Three industries, two continents, one identical mistake. It was never a strategy. It was cognitive clustering. The AI layoffs of 2024–25 weren’t a strategy failure. They were a cognition failure, the same one we walked through in my Tokenmaxxing article, run against a different budget line. And the tell is that three companies with nothing in common made the identical call, and then made the identical reversal.
The decisions
Between 2023 and 2025, three C-suites in three completely separate industries on three different continents did functionally the same thing. Ford leaned on automated quality inspection while shedding salaried roles. IBM’s AskHR agent absorbed roughly 94% of routine HR interactions, and CEO Arvind Krishna publicly confirmed in 2025 that hundreds of HR staff had been replaced. Commonwealth Bank cut 45 customer-service roles in 2025, tying the redundancies explicitly to a new voice-bot. Different industries, different geos, different stacks, same call - including their reversals.
Ford’s COO Kumar Galhotra told Bloomberg the company had leaned too hard on automated quality systems and the results weren’t good enough; Ford has since rehired, hired, or promoted about 350 veteran specialists over three years and, in 2026, topped J.D. Power’s U.S. Initial Quality Study for mainstream brands, its first time leading the study since 2010.
In February 2026, IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux announced IBM is tripling U.S. entry-level hiring, including for the very software-developer roles “we’re being told AI can do.” And CBA reversed its 45 redundancies in August 2025 and formally called the assessment behind them an error, after call volumes rose rather than fell.
Cognitive composition
Look at who was around each table. Jim Farley, Ford CEO, career marketing and product operator. Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, career researcher, ex-head of IBM Research. Matt Comyn, CBA CEO, career retail banker with experience in digital transformations. Three very different résumés. Three identical calls.
That’s the tell. When three cognitively distinct leaders arrive at the same questionable decision, the driver isn’t strategy, it’s a shared cognitive frame. In 2024–25 the frame was: adopt AI fast, replace headcount as the visible KPI of adoption, signal cost discipline to the market. Every C-suite was optimizing for the same demonstration.
What was missing from every one of those rooms was a cognition that priced tacit knowledge. The veteran quality engineer who catches a bracket weld failure because he saw the same defect on a line ten years ago. The IBM HR partner who reads the room on a bereavement, a performance appeal, an accommodation request. The CBA rep who de-escalates a scam-loss call at 11pm. That is the 6% AskHR couldn’t route. That is what Ford’s automated inspection missed. That is what CBA’s voicebot could not do.
None of those leaders are stupid. The failure is cognitive clustering: a leadership team made of people who process the same signals the same way, arriving at the same conclusion because no one in the room was wired to price the downside of removing tacit judgment.
What a Decision Simulation would have surfaced
Stress-test the “replace the humans with the agent” call against a cognition weighted toward tacit knowledge and second-order effects, and two questions land in the first pass. What is the cost of the 6% failing? And what is the cost of losing the humans who trained the AI on the other 94%? Both were knowable in 2023. Neither was priced.
The July 2026 news cycle is the evidence the pattern is still running. Volkswagen is weighing up to 100,000 job cuts. Sprout Social cut roughly 20% of its workforce on July 16. KPMG Australia is preparing 1,000+ cuts and reducing partner pay. Meanwhile Orgvue’s survey found 39% of global leaders had cut jobs citing AI, and 55% of those now say the call was wrong. Robert Half data reported by CNBC shows 32% of U.S. hiring managers who cut a role primarily for AI have already rehired for the same or a comparable position. The reversals are documented, on the record, quantified. And yet the cuts continue.
The lesson
Layoffs framed as an “AI strategy” are almost never a strategy. They are the output of a leadership team that shares the same FOMO and cognitive triggers and lacks the diversity around the table to stress-test it before it hits the P&L.
As executives everywhere clamor to replace people with AI, the ones using AI simulations to price the downside before the cut (not after) may be making the most cognitive (and human) choice available to them. And who knows, maybe they can prevent the pain of the boomerang.