[cyanydeez]

This is not investment, this is human divestment. These orgs are betting they can deploy AI to replace humans.

In some cases, they'll probably have false positives: they were already bloated, and the missing staff were just doing the mythical man month.

In other cases, they'll probably claw back hiring as AI turns out to be a force multiplier but the force is at some orthogonal angle to the human labor that's most valuable, eg, mediocre programmer gets unstuck quicker, but still writes buggy code.

In further cases, they just fucked themselves by chilling their staff and sassling managers with the most desperate and mediocre employees. Eg, no one is available to debug the now more efficiently produced but still buggy code.

Odds of any of these orgs successfully streamlining work flow is low because ultimately, these layoffs are inline with trying to raise shareholder value when money is no longer cheap so you can't just go buyout competitors or novel business plays. AI is just a rationale to paper over jack Welches legacy.