ford, ibm and commonwealth bank all cut roles on an automation case, then hired people back into them. none of them put out a release about the second part.

reporting from july put three large employers in the same position: reductions made on an ai business case, followed by quiet rehiring once the systems could not carry the work end to end. the condition underneath it is a category error made at the budgeting stage, where a role gets priced as the sum of its visible tasks and the rest of it, judgment about exceptions, context nobody wrote down, the call to the customer who is halfway out the door, is valued at zero because it never appeared in a process map. the cost is not the salary you saved and then gave back. it is the rehire at market rate, the institutional memory that left with the first round, and a team that now reads every efficiency project as a layoff with a project plan attached.

the fake fix is a better assessment of which jobs ai can do, which is the same question that produced the first answer. ask a different one: take the role you are tempted to automate, write down what happens in it when something goes wrong, who decides, and what they need to know that is written down nowhere. automate the documented part, keep the person on the undocumented part, and you get the savings without paying a recruiting fee to find out what the job was.