CEOs Say They Will Hire. Employers Keep Cutting. Nobody Agrees How Much of It Is AI.

Nine in ten US chief executives expect to increase headcount over the next three years, according to a KPMG survey published on 15 October. In the same week, Kroger told staff it will cut 3,000 corporate jobs, Netflix announced it is laying off roughly 1,000 people, and Singapore's president told the IMF and World Bank annual meetings that the first job after graduation "is now seeing less demand".

Both things can be true, and the survey admits as much: 53% of those CEOs are still planning workforce reductions in some areas, while 86% say they are redesigning roles, career paths and team structure for human-AI collaboration. Optimism about total headcount is not the same as optimism about every job inside it.

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What this suggests is that employers are describing one decision in two vocabularies, growth in the survey and efficiency in the memo, and that the first rung of the ladder is where the difference lands. Nobody agrees yet how much of the cutting is AI, how much is old-fashioned cost control, and how much is a company reorganising around smaller teams. This week's Paper Cut follows that argument from the layoff memos to the graduate job market, through the hidden cost of AI at work, and on to what employees are being asked to take on trust.

This Week’s Paper Cut's

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The cuts keep coming, and the AI explanation is being tested

CNBC reported on 14 October that Netflix will lay off roughly 1,000 employees, about 6% of its workforce, largely in product, technology, legal and HR. The co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, told staff the company needs to be "disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources", and also wrote that "Our business is strong and growing".

Kroger's chief executive, Greg Foran, told staff on 12 October that the grocer will cut 3,000 corporate jobs over three years, according to the Associated Press, writing that "We need to adopt capabilities, reduce duplicative work and look closely at where work is best fit to be done". The AP links the cuts to Kroger's expanding use of AI.

Not everyone is buying the framing. HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek that "Now there's AI, which is a great scapegoat for companies". At Ubisoft's Singapore studio, where 70 jobs went on 14 October, analysts quoted by the Straits Times pointed to the company's finances, including an operating loss of EUR1.3bn in fiscal 2026, though Darang Candra of Niko Partners said AI has "slowed down hiring in game development".

The stated reasons elsewhere were different again. TomTom is cutting about 200 roles, roughly 6% of its workforce of about 3,300, as it reduces management layers, with chief executive Mike Schoofs describing the aim as "bringing decision-making closer to execution", according to NL Times. The company expects a EUR15m restructuring cost and EUR21m in annual savings. Airtable's new owner, Bending Spoons, said on 12 October that it is laying off a "large part" of the company without giving a number, with product leader Federico Simionato citing a "deep belief that small teams ship more and better".

BMW chose the voluntary route. Its severance programme opened on 8 October to about 40,000 eligible employees, and People Matters, citing Handelsblatt and Automobilwoche, reports that the HR portal crashed under the traffic. The same reports say BMW plans about 8,000 fewer jobs in Germany by the end of 2027, excluding production, with department and management posts down 20% by mid-2027.

The pattern here is that the stated reason changes with the audience: AI in Kroger's memo, structure at TomTom, small teams at Airtable, finances in the Ubisoft coverage, and a strong business at Netflix. EBN has been testing the AI explanation against the numbers for weeks, in Executives Won't Blame AI for the Layoffs. Their Own Employees Say Otherwise and AI Isn't Behind Most of This Year's Layoffs. Goldman Sachs Has the Number.

Employer Brand POV

Separate the real reason for a cut from the fashionable one before the memo goes out, because this week's coverage shows consultants, reporters and your own employees will test the AI explanation against the financials, and the version that survives that test is the one candidates will remember.

CEOs promise hiring, while the first job gets harder to find

The KPMG survey, reported by Axios, covered 400 US CEOs between 11 August and 21 September. Alongside the 89% expecting more headcount, 79% said they are hiring new talent with AI and tech capabilities. KPMG's US chief executive, Tim Walsh, told Axios that "As we put more AI into our processes and platforms, the capacity opens up", which makes the case for growth but says little about who gets hired first.

Singapore's president, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, was blunter. Speaking at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok on 12 October, he said, in Reuters' account, that governments should soon address how AI is reducing hiring demand for new graduates, that the evidence is "already very clear", and that it is strongest in the sectors most exposed to AI. Reuters' report carries no figures, so the claim rests on his authority and on the data others are producing.

Some of that data arrived this week. A HEPI blog by Gina Nkwah cites HESA figures showing that 25% of UK graduates in work were not in high-skilled employment within 15 months of graduating in 2023/24, and notes research suggesting that six months of underemployment raises the chance of it lasting. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on 15 October that employment fell by 39,000 in September and the unemployment rate rose to 4.7%.

In the US, Fortune reports that 46% of Gen Z and millennial small business owners plan to add staff, against 19% of owners who are boomers or older, in the Justworks and US Chamber of Commerce small business index, while one in three employers say they are replacing entry-level roles with AI, according to a GMAC survey cited in the same piece.

The more interesting response is to rebuild the training that entry-level work used to provide. Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University are running a preceptorship programme, borrowed from nursing, that pairs junior engineers with senior ones. Michael Hilton of Carnegie Mellon explains the problem: "It used to be that early-career software engineers would do a lot of tasks that would build up their expertise." CNBC reports that AWS has put $1bn behind its own forward deployed engineer initiative, while Anthropic is committing $100m to train 10,000 such engineers by the end of 2027 through a residency modelled on medicine.

Lightcast data cited by CNBC shows US postings for the role rising from fewer than 200 in 2023 to over 7,300 in the first nine months of 2026. As Caylent chief executive Val Henderson put it, "There is no compression algorithm for experience".

What this suggests is that employers are rediscovering that experience has to be grown, and are building apprenticeships for the roles AI has made scarce, while the junior roles that once did the growing are redesigned or removed. EBN has followed the same fault line in Too Young to Hire, Too Experienced to Hire, Entry-Level Work, AI and the Answer Key and Stop Calling Everything a Talent Shortage.

Employer Brand POV

Show graduates the first two years of the job as it will actually run, including who teaches them and what they will do once AI handles the routine tasks, because the preceptorship and residency schemes announced this week suggest the employers who can describe this will attract the people the rest cannot.

AI is changing the work faster than the budgets and manners around it

Accenture has told staff that from 1 October it centrally funds only $29 per person per month for Claude Enterprise, according to 404 Media. Further use is consumption-based and has to be funded by project budgets, and some employees had reportedly been spending up to $1,000 a month. An Accenture spokesperson said the approach is about "the right tool for the right work", and that licences are being reviewed and reallocated.

Bank of America's chief executive, Brian Moynihan, told CNBC the bank added 1,000 contractors in the second quarter, on top of 3,000 internal staff, to patch software flaws exposed by Anthropic's Mythos model. The bank expects a Q3 cost of "a couple hundred million plus" for software remediation and anti-money-laundering compliance. It also runs about 130 internal AI projects, with savings expected to rise from $300m this year to $700m in 2027, while headcount fell by about 3,400 over the past year as it cut roughly 5% of managers. CNBC notes it is unclear how much of that fall is attributable to AI.

At OpenAI, the head of Dots, Alexander Embiricos, told TechCrunch Disrupt, in Business Insider's report, "We basically have a lot more choice now", and put the decision to employers as a question: "do you expand the ambition of what you can do, or do you do less?"

The costs that do not appear on a licence invoice are showing up in the research. Forbes cites a 2025 global study from the University of Melbourne and KPMG finding that 58% of employees regularly use AI at work, two in three rely on its output without evaluating it, and half use AI instead of collaborating with peers or supervisors. It also cites BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab research finding that 40% of US desk workers had received "workslop", polished AI-generated work lacking substance, from a colleague in the previous month. A separate study by USC's Peter Cardon and the University of Florida's Anthony Coman found that employees viewed managers who relied heavily on AI for emails as less caring, less competent and less trustworthy.

The pattern here is that the costs of AI land in budgets, in colleagues' time and in relationships, and none of them show up in a usage dashboard. EBN has looked at how the individual experience of that shift plays out in The Better You Get at AI, the Closer You Get to Replacing Yourself, and at what happens when the measures look healthier than the experience in Every Metric Improved. Nobody Felt It.

Employer Brand POV

Count the cost of AI in your teams' time and attention, not only in licences, because Accenture's cap and the workslop research both show the bill arriving in places licence dashboards do not look.

Trust is still cheap retention, while pay and monitoring move the other way

ADP's chief executive, Maria Black, told Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit that employees who trust their CEO and senior leaders are 41% more likely to be engaged at work, and 60% more likely when they trust the people around them. ADP's research also found that a 1% drop in full engagement raises the likelihood of voluntary attrition by 45%. "Trust is a direct corollary to engagement," Black said.

Nvidia is the example being held up. An Inc column citing Fortune says its global turnover is 3.7%, against a tech average of 21.9%, and quotes HR director Febe Punsalan: "We start by listening". Employees' suggestions, the column says, get a response. It is a column and not a study, so treat it as a signal, though it sits comfortably beside ADP's numbers.

Elsewhere the direction is different. A memo seen by Business Insider shows LinkedIn will base annual bonuses entirely on individual performance from fiscal 2027, replacing a 50% company, 50% individual split. Bonus targets are unchanged, and sales roles are excluded. A spokesperson said the aim is a "more direct connection between individual performance and bonus payouts", while Business Insider notes the change moves away from employees sharing in the company's financial success and gives managers more influence over payouts.

A survey from resume builder MyPerfectResume, reported by Inc, suggests how that pressure feels from inside: 77% of workers feel pressure to look busy, 82% worry their career could suffer if they look idle, and 70% believe busy-looking workers are rewarded more than quiet producers. 28% feel their management does not trust them, and 43% say they would feel less pressure if the job market were stronger.

What this suggests is that when jobs feel scarce, trust becomes the thing employees ration, and visibility rituals and individual scorecards fill the space it leaves. EBN's Every Decision Made Without the People It Affects and Are employer brands confusing visibility with value? sit alongside this theme.

Employer Brand POV

Ask employees what they would change, answer in public, and report what happened, because ADP's numbers suggest that trust is cheaper than replacing the people who leave when it runs out.

Odds and Ends

Two stories that did not earn a full section, but are worth a mention on their way past.

A New Jersey lawsuit alleges that Sutherland Healthcare Solutions fired a long-serving remote employee on 8 September after she refused new AI-driven webcam monitoring that would have photographed her about every three minutes, roughly 160 photos a day, Inc reports. The suit says she was given a choice between accepting the monitoring, returning to the office, or being dismissed. These are allegations in a lawsuit and have not been tested in court, but the story shows where monitoring and flexible working collide.

At the Forbes Global CEO Conference in Singapore on 7 and 8 October, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said the country's economy has grown at 5% for each of the last three years, including this year, and that Singapore aims to tap the AI boom to build new capabilities and create better jobs, according to Forbes Asia. It is a useful counterpoint to the president's warning on graduate hiring.

The Cut List

Seven employers confirmed or detailed cuts or exits this week. The stated reasons ranged from AI and smaller teams at Kroger and Airtable, to management layers at TomTom, lower demand at Pfizer and company finances at Ubisoft, while Netflix described its business as strong and growing.

Put the week side by side and the shape is plain. The stated reasons changed from memo to memo, from AI to structure to finances, while the effect on the people furthest from the decisions did not: graduates looking for a first role, and staff trying to look busy enough to be kept. What this suggests is that employers who can say plainly which reason is the real one, and what the first job looks like afterwards, will have the easier conversation with candidates and with the people who stay.

Takeaways

• 89% of 400 US CEOs expect to increase headcount over three years, according to KPMG as reported by Axios, yet 53% still plan workforce reductions in some areas.
• Netflix is laying off roughly 1,000 employees and Kroger 3,000 corporate roles over three years, with AI cited at Kroger while experts quoted on Ubisoft's Singapore cuts point to finances.
• Singapore's president told the IMF and World Bank meetings that the first job after graduation "is now seeing less demand", and HEPI cites HESA figures showing 25% of UK graduates in work were not in high-skilled employment within 15 months.
• Australia lost 39,000 employed people in September and unemployment rose to 4.7%, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported.
• Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon are piloting a preceptorship for junior engineers, and US forward deployed engineer postings rose from fewer than 200 in 2023 to over 7,300 in the first nine months of 2026, according to Lightcast data cited by CNBC.
• Accenture now centrally funds only $29 per person per month for Claude Enterprise, while Bank of America added 1,000 contractors for Mythos fixes as its headcount fell by about 3,400.
• ADP says employees who trust their CEO and senior leaders are 41% more likely to be engaged, and that a 1% drop in full engagement raises the likelihood of voluntary attrition by 45%.
• LinkedIn will base bonuses entirely on individual performance from fiscal 2027, and 77% of workers in a MyPerfectResume survey feel pressure to look busy.

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