Uber recently announced it is cutting 23% of jobs in its People and Places division as part of a restructuring move to create a more streamlined and efficient organization. This is one of the latest examples of how corporate talent development teams are shrinking at a pace that few anticipated, and new data suggests this is more than a standard cyclical correction.
Over the last five months, 100% of companies tracked by workforce tech company 1Huddle reduced at least one senior HR role, 96% cut the total number of director and senior-level positions in talent development or training, and 71% terminated a director or senior leader in that function outright, according to 1Huddle’s analysis of more than 57 million corporate onboarding and training sessions.
‘L&D is paying the price’
“Companies are cutting staff across the board, and HR teams are being exposed,” Sam Caucci, CEO of 1Huddle, told HR Executive. “When you’re reducing headcount, you look at who contributes to revenue growth and who doesn’t. L&D has been positioned as a cost center for too long; now, it’s paying the price.”
Caucci pushes back on the popular explanation that AI tools are replacing senior learning and development roles. “AI tools haven’t proven they can replace senior L&D roles,” he says. “What companies are actually doing is looking for technologies that automate corporate functions so they can push more productivity to the frontline.”
The 1Huddle data shows that training content created by frontline managers increased 4.4 times over the same five-month period, a sign that responsibilities once held by corporate HR are being redistributed to managers on the floor. “They’re being asked to develop talent with no training and no support,” Caucci says. “That’s redistribution without infrastructure.”
Caucci says that reduced hiring means fewer recruiters and onboarding specialists, while high turnover without a retention investment makes long-term development programs harder to justify. The result is a pull toward decentralized, frontline-led development and away from centralized L&D teams.
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An ‘underinvestment’ in training content
Despite widespread assumptions that companies are redirecting L&D budgets toward AI tools, 1Huddle’s data tells a different story. AI skills rank 43rd out of 50 skill categories based on the training content organizations are actively prioritizing, a figure Caucci calls a significant underinvestment.
“We don’t see an increase in AI spending,” he says. “We see a decrease in labor and an underinvestment in AI training.”
Caucci expects reductions in senior talent development roles to continue through the rest of 2026, driven by broad organizational shrinkage. “That won’t stop until either the economy turns or companies realize they’ve destroyed their ability to scale,” he says.
The harder question for HR leaders may be whether frontline managers, now carrying more of the load, can deliver. Caucci is skeptical that the math works without dedicated support. “The shift is from centralized corporate L&D to distributed frontline development,” he says. “The question is whether managers can actually do it.”
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