Josh Bersin told a room full of senior HR leaders that the dominant corporate logic driving AI-related layoffs is both strategically flawed and unlikely to deliver the returns companies are promising investors.
The argument he made in Amsterdam cuts against calculating an AI-influenced headcount reduction and calling it a transformation. Bersin called this approach a category error.
“The fact that some jobs may go away isn’t really the point,” he said during his keynote at HR Tech Europe 2026. “By the way, let’s suppose you did get rid of a third of your HR department. Would that really make the material financial difference to your company? Probably not that much, a little bit.”
Bersin suggests that the bigger opportunity is not cost reduction but performance improvement, and companies focused on the former are missing the latter.
The flaw in the task-analysis approach
Bersin described the standard headcount-reduction playbook in some detail. Companies inventory every job, catalog every task, identify which tasks AI can perform and use the math to calculate how many positions to eliminate.
In practice, he said, this format doesn’t reflect how business needs get completed. “The actual work that somebody does in a job is not really written down in the job description,” Bersin said. “It’s very company-dependent, case-dependent, organizational-dependent.”
He suggests that HR leaders should design the AI agent first, then determine what human roles are needed to operate around it. Rather than starting with existing jobs and asking what to cut, organizations should start from a blank whiteboard, map the process as it should work with agents embedded in it and build roles around what remains. The sequence matters. IBM, he said as an example, follows a framework of eliminate, simplify, then automate.
“You don’t say, ‘What are we doing now, and how do we automate that?’ ” Bersin said. “Because a lot of what you’re doing now, you’re not even going to have to do.”
IBM’s case
IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux, HR Executive‘s 2024 HR Executive of the Year, has been making a version of this same argument from inside a company that has run the experiment at scale. Her framing at the Wall Street Journal‘s CPO Council Summit earlier this year, as reported by HR Executive, got to the same point.
Cutting entry-level hiring in response to AI may be a “logical decision in the short-term,” LaMoreaux said, but it reflects a narrow productivity mindset rather than a growth one. “What if entry-level hires could be redeployed to capture small and medium-sized businesses an organization hasn’t previously had the ability to pursue?” she said. “What if, instead of maintaining products, software developers had the capability to focus on new products and features?”
She points to IBM’s own numbers. Over three years, AI freed up $4.5 billion in free cash flow and saved 22 million people-hours. Software developers who once spent 80%-90% of their time coding have shifted toward higher-value work. IBM’s HR function reduced its operating budget by 40% over four years while driving HR employee engagement to an all-time high. These are outcomes LaMoreaux attributes to redesigning workflows around AI rather than using AI to justify cuts.
“We don’t want to just say AI is taking away the drudgery,” LaMoreaux said. “OK, to do what? We have to get people excited about the ‘to do what.’” That is the whiteboard-first approach Bersin described in Amsterdam.
When cuts create problems
Bersin makes his case at a moment when the incentives seem to point in another direction. Meta has announced plans to reduce its workforce by roughly 10%. Microsoft has offered buyouts to approximately 7% of employees. Investors have largely rewarded both moves, which is not a coincidence because this data point is the mechanism driving the behavior.
New research from LHH (a business unit of the Adecco Group) found that 87% of HR leaders say their organization has already conducted or is planning layoffs in the next 12 months, up from 77% in 2023. AI transformation, skills displacement and shifting market demands were the primary drivers cited. The research surveyed 3,000 HR leaders and more than 8,000 employees across seven countries.
The same data shows that many of these cuts are creating problems that companies will pay to solve later. Of the HR leaders who track rehiring costs, 73% say it costs more to rehire than to redeploy. And while 77% of HR leaders say their organizations offer targeted redeployment programs, only 19% of employees say they experience or recognize those programs. This represents a 58-percentage-point gap between what leadership believes it is providing and what workers actually encounter.
“Layoffs are a necessary part of how organizations adapt to shifting skills demands and market realities,” said John Morgan, president of career transition and mobility at LHH. “The question is whether companies have the infrastructure to identify which talent to redeploy for future needs and which to support through high-quality outplacement.”
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