Six laid-off Uber employees told Business Insider that this month's cuts were really about AI: handling Slack questions, drafting customer-support replies, cutting one person's workload to a fifth of what it used to be. Uber's own memo cited management layers instead. It is not the only place this week where the official explanation and the employee's experience pull apart. Omnicom is calling most of a 15,000-person reduction disposals and outsourcing rather than redundancy. KPMG is cutting consultants because too few of them are quitting on their own anymore. Nobody wants to be the one saying plainly what is actually happening to headcount, and the same reluctance shows up again this week in who gets flexibility, and who gets believed when they say they have been shut out of hiring.
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