The first wave didn’t go the way the headlines predicted

If AI simply displaced the lowest-cost roles first, we’d expect the economics to be obvious. Instead, an MIT analysis put the share of roles where automation is actually economically viable at roughly 23% — meaning humans remain the cheaper option in more than three-quarters of them. The capability exists in far more places than the cost case does.

The reversals tell the same story. Klarna cut roughly 700 customer-service roles on the expectation that AI would absorb the work, then moved to rehire when service quality slipped and customers noticed. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” shopping technology, widely described as AI doing the work, leaned heavily on remote human reviewers behind the scenes. And Forrester now projects that about half of AI-attributed layoffs will be quietly reversed — often refilled at lower cost rather than admitted as a miss.