Volkswagen plans to cut 100,000 jobs by the end of the decade, the biggest restructuring in the history of the car industry. Notably, VW isn't blaming AI. It's blaming China.
That's worth holding onto, because the dominant narrative of 2026 is that the machines are coming for our livelihoods, and the headline numbers seem to back this up. Challenger, Gray & Christmas (the outplacement firm tracking US layoffs) reports that AI has been cited in 22% of all job cuts announced this year, leading the stated reasons for five consecutive months. More than 225,000 US workers have been let go: roughly 843 people every single day.
AI is the villain being blamed.
Except… When you actually read what the releases say, the picture fractures into three entirely different stories. My take is this: the jobs are really going, but AI is doing far more work in the press release than it is on the org chart. Economists even have a name for it now; "AI-washing," the reputational cousin of greenwashing.
Story 1: Blame the Machine
Some cuts are openly and honestly pinned on AI and the threat there is real. Salesforce's Marc Benioff says he cut his customer-support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 because AI agents now handle the work, "I need less heads." That's the legitimate version, and as Andy Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas puts it, "regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is." Fair enough.
But the roles disappearing aren't always the ones you'd expect, which leads me to think AI is often the excuse rather than the culprit. It has been reported that KPMG is cutting 200 UK advisory jobs, incl. staff in its AI and cyber teams. Read that again: it's laying off the people who sell AI consulting, citing softening client demand rather than a robot taking their desks. That doesn't read like AI replacing workers, more the AI hype cycle cooling down. Companies that rushed to buy AI advice are now pulling back. It's a signal of market fatigue, not Deus Ex Machina.
Story 2: Hide the Machine
Then there's the group doing the exact opposite: cutting because of software while carefully avoiding the term.
When Uber's leadership trimmed 3,400 roles, it was framed as "eliminating management layers" to boost operational agility. AI wasn't mentioned in the internal memo. Meanwhile, customer service and routing operations are reportedly being handed off to automated models behind the scenes. "Delayering" sounds like decisive corporate restructuring; whereas saying "software took your job" could potentially trigger a backlash.
Story 3: Blame the Weather
Finally, the largest group of all: companies blaming anything and everything except technology.
Co-op explicitly cited Labour's National Insurance hike, which pushed their payroll tax bill from £100m to £150m annually, before accelerating automated shelf-label rollouts across 2,300 stores.
Admiral cut 500 jobs while going out of its way to state AI was not responsible.
Vistry is shedding costs amid a £661m loss blamed on the housing market and global supply disruptions.
Novo Nordisk, with 13,000 positions gone in a year, points directly at its looming patent cliff.
The uncomfortable truth is the stated reason for a layoff is rarely meant to inform the public; it is meant to perform a specific corporate function.
Here's the tell that gives the game away. According to Challenger's own data, the share of US layoffs blamed on AI rocketed from around 7% in January to 40% by May. AI did not advance that fast in four months. What changed wasn't the technology — it was the explanation. Marc Andreessen, no AI sceptic, put it bluntly: every large company is "overstaffed by at least 25%," the hangover from a pandemic "hiring binge" that "was just wild" and "now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it's AI." He went further: "AI literally until December was not actually good enough to do any of the jobs that they're actually cutting." Forrester agrees the tech isn't ready it projects just 6% of US jobs automated by 2030, and reckons that even where a firm wants to swap a person for software, "it could take you 18 to 24 months… if it even works."
When a company blames AI, the message is "we're innovating." But one reason for the recent onset of corporate GLP-1'esque slimming is a possible over-hiring during the post-COVID boom. When a company blames the macro picture, drawn from a cornucopia of scapegoats like taxes, rates, and China, the message is: "external pressure, nothing we could do." What may hide underneath is quiet automation and the realisation that they may simply be overstaffed. But keen to avoid the backlash of admitting it.
Blaming AI lets a company that over-hired in the ZIRP era reframe overcapacity as forward-thinking modernisation. Blaming tax hikes, interest rates or Chinese competition lets a firm quietly automating its workforce dodge the reputational hit of replacing humans with algorithms.
The one thing no company seems to want to admit is the possible truth that: money was cheap, we hired too many people and now interest rates, energy prices and taxes are higher. Rates have climbed to multi-decade highs, elevating the cost of capital alongside rising payroll taxes and sticky wage inflation. AI arrived at the exact moment corporate boards were desperate to cut costs anyway. It didn't necessarily trigger the jobpocalypse. It simply provided the perfect alibi.
The Takeaway
So, fact or fiction? Maybe it is both. The jobpocalypse isn't a simple story of human versus machine. It's a story of narrative management.
AI hasn't taken over the corporate world yet, but it has perfected its first major corporate job: acting as the ultimate shield for thinning out an org chart.
The next time you see a layoff headline, don't ask what the software did. Ask what the press release is trying to hide.
GLA & DYOR.
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