This Week, Every Decision Got Made Without the People It Affects

Legal & General is cutting 1,000 jobs. Admiral is cutting 500. BBC Sport is cutting staff and axing bulletins. Novo Nordisk has shed 13,000 in the past year. Porsche could be next for another 4,000. Microsoft has started a fresh round tied to its Xbox "reset." Six companies, six sectors, one week. None of the people affected were in the room when any of those decisions got made, and neither, according to new research out this week, are most of the people whose job it technically is to be there: 46% of organisations exclude their CHRO from AI strategy decisions altogether. The same pattern, being decided about rather than decided with, runs through who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets believed this week too.

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This Week’s Paper Cut's

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Nearly half of CHROs aren't in the AI room

A new IBM study finds that 46% of organisations exclude their CHRO from AI strategy decisions entirely, a leadership gap that widens even as AI adoption accelerates across the workforce. HR Dive's own weekly numbers round-up put a finer point on the consequence: CHROs report that AI is quietly generating "invisible" work, the auditing, correcting and re-explaining that doesn't show up on anyone's productivity dashboard but still has to get done by someone. That may explain a separate finding from McKinsey's Technology Trends Outlook 2026, which found that 30% of firms saw productivity actually drop after adopting agentic AI, not rise.

Related reading on EBN: our own coverage of "The Talking Point: Martin Lehnert, GEO, and a Room That Turned Up" looks at the flip side of this exclusion: employer brand teams who got ahead of the AI shift early, and are now being cited directly by the same systems that, elsewhere this week, are being deployed without the people responsible for the workforce ever being consulted.

Employer Brand POV

Invite HR into the room before the AI strategy is set, not after, because the IBM finding suggests most organisations are currently doing the opposite, and the invisible-work problem HR Dive describes is what happens when the people who would have flagged it are shut out until it is somebody else's problem to solve.

Leaders promise leisure. Graduates are fighting for scraps.

Zoom's chief executive, Eric Yuan, this month joined Bill Gates, Jensen Huang and Jamie Dimon in predicting a three or four-day working week is coming soon, courtesy of AI. "If AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work five days a week?" Yuan has said. Gates has gone further, predicting AI will remove the need for humans doing "most things" within a decade.

Whatever that future looks like for people already inside an organisation, it is not the world graduates are describing right now. Hilton received 12,000 Gen Z applications for just 72 internship spots this year, a 0.4% acceptance rate its CHRO links partly to AI making early-career roles newly competitive, more selective than an Ivy League college. In China, a record 12.7 million students graduated this summer into a labour market where youth unemployment has climbed to 18.9%, the highest reading since the measure was revised in 2023, with AI's effect on entry-level roles cited as a growing factor. Piyush Gupta, the former DBS chief executive who now chairs Singapore Management University's board, argues the single-major degree "no longer serves students," urging graduates toward broader, cross-disciplinary study instead, though SMU's own cross-disciplinary programme still only accepted 100 of roughly 900 applicants this year.

Employer Brand POV

Widen the aperture on what an "entry-level" candidate looks like before you widen it out of existence altogether. If executives are simultaneously promising existing staff more leisure from AI while entry-level hiring gets harder to break into everywhere from hospitality to consulting, that contradiction is now visible enough that graduates are the ones pointing it out, not just journalists.

The quiet removal of experience

Nearly 600,000 people aged 50 to 64 in the UK do not have a job but want one, up 13,000 year on year, according to DWP data. Lisa Davis, a former Fortune 500 executive, described the pattern for women specifically as "the silent removal of experienced women": not a single decision anyone could point to, but restructurings, succession plans and sponsorship that quietly stops, adding up to the same result. AARP research she cites found 66% of women over 50 say older workers face age discrimination at work, and 22% feel they are being pushed out of their jobs specifically because of their age. Women's share of new S&P 500 board appointments fell to 29% in 2026, down from 38% the year before. Meanwhile, in Singapore, younger workers are pushing back on a different assumption: a growing share of Gen Z employees say they simply do not want the boss's job at all, prioritising financial independence over the traditional management ladder.

Related reading on EBN: our recent piece, "Too Young to Hire, Too Experienced to Hire? Is the Talent Market Developing an Age Problem", covers the other end of this same squeeze, and read together the two pieces suggest the problem isn't graduates or the over-50s specifically, it's how little room either group is being given in the decision.

Employer Brand POV

See the pattern before it becomes a headline, not after. None of the individual decisions described in the AARP or McKinsey research look like discrimination in isolation, a restructuring here, a succession plan there, but the cumulative effect on who is still in the building past 50, and especially which women, is now well-documented enough that "we didn't mean it that way" stops being a credible defence.

Odds and Ends

Not everything this week fits neatly into a theme, but a few stories are worth a mention on their way past.

A viral TikTok from a corporate recruiter arguing that Gen Z candidates shouldn't bring iced coffee to job interviews has split the internet into generational camps, and while it sounds trivial, the underlying question, how much unwritten "professionalism" testing candidates before they've said a word, is a genuine employer branding problem hiding in a silly one.

More than 70 people have filed a class action against Meta alleging its smart glasses quietly routed intimate footage to overseas contractors for review. It's a consumer privacy story first, but any employer currently issuing or piloting smart glasses, body cameras or always-on wearables to staff should read it as a preview of the questions its own workforce will start asking.

Singapore will require companies with more than 200 staff to employ at least one certified HR professional from 2028, part of a push to double the country's certified HR pool by 2030. Coming in the same week as the IBM finding on CHRO exclusion from AI strategy, it's a useful reminder that professionalising HR and actually listening to HR are two separate projects, and only one of them is being legislated.

Société Générale's chief executive told the Financial Times that regulatory caution, not appetite, is what will keep AI out of the most client-facing corners of banking for a while yet, a rare instance this week of a leader arguing for slower AI adoption rather than faster.

And if this week's CHRO-exclusion story has you wanting more on how employer brand teams can get ahead of the AI shift rather than be sidelined by it, our first EBClub Talking Point session with Martin Lehnert on GEO is worth the watch: "Our First Talking Point: Martin Lehnert, GEO, and a Room That Turned Up".

The Cut List

Legal & General's chief executive, António Simões, told staff the firm needs to become a "leaner organisation," cutting about 1,000 roles, a tenth of its workforce, by mid-2027, starting with voluntary redundancies in the UK before any mandatory cuts are considered. Admiral is cutting 500 UK jobs, about 5% of that business, to help save £100m, though the company was explicit that "adoption of AI is not believed to be responsible for these changes," a rare direct denial in a week full of AI-adjacent cuts elsewhere. BBC Sport is cutting staff and axing lunchtime and overnight news bulletins, Novo Nordisk has shed 13,000 jobs in the past year chasing new "multi-blockbuster" drugs, Porsche could face up to 4,000 more cuts according to Handelsblatt, and Microsoft began a fresh round this week centred on its Xbox division, alongside roles in Cloud and AI. Not every move this week ran in one direction: Amazon is quietly trying to rehire some of the same workers it laid off, according to recruiter emails, a reminder that the boundary between "cut" and "wanted back" is thinner than either announcement suggests.

Related reading on EBN: our own reporting this week on employer branding in China found that during organisational contraction, most teams can only offer "legally compliant support and basic employee care," not because they don't understand the stakes, but because they were never resourced or invited in early enough to do more.

Employer Brand POV

Resource the moment a redundancy programme is announced as if it is the most-watched piece of employer branding you will do all year, because it is.

Six companies across insurance, media, pharmaceuticals, automotive and tech confirmed job cuts this week, even as Amazon quietly tried to woo back some of the staff it had already laid off.

Takeaways

1. Legal & General plans to cut 1,000 jobs, about a tenth of its workforce, by mid-2027, starting with voluntary redundancies before considering mandatory cuts.
2. Admiral UK will cut 500 jobs, about 5% of its UK insurance workforce, to save £100m, and says the decision is not AI-driven.
3. Novo Nordisk has shed 13,000 jobs in the past year, and Porsche could face up to 4,000 more, according to Handelsblatt.
4. McKinsey's Technology Trends Outlook 2026 found 30% of firms saw productivity drop, not rise, after adopting agentic AI.
5. Hilton received 12,000 Gen Z applications for 72 internship spots this year, a 0.4% acceptance rate its CHRO links partly to AI.
6. China's youth unemployment rate rose to 18.9% in August, the highest since the measure was revised in 2023, as a record 12.7 million students graduated.
7. AARP research finds 66% of women over 50 say older workers face age discrimination at work, and 22% feel pushed out of their jobs because of their age.
8. Women's share of new S&P 500 board appointments fell to 29% in 2026, down from 38% the year before.

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