AI Layoffs

Paycom, OKC’s biggest “tech” company, announced layoffs today that they blamed on AI. Lots of other companies have done the same recently (Microsoft, Saleforce, etc.)

The cynical (but true!) counter-narrative is that AI is just an excuse. Companies have always limped along with pointless inefficiencies.

After a couple years of LLM work, my read is that most “AI optimization” is just someone finally asking obvious questions about bad processes. It’s in-house consulting dressed up as innovation. AI mostly works as a permission structure to kill dumb workflows that could’ve been fixed 20 years ago.

Example: many moons ago I worked at a company where field offices entered truck weights in a spreadsheet, printed and faxed them, and someone at corporate re-typed the numbers into Access. One hour of questioning turned that job into linked Excel sheets. I guess we could’ve slapped an “AI transformation” label on it.

That feels like what’s happening now. “Rub some AI on everything” creates the cover story, but the real driver is people finally saying: “Why are we doing this?”

Using LLMs for meaningful work in a consistent/deterministic way is hard. These companies didn’t all become AI experts overnight.

None of this makes the layoffs less brutal for the people caught up in them, but it does punch some more holes in the AI-is-eating-the-world story.