CEOs had a playbook: announce AI-driven layoffs, signal efficiency to Wall Street, watch the stock pop. Turns out the market isn’t buying it.
New data from CNBC tracking 23 S&P 500 companies that announced AI-linked layoffs found the move is backfiring more often than not.
Here’s what happened
- 56% of those companies saw their stock prices decline after the announcement, with an average drop of 25%.
- Nike cut 800 workers to accelerate automation. Stock is down 35% since.
- Salesforce laid off 4,000. Stock fell 32%.
- Fiverr cut 30% of its workforce. Stock dropped 54%.
And internally, it’s not working either. A separate Gartner survey of 350 large-company executives found companies cutting for AI reasons weren’t generating better returns than those that didn’t.
As it turns out, the highest-ROI companies were found to be using AI for “people amplification” (making workers more productive), not replacing them outright.
Why this matters
The “AI layoff” has become a corporate ritual at this point: cut staff, say AI made you do it, hope investors cheer. But the data says it isn’t working on either end. Markets aren’t rewarding it, and 49,135 workers have lost jobs to AI attribution so far in 2026 alone, nearly as many as all of last year.
Even Sam Altman called it out. In February, he said there’s “some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise” do anyway. So basically, the companies claiming benefits from AI layoffs are pretty much just in trouble and looking to spin it as a positive (“look at how productive we are now!”).
Our take
If your company is announcing AI layoffs, but hasn’t actually changed any core workflows, that’s just a press release putting lipstick on a pig (no offense to all the pigs out there, y’all are gorgeous creatures). The companies actually winning with AI are doing more with the same people, not fewer people doing the same things.
As for more on how to do THAT, check out this post from OpenAI engineer Jason Liu (@jxnlco) on how he uses Codex on a daily basis to “amplify” his individual work.
Editor’s note: This content originally ran in the newsletter of our sister publication, The Neuron. To read more from The Neuron, sign up for its newsletter here.