Before You Start Laying Off People Because of AI

Human-centric is the new black

Major global players are racing to announce how many positions they're eliminating thanks to technology. To name a few: Atlassian 1,600 (10%), Amazon 16,000 (and that's already the second wave), Meta at least 20%. Czech Direct recently announced 30%. And then there’s a study from Anthropic, which shows that AI is still far from reaching its theoretical potential.

But behind every such announcement are people and entire teams that companies expensively recruited and developed, and are now laying off with visions of cost savings, better EBITDA, and happy shareholders.

I wonder how clear it is to them what will make them stand out among competitors in the new landscape, or what new job positions will look like.

AI is not just a technological upgrade. It's a design challenge to redefine human work and organizations as a whole. The choice between a "tech-centric" approach (focused on tools) and a "human-centric" approach (focused on people) may then become a fundamental decision about market survival.

Think massive investment in algorithms is enough for success? An illusion. A Deloitte survey paints a different picture: 59% of companies opt for a purely technological focus, but this means they're 1.6x more likely to fail to meet expected return on investment. In contrast, human-centric organizations use AI to multiply human potential rather than simply replacing it.

AI transformation as a cultural shift

It also seems that organizations' attention regarding AI transformation focuses more on how people use artificial intelligence than on how it affects their relationships at work. And what emerges is a cultural debt.

This manifests, for instance, as eroded trust and feelings of isolation. In the aforementioned Deloitte study, 42% of workers report that their company rarely evaluates AI's impact on people, and as many as 80% of people worry that their colleagues use AI merely to create an appearance of productivity.

We're in a situation where constant organizational changes have led to deteriorating mental well-being (68%), increased workload (60%), and feelings of being unnecessary or falling behind (58%). This is certainly not what human-centered transformations look like...

Traditional change management tools and training systems clearly can't keep up with what people in organizations actually need as their work roles and conditions transform. A better approach is to work with the concept of adaptivity ("changefulness") — developing the ability to adapt, learn, and evolve as an everyday skill that is an integral part of work.

We need to rediscover curiosity over control and experiment, not just train people on AI tools. These are the survival instincts that have always helped people cope with change and uncertainty.

The outcome is not automatic

Every major technological wave (from early mechanization through computers to the internet) has always offered two paths:

• either it was used for technocratic centralization of power and micromanagement — work organization models like Fordism or Taylorism,
• or it was used to strengthen human autonomy — human-centric projects like Wikipedia and many companies built on self-management principles (e.g., Buurtzorg).

That's why the impact of artificial intelligence on human work is not predetermined by the technology itself, but by how we choose to organize work around it.

Sooner or later, organizational leaders will have to answer the following questions:

• Which layers of corporate bureaucracy can AI truly replace, and which might it unintentionally reinforce? How do you prevent everyone from generating AI reports and outputs simply because it's extremely cheap, but adds zero value?
• Can artificial intelligence serve as an "operating system" for a team, providing coordination that would otherwise require a manager or formal process?
• How do you design organizations where people and AI agents collaborate? And if AI makes a team of 10 as productive as a team of 20, what happens to the remaining 10? Should this team even be doing what it's been doing, or is that already obsolete? Anyone can do mass layoffs, but will that be the right solution for the company?

At Tempo, we believe that real AI transformations are not just a technological race of cutting people and automating. It's the greatest humanistic project of our time, whose goal should be leveraging human potential to create amazing products, experiences, and value for customers and the world around us.

Because that is the true purpose of business.

Sources:

• Newsletter Corporate Rebels
• Deloitte: 2026 Global Human Capital Trends