Pay Rises Are Coming. So Are More AI Layoffs.

What do you tell the employee who got a pay-rise memo in one hand this week and a return-to-office notice in the other, while a friend at a rival firm got a redundancy letter for a job AI has apparently learned to do? Both of those employees are real this week, and neither of them is wrong about what happened to them.

Persol's latest survey has 73% of Japanese employers planning 2026 pay rises as retention becomes the priority. Two-thirds of employers told cfobrew they'll increase hiring in the second half of the year. A separate report reached hcamag's desk arguing AI adoption is producing more hiring, not less. At the same time, Visa confirmed a 7% workforce cut this week in what Reuters called an efficiency push, and Bloomberg reported AI is now doing customer service work at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft and Uber all at once.

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Both halves of that picture are true, and that's the uncomfortable part. This week's Paper Cut is about what happens when the aggregate hiring story and the individual redundancy story stop matching, and what that split means for anyone trying to write an honest employer brand message in the middle of it. There's also genuinely good news to get to further down: EBN and EBClub have joined forces, and it's worth your attention.

This Week’s Paper Cut's

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Employers say they're hiring and raising pay. The redundancy notices didn't get the memo.

Three separate pieces of research landed this week arguing the labour market is in better shape than the layoff headlines suggest. Persol's survey found 73% of Japanese employers plan 2026 pay rises, explicitly framed around retention rather than growth. cfobrew reported that two-thirds of employers expect to increase hiring in the second half of 2026. A report picked up by hcamag went further, arguing that AI adoption is a net driver of more hiring, not fewer roles, as companies build out teams to manage and deploy it.

China's tech sector is telling a similar story from a different angle. The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese firms are planning to boost pay in 2027, explicitly to keep top talent as the country's AI boom intensifies competition for skilled staff. Read together, these four stories describe employers who see AI as a reason to spend more on people, not less.

None of that squares easily with what happened at Visa, Uber, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Microsoft in the same seven days. Visa confirmed a 7% staff reduction this week, which Reuters and Bloomberg both linked to an efficiency push. Bloomberg separately reported that AI is now handling customer service work previously done by staff at CBA, Microsoft and Uber, three very different companies making the same substitution in the same news cycle. Business Insider added a further wrinkle, reporting new research suggesting AI's nearer-term threat to workers may be supressed pay rather than outright job loss, which would explain how "more hiring" and "fewer secure roles" can both be true depending on which part of the workforce you're standing in.

There's a compensation story tucked inside all of this too. Reuters reported that Anthropic is considering mandatory employee stock trading plans following its IPO, an unusual move that sits at the sharper end of how fast-scaling AI companies are having to rethink pay and equity as they grow. It's a reminder that the AI labour story isn't just about who keeps their job. It's also about who gets a stake in the company doing the cutting or the hiring.

Employer Brand POV Match your pay and hiring messaging to what's actually happening role by role, not to the company-wide average. Telling the whole workforce "we're hiring" while a specific function is quietly shrinking under an AI substitution plan is the fastest way to make your own EVP look dishonest within a quarter. If aggregate headcount is growing but certain roles are exposed, say so specifically, to the people in those roles, before they read it in the trade press first.

EBN and EBClub have joined forces to build a single global community

The news itself: EBN and EBClub announced this week that they are combining efforts to build what the joint release describes as the world's largest global community for employer branding professionals. The two platforms have operated in similar territory for some time, EBN as a publication, EBClub as a practitioner network, and this week's move brings the media and the community sides of that work under one roof.

It's worth being plain about why this matters rather than just noting that it happened. Employer branding is still, in a lot of organisations, a job with no peer group next door. You can be the only person doing this work at your company, reporting into HR or marketing or somewhere in between, with no one down the hall who has run into the same budget fight or the same "why don't we just do what Google does" conversation. A combined EBN and EBClub community is a direct answer to that specific problem, not a vague promise of "networking."

EBN's own piece on the merger makes the practitioner case directly: the job of employer branding "need never be lonely ever again," as the headline puts it, once there's a properly resourced place to compare notes with people doing the same work elsewhere. That's a genuinely useful thing to exist, and it's a different kind of story to the layoffs and pay data running through the rest of this issue. Readers who've felt that isolation will recognise exactly what problem this is trying to solve.

Employer Brand POV Treat this as an actual resourcing decision, not a bookmark. If your organisation has one person carrying the employer brand function, or a small team without much peer support, put fifteen minutes on someone's calendar this month to look at what the combined EBN and EBClub community offers. The alternative is the same practitioner solving the same problems alone that a room full of peers solved months ago.

Related reading on EBN: Why Employer Branding Professionals Need Community

AI is expanding what people do at work, but most companies haven't caught up

OpenAI published its own research this week arguing that AI is expanding the scope of what people do at work rather than simply replacing tasks, framing adoption as additive rather than substitutive. Gallup released a companion piece of sorts, a 2026 briefing on AI and workplace productivity aimed squarely at leaders trying to work out what to actually do with the technology beyond the pilot stage.

The gap between that framing and daily practice showed up almost immediately. HR News reported that businesses are increasingly making AI use a workplace requirement even as those same firms admit they're struggling to build AI-ready workforces, mandating a tool before the training to use it properly exists. HR Dive added a sharper data point: nearly half of workers said they'd let AI negotiate their own pay on their behalf, a striking level of trust in the technology given how unevenly it's being rolled out everywhere else.

Atlassian took a more concrete approach to the same problem. The company introduced what it's calling "AI wallets" for employees this week, effectively a budget or allowance model for individual AI tool use rather than a blanket mandate. It's a small policy detail, but it's the first mechanism in this week's stories that treats AI adoption as something to be resourced and governed at the individual level, rather than announced top-down and left to sort itself out.

Employer Brand POV Train before you mandate, and say so publicly if you haven't yet. A workplace AI requirement announced without a matching training budget reads to staff exactly the way it reads in this week's HR News piece: as a shortcut. If you can't fund something like Atlassian's wallet model yet, be honest about the sequencing instead of pretending readiness already exists.

Office culture is quietly deciding who this economy actually rewards

Business Insider reported this week on introverts adapting to return-to-office mandates in an unexpected way, turning underused conference rooms into informal sanctuaries away from open-plan noise, a small but telling sign of how unevenly RTO is landing across personality types and roles. Reuters took the longer view, publishing a decade-spanning look at how the US workplace has changed and what employers now need to focus on as a result.

Forbes contributor Caroline Castrillon wrote about what she calls the productivity performance trap, arguing that efficient employees are frequently punished for their efficiency with more work rather than more reward or recognition, a dynamic that quietly erodes exactly the kind of high performers most employers claim to want to retain. It's an analytical framing rather than a hard data point, but it names something a lot of readers will recognise from their own teams.

Fortune, meanwhile, spoke to CEOs at Amazon, Citi and McDonald's, who argued that opportunity is still there for Gen Z jobseekers with the right mindset, even as millions of young workers face unemployment. That's a genuinely large gap between leadership messaging and workforce experience, and it sits uncomfortably next to the RTO and productivity-trap stories running alongside it this week.

Employer Brand POV Audit who actually benefits from your RTO and performance rules this quarter, not who they were designed for. If your best-performing staff are quietly picking up more work with no extra recognition, and your youngest jobseekers are hearing "mindset" as the explanation for a genuinely difficult market, both of those are employer brand problems before they're anything else.

The Cut List

Takeaways

• Persol's survey found 73% of Japanese employers plan 2026 pay rises, framed explicitly around retention rather than expansion.
• cfobrew reported two-thirds of employers expect to increase hiring in the second half of 2026, even as high-profile cuts continue elsewhere.
• Visa confirmed a 7% workforce reduction this week, which Reuters and Bloomberg linked to an AI-driven efficiency push.
• Bloomberg reported AI is now doing customer service work previously handled by staff at CBA, Microsoft and Uber, three companies making the same substitution at once.
• Business Insider reported new research suggesting AI's nearer-term threat may be suppressed pay rather than outright job loss.
• Nearly half of workers told HR Dive they would let AI negotiate their own pay on their behalf.
• Atlassian introduced "AI wallets," a budgeted allowance model for individual employee AI use, rather than a blanket mandate.
• EBN and EBClub announced this week that they are combining efforts to build a single global community for employer branding professionals.

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