Several large companies cut jobs because of AI and then brought people back or admitted the cut was a mistake. Below is what each one said, in order of the video, with the date and the source of every claim. The surveys at the end suggest it is not rare, but they ask a few people and they are self-reported.

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Cover: Sebastian Siemiatkowski by TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped and edited. The Klarna logo belongs to its owner; no endorsement implied.

0:00 Are AI layoffs backfiring?

A survey of 2,036 employed adults in the US and the UK, reported by The Globe and Mail on 25 October 2026, found that 16% say they were replaced by AI and later asked back by the same employer. The figure is 19% in the US and 13% in the UK. The people answered about themselves, and nobody checked their employers' records.

0:40 What broke at the bank?

In July 2025 the Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced 45 job cuts as it introduced an AI voice-bot. ABC News reported on 21 August 2025 that the bank had reversed the decision and apologised to the affected employees for the "error". The bank had said the bot would reduce calls. The Finance Sector Union said call volumes were rising, with managers offering overtime and pulling team leaders onto the phones.

The 45 were offered a choice: keep their current roles, be redeployed inside the bank, or leave. The union's national secretary, Julia Angrisano, said the bank had been caught out trying to dress up job cuts as innovation.

Kathryn Sullivan, 63, was one of the 45. AAP reported that she had worked at the bank for 25 years and had spent the past few years teaching its chatbot how to answer customers. At the annual general meeting in Brisbane on 15 October 2025 she said that not all the jobs offered back were the same job. The chairman, Paul O'Malley, answered "We made a mistake". The CEO is Matt Comyn.

2:22 Who said AI could do every job?

Klarna said in early 2024 that its chatbot did the work of 700 human agents, and in December of that year that it had hired no human workers for the previous year. In February 2025 its CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, told Bloomberg that AI can already do all of the jobs that humans do.

In May 2025 he told Bloomberg that cost had been too predominant a factor and that "what you end up having is lower quality". Fortune reported on 9 May 2025 that Klarna was in the middle of a recruitment drive so that customers can always reach a human. A company spokesperson said it was still "very much AI-first".

3:17 Where did IBM's money go?

IBM's CEO, Arvind Krishna, told The Wall Street Journal on 6 May 2025 that AI agents had replaced the work of a couple hundred human resources workers. The company then hired more programmers and salespeople. He said total employment had gone up, because the savings give the company more to invest in other areas, in work where people deal with other humans instead of rote processing.

3:48 Why hire them back?

The recruiter Robert Half surveyed hiring managers in the US and Canada. According to Information Age on 1 October 2026, just under one in three of those who had cut a role mainly because of AI later rehired for the same or a similar position.

The reasons come from the Canadian part of the survey, reported by HR Reporter on 13 May 2026 (1,365 managers). The two most common, each named by 38%, were that AI needed more human oversight and quality control than expected, and that business demand grew and needed more capacity. A Robert Half director, Nicole Gorton, said this could lead to rehiring for similar roles, but often redesigned to combine technical skill with stronger oversight, communication and decision-making.

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5:00 Who isn't coming back?

Not every cut is reversed. Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, said on a podcast in 2025 that he had reduced support from 9,000 people to about 5,000 because he needed fewer. The company said it no longer needs to actively backfill support engineer roles and had redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas, as reported by Business Insider and The Register.

The company is hiring, but not for those roles. In April 2026 Benioff wrote that Salesforce was hiring 1,000 new graduates and interns, and Fortune reported that he had said he would not hire more service agents because of the company's AI agents.

5:55 Are the cuts slowing down?

No. On 23 October 2026 American Express announced cuts of about 5% of its staff. Its CFO, Christophe Le Caillec, told CNBC the aim was to be leaner and more agile and to prepare for AI, and that you do not want to automate processes that are not optimally structured. The day before, Barclays confirmed plans to cut 5,000 jobs.

6:37 So how often does it happen?

The assessment firm SHL calls the pattern "AI rebounding". In the same Globe and Mail report, 24% of workers aged 18 to 24 say they have experienced it. SHL's Lucy Beaumont described the pattern as automating first and understanding the work second.

The numbers differ because the surveys ask different people different questions: workers in one, hiring managers in the other. Both agree that it happens, and none of them says how many cuts stay in place.

8:28 So did most come back?

From the Robert Half figure, a little over two in three of the managers who cut a role for AI had not rehired for it at the time of the survey. That is our own subtraction, not a finding of the survey, and it says nothing about what they do later.

9:28 What would you ask for?

The Globe and Mail reported what workers say they would want before returning: 51% a significant pay increase, 42% written job-security guarantees and 40% full transparency about how AI would be used in their role.

Where the checking work shows up

Oversight and quality control are the top reason managers gave for hiring back. That work also appears in our job lists: on 28 October 2026, 2,516 open roles on 23 platforms ask people to write, check and correct what AI produces, and 1,404 of them list an hourly rate, with a median of $55. That is the pay in the ad, not what people earn, and a role is not a promise of work.

2,572 open roles at 22 platforms today

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For a view by profession, see which professions these roles ask for, one page each, and the earlier piece Will AI replace jobs?

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