Executives Won't Blame AI for the Layoffs. Their Own Employees Say Otherwise.

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.

SPONSORED

The best employer brands don’t manufacture stories. They uncover what’s already true. Sell The Truth: Leadership Storytelling For Cultures That Win by Bryan Adams shows leaders how to turn truth into stories that build belief, trust and competitive advantage.

Order now

This Week’s Paper Cut's

Watch or listen here ↯

We keep tracking to a minimum. The video is hosted on YouTube and the podcast is hosted on PodBean, which may place cookies that measure viewing and personalize content. We only load the player after you consent to these cookies. You can update your cookie settings any time.

The cuts that don't call themselves layoffs

US initial jobless claims fell to 196,000 last week, the lowest since mid-July, and economists still describe claims in the 200,000 to 230,000 range as historically low. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 162,000 in August, about three times the recent monthly average. By the numbers that get quoted in a press release, the labour market looks calm.

The picture underneath is less tidy. Omnicom's chief financial officer, Philip Angelastro, told an investor conference this week that the group expects to end 2026 with about 105,000 employees, down from roughly 120,000 at the end of 2025, as it finishes integrating Interpublic Group. He was careful to note the change "really [has] not impacted client-facing people very much at all," attributing the bulk of it to duplicated corporate roles, offshoring and business disposals rather than a straightforward redundancy round. KPMG, meanwhile, is opening a fresh round of UK advisory redundancies for a reason that inverts the usual story: attrition, the natural drip of people leaving on their own, has slowed as corporate clients rein in spending, so the firm is cutting to reach the headcount attrition used to deliver for free.

Oracle sits at the sharper end of the same pattern. The company's workforce fell by about 21,000 people, or 13%, in the fiscal year to May, and it began a new layoff round this week aimed at freeing up cash for its AI build-out, which carries a forecast $90bn to $95bn in capital spending for fiscal 2027. Oracle's new chief financial officer, Hilary Maxson, told staff on a companywide call, a day after the cuts began, that she did not want people "doing more with less," calling it "a phrase that I really, really don't like." Neither she nor the co-chief executives addressed the layoffs directly on the call. Meanwhile in the UK, payrolls fell by 26,000 in August, more than five times the 5,000 drop economists expected, and job vacancies dropped to a fresh five-year low of 702,000, the kind of number that does not show up in a US jobless-claims headline but describes the same underlying hesitation to hire.

Employer Brand POV

Track the line inside your own organisation between what you would call a layoff and what you would call an efficiency programme, before an employee, a journalist or a regulator draws that line for you. Omnicom's framing and KPMG's both rely on the distinction holding up under scrutiny. If attrition, disposals or outsourcing are doing work that redundancy used to do, say so plainly rather than letting the headcount number speak for itself.

AI's bill is landing on workers first

At Uber, six recently laid-off employees told Business Insider that AI was already doing large parts of their old jobs, from drafting Slack answers to writing customer-support replies, with one saying an AI tool had cut a task down to a fifth of the time it used to take. That is notable because it is not the reason Uber itself gave. Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi has framed this month's 3,300 job cuts around flattening management layers, not AI, even while citing "real tailwinds" from AI productivity at an industry conference the same week.

New research adds a layer most headlines miss. Sania Edlich of Princeton and Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, reviewed 321 occupations and found that AI-exposed roles are seeing slower wage growth rather than fewer jobs, with companies capturing the productivity gains by holding down pay rather than cutting headcount. "If you are a hairdresser, if you are a massage therapist, if you are a doorman, of course your occupation is not threatened by AI, whereas if you are a journalist or an economist, there is just more pressure on wages," Slok told the New York Times. In the UK, Deloitte research reported by Reuters found workers are now spending close to £1bn of their own money on AI tools to do their jobs, a cost employers are not the ones absorbing. A separate Wall Street Journal report this week described AI use creating new trust friction between colleagues, with unclear internal rules about who is allowed to use it, and how, breeding suspicion rather than confidence.

Employer Brand POV

Tally what your own people are already spending, in money or unpaid time, to keep up with AI tools at work, because that figure is a truer measure of the pressure they are under than any usage dashboard. If wage growth in AI-exposed roles is quietly flattening while headcount holds steady, as the Princeton and Apollo research suggests, a "no layoffs here" message will not land the way it once did.

The office fight isn't over

More than 1,000 Barclays staff have signed a union letter objecting to a tightened office mandate that would require most employees in three days a week, with senior leaders in four, and no exemption for long commutes. Unite, which represents about 80% of Barclays' 45,000 UK staff, says 94% of members surveyed want the changes delayed until consultation concludes. Barclays says its policy "vary[ies] by business area, reflecting the nature of the work and the needs of the business."

The revolt lands days after the UK government announced it will go further than the current "consider reasonably" standard for flexible-working requests. Louise Haigh told the TUC conference that employers refusing a flexible-working request will now have to hold a face-to-face meeting and explain their reasoning, rather than simply logging a decision. "Every request can be taken seriously," she said. Separately, a Hassell Workplace Futures Survey found employees increasingly want the office to offer something remote work cannot: quiet space to focus, away from the always-on nature of AI tools that follow people onto their phones, in bed and on the commute. The office fight, in other words, is no longer simply remote versus in-person. It is also about what the office is actually for once people are back in it.

Employer Brand POV

Grant flexible-working requests the seriousness the law will soon require of you, not the minimum you can get away with. Barclays' own staff numbers, more than 1,000 signatures and 94% wanting a pause, are the kind of internal data point that becomes public whether or not a company intends it to.

Everyone's told to be more visible. Some people still can't get seen.

"I feel invisible in the workplace and in public life as a fiftysomething woman," Liz, 51, told the Guardian, after applying for more than 100 roles and being asked in one interview whether she "always dress[es] so formally." James, 59, has sent 598 applications for eight interviews since losing his job two years ago. The Centre for Ageing Better puts the number of 50-to-state-pension-age workers struggling to find work at 918,000, roughly matching the number of young people not in education, employment or training. The Telegraph reports a similar pattern this week under the headline "How Britain is failing middle-aged workers," describing decades of skills and experience going to waste while job support skews toward younger jobseekers.

Related reading on EBN: our own report this week, "Too Young to Hire, Too Experienced to Hire? The Age Problem", goes further into why both ends of the age range are struggling in the same labour market at once, and what that squeeze means for succession and knowledge transfer.

The pressure to be seen cuts the other way too. As jobs get scarcer, Business Insider reports that workers across the board, not just executives, are being pushed to "go direct": build a LinkedIn presence, post regularly, become discoverable to recruiters who now search rather than advertise. Do it badly, or too visibly on the wrong topic, and it can cost you internally, as one salesperson found after his manager asked him to stop promoting a side hustle. LinkedIn says it is cracking down on "AI slop" content that lacks a clear point of view, after finding that more than 30% of posts on the platform were likely fully AI-written.

Related reading on EBN: our own analysis this week, "The Personal Brand Paradox: When Everyone Is an Influencer", looks at what happens once every employee, executive and recruiter is expected to behave like a media company, and why authenticity gets harder to fake, and easier to standardise into meaninglessness, at scale.

Elsewhere, the bill for past exclusion is still being paid. Accenture agreed to pay $25m this week to settle DEI-related federal discrimination claims, taking combined settlements from Accenture, Deloitte and IBM under the US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to $63.5m this year. None of the three admitted liability.

Employer Brand POV

Notice who your own funnel already filters out, whether that shows up as an age skew in your interview data, a discrimination settlement waiting to happen, or a culture where the loudest LinkedIn voice gets heard over the most experienced one. Visibility pressure and invisibility are not opposites this week so much as two ends of the same problem: who gets to be seen, on what terms, and who decides.

The Cut List

Takeaways

1. Omnicom expects headcount to fall from about 120,000 to 105,000 by year-end, attributing most of the drop to outsourcing, offshoring and disposals rather than direct redundancies.
2. Oracle's workforce fell 21,000, or 13%, in the year to May, and the company began a fresh layoff round this week to help fund a forecast $90bn to $95bn in AI capital spending for fiscal 2027.
3. Princeton and Apollo Global Management research covering 321 occupations found AI-exposed roles are seeing slower wage growth rather than fewer jobs, with companies capturing productivity gains through pay rather than headcount.
4. UK workers are spending close to £1bn of their own money on AI tools for work, according to Deloitte research reported by Reuters.
5. More than 1,000 Barclays staff signed a union letter against a tightened office mandate; separately, new UK rules will require bosses to hold a face-to-face meeting before refusing any flexible-working request.
6. The Centre for Ageing Better estimates 918,000 workers aged 50 to state pension age are struggling to find work, roughly matching the number of young people not in education, employment or training.
7. Accenture's $25m DEI-related settlement brings combined payouts from Accenture, Deloitte and IBM under the US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Fraud Initiative to $63.5m this year.
8. A Pew Research study found 60% of US adults now identify as "working class," up from 54% two years ago, including half of adults earning more than $155,000 a year.

SOURCES

FROM THE EBN NETWORK

Find the right people. Search hundreds of screened employer branding agencies, consultants, platforms and specialist providers. The employer branding rabbit hole now has filters.

Explore the Directory