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AI Is A Better Excuse Than It Is A Replacement
Oracle needs the money, Microsoft needs the paperwork, and PayPal needed a reason.
Every layoff number now arrives with an explanation attached. The explanation is almost always AI. I have stopped believing it.
AI is doing something to these jobs. It has also become the most convenient sentence in the room. A company gets to sound like it is building the future while it trims a cost line. A manager avoids saying the money went somewhere else. The rest of us treat a decision made in a budget meeting as though it were weather.
Three of the year’s larger cuts landed inside one news cycle this week. Oracle is lining up another round. Microsoft has moved a few hundred people onto performance improvement plans. PayPal cut around 600 people days after cutting 160 more in Ireland.
Stacked together they look like one story about machines. Pull them apart and each has a different reason underneath it. The money explains all three better than the models do. The useful question is which budget the cut came out of. That tells you whether the work has gone or has moved to a cheaper desk.
