coming back however someone still has to be in the driver’s seat and looking ahead to create what’s next since AI can really only look at what has already been done.
This semester was the first time I added AI as a module to my adjunct course at USC because I received feedback from former students that while AI use is frowned upon in college by professors, it’s a competitive advantage in the workplace. I’m by no means naive or unaware of how LLMs can be helpful as a thought partner, workflow optimizer or helping you increase productivity however we are all figuring out our ethical edges and integrity compass when it comes to using AI to get things done.
The Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
If the computers are doing the menial and tedious — what do you actually want to do?
This is not a small question. It might be the most important question of this decade.
The Anthropic study found something striking: when people talked about wanting productivity gains, and were then asked what those gains would actually unlock…the real answer surfaced. It wasn’t about doing better work. It was about living a better life. The underlying desires across 80,000+ interviews collapsed into three things: more time, more autonomy, more meaningful human connection.
So here’s the invitation: not just for organizations, but for every individual navigating this reshuffling:
- Who do you want to be when the machine handles more of the tedious work?
- What jobs can we create that don’t exist yet?
- What problems are worth your specific genius, your lived experience, your perspective that no algorithm can replicate?
- How can the next generation shape the workplace rather than being shaped by its defaults?
When these questions swirl around in my mind, I start to realize this may be more of a design problem. And design is a human act. It means we get to really look at what makes us each unique and design creative solutions that may not be linear, predictable or in our current existence.
This Is the Crossroads. Here’s the Choice.
With AI and LLMs being the new hammer, what kind of house do we want to build? A greenhouse, a carnival fun house, and cabin…I can keep going but I think you get the idea.
What I know for sure is we can’t sprint back to the familiarity of 2019, an era of “predictability” that was, let’s be clear, only predictable and comfortable for some of us.
OR. We can actually do this differently.
We are in a genuine redesign moment. The architecture of work is being questioned, in some cases torn down and rebuilt in real time. That is terrifying AND it is an extraordinary opportunity. These moments don’t come often.
Being better looks like investing in your managers before buying more AI subscriptions. Better looks like re-skilling and up-skilling as a core strategy not a severance package consolation prize. Better looks like asking who’s not in the room and going to get them because redundancy means cross training happens across all functions (even the CEO). It’s funny because if any position can be replaced then it means CEOs can be replaced too but that’s a conversation for another post….maybe time to rewatch WALL-E.
Back to the research…Gallup found that when employees feel genuine choice and autonomy in their work, they are nearly 50% more optimistic about their future. Fifty percent. That’s the difference between a thriving workforce and $10 trillion evaporating into the air.
The reshuffle is happening whether we design it or not. The question is whether we step into it or get shuffled by it.
From Pink Slip to Permission Slip
If you’re one of the people holding a layoff notice right now — this newsletter was written especially for you.
That pink slip? It can be a permission slip.
Permission to ask the question you’ve been too busy to answer: what do I actually want to do? Permission to build the thing you kept putting off. Permission to bet on yourself in a moment when the old structures are being dismantled anyway. Permission to consider a redesign — not just your career, but your relationship to work entirely.
I wrote about this here: Pink Slip to Permission Slip. And I believe it so deeply I’m hosting a call on June 11th at 11am. If you’re navigating a layoff, a career pivot, or just the unsettling feeling that the old map no longer matches the territory — RSVP here.
Sources
Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. gallup.com
Huang, S., Carter, J., Eaton, J., et al. (2026). What 81,000 People Want from AI. Anthropic. anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews
Challapally, A., Pease, C., Raskar, R., & Chari, P. (2025). The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025. MIT Project NANDA.
Drop a comment: What are you RESHUFFLING in your life right now?
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