What Everyone's Getting Wrong About the Layoffs

I Don't Personally Know Anyone Who's Been Laid Off

Strange thing to say out loud, given how much the topic has been dominating conversation in the last two months.

I've spent time with family in Hyderabad. I've caught up with friends across Dubai. I've sat in coaching sessions where the topic keeps surfacing. The pattern is consistent. Nobody I'm sitting with has personally been let go. But everybody knows someone who has. A cousin's colleague. A friend's brother. A neighbour's husband. Always one degree removed, always recent, always abrupt.

That gap between the rumour and the lived experience is doing something to all of us. It's making the fear bigger than the data. And it's making us reach for the wrong explanation.

The Story We're Telling Ourselves Is About AI

Open any feed right now and the headlines are the same. Meta cutting eight thousand jobs. Oracle, Amazon, Dell stacking on top. Every article is leaning hard on the same word. AI. Roles automated, headcount restructured, work absorbed by software.

It's a clean story. It explains the speed. It explains why the cuts feel different from previous cycles. And it offers a villain that's easy to name.

But I don't think it's the whole story. Probably not even most of it.

What I've Actually Been Hearing

When I dig into what my friends and family are telling me, the picture shifts. The layoffs and salary cuts they're hearing about have happened fast, mostly in the last two months, and almost always in companies sensitive to one thing. The wider economic and geopolitical situation.

That's a different conversation entirely. That's tariffs, slowdowns, regional tensions, sectors retracting because demand has wobbled. AI is sitting in the background. It's not the trigger. It's the convenient label.

If I had to bet, I'd say AI is responsible for some of what's happening. Maybe twenty per cent. The rest is older, more familiar economic gravity doing what it always does.

That Doesn't Mean AI Is Harmless

I'm not dismissing AI as a workforce shift. I'm saying we're attributing too much of the current moment to it.

But the longer arc is real. And the way it shows up isn't the way most people imagine.

I've used AI heavily in my own work over the last year. I want to be precise about what it's good at, because the hype gets in the way of the truth.

AI is excellent for automating workflows. Setting up rules for routine tasks. Cleaning manual admin work that used to eat hours every week. Updating spreadsheets based on triggers. Connecting one tool to another without me touching either.

The catch is this. The ideation isn't AI's. The design isn't AI's. The judgement of what should connect to what, and why, and in what order, that's mine.

I built the workflows. AI executes them. That's a partnership, not a replacement.

The Real Split

If your job is mostly executing instructions someone else has designed, your role is at risk. Not because AI has feelings about you, but because that work can be encoded. That's the threat.

If your job is figuring out what should be done, why it matters, and how the pieces fit together, you've just been handed a force multiplier. You can produce more, faster, with fewer errors. You get to spend your hours on the part nobody else can do.

The future isn't AI replacing humans. The future is humans who use AI ahead of humans who don't.

It's not a comforting line. But it's a useful one.

Where the Money Conversation Comes In

This is where the practical layer kicks in.

If you're worried about your role, the answer isn't to outrun the news cycle. The answer is to do two things in parallel.

First, build the buffer. The cash runway. The insurance. The separation between your salary and your survival. If your job is the only thing standing between you and a crisis, that's a position you're choosing to stay in. Stop choosing it. I've written before about why a six-month runway changes the way you sleep at night, and this is the same point arriving from a different direction.

Second, invest in the skill curve. Learn to use the tools reshaping your industry. Not as a defensive crouch, but as positioning. The people I see thriving aren't the ones avoiding AI. They're the ones who picked it up early and used it to make themselves twice as useful. It's the same principle I keep coming back to in the post about your employer's best quarter not being your best quarter. The company's success and your security are not the same thing.

Both of these are within your control. The headlines aren't.

The threat isn't AI taking your job. The threat is staying in a position where one event can take everything.