We Built the Machine That's Replacing Us

From corporate communicators to consultants and business writers, AI has turned the disruption gospel on the people who preached it

A former colleague - a 19-year communications veteran at a Fortune 500 tech company - was laid off early this year despite strong reviews and a stellar reputation. The company said it was “redeploying assets” but she knew it was AI-driven. She was stunned. “I eat, sleep and breathe tech and AI,” she told me, “and I didn’t see it coming.”

She had spent nearly two decades writing the story of why this was good for everyone else.

She is what I’ll call a narrator: one of the columnists, consultants, communications executives, and management gurus whose job for thirty years has been to translate Big Tech’s vision into a doctrine the rest of us could believe in. Disruption is virtue. Change is opportunity. Adaptation is responsibility. Workers who resist are laggards.

The factory worker who lost his job in 1985 should retrain. The retail clerk who lost hers in 2005 should learn to code. The customer service rep in 2015 should reinvent.

The narrators didn’t whisper this. They shouted it from bestseller lists, McKinsey decks, and TED stages. Tom Peters built a forty-year career out of the gospel of embracing change and told us to thrive on chaos. Thomas Friedman declared the world flat and instructed American workers to upskill. Who Moved My Cheese? sold 30 million copies and became corporate America’s preferred severance gift; author Barbara Ehrenreich called it “the classic of downsizing propaganda,” stressing that anyone, anytime can personally reinvent themselves to survive and thrive in any environment. Companies bought it in bulk and handed it to laid-off employees on their way out the door.

I was one of the narrators. I served as a national consumer spokesman for Intel in the 90s, later drafted mission statements at Sun Microsystems, managed an editorial and blogging program at HP Enterprise, and spent nine years managing editorial programs and writing for Cisco’s internal news hub, serving 80,000 employees. The instruction was always the same: stay on message. Technology will change the world for the better. Job losses are a modest price for everything we’ll all gain. I honestly believed it. I treated tech as something close to religion and sang the praises to anyone who would listen. I survived four layoffs, always surviving and jumping to the next lily pad.

Then, eighteen months ago, Cisco laid me off with 5,600 others. The surviving staff was told to use AI tools to fill the gaps.

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The exemption clause we wrote for ourselves

It was never supposed to happen to us. The narrators, the journalists, the knowledge workers - we were above it all. Intelligence was the moat. Creativity couldn’t be automated. The bosses needed us. And besides, we were “family.” (even though most of us never believed it, we pushed the narrative when needed).

In early 2024, I remember a senior communications executive leading a discussion about AI. It was the early days of AI in the workplace and managers were excited. I recall one analyst relations manager gushing: “I just did a report with AI in a couple of minutes. It used to take me hours!”

I thought: Does she realize she realize she may be talking about her eventual job replacement?

Then the day came my boss let our long-time contract writers go and told us to start using AI more to fill the gaps. Whew, I thought. Hate to be them. It took only a few days for the second thought to land: we could be next.

We were.

The message since has crystallized: anything that can be automated will be automated. That includes professional work, not just the routine tasks the narrators always promised AI would absorb.

Consider what a corporate writer actually does inside a big tech company. Drafting executive talking points, writing internal news stories, producing leadership Q&As, shaping all-hands briefings. Real work, requiring real judgment about audience, tone, and what the CEO actually meant. An AI tool can now produce a passable first draft of any of it in less than two minutes. Is it as great work? No. The phrasing is flatter. The judgment about what to leave out is worse. The voice is generic in a way a careful reader would catch.

But if it’s 70 to 80 percent as good, costs almost nothing, and arrives instantly, senior leadership will approve.

AI doesn’t call in sick. It doesn’t get pulled into a family crisis. It doesn’t stop at 5:30 because the kids need pickup. It never sleeps.

For most of what corporate communications produces, 70 percent is good enough. And “good enough” wins the day, especially when the alternative is paying a human.

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The selling never stopped

The narrators are still narrating in the background. Earlier this month at the University of Arizona commencement, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt opened with the usual remarks about AI’s transformative potential. The graduating class booed him. Some students shouted at him.

Schmidt looked surprised. The execs and narrators usually are, when the audience stops listening.

Debates are raging on Linked-In and other forums about the future plight of the narrators and other knowledge workers, like professional writers. Meanwhile the doctrine is still going out in keynotes, podcasts, op-eds, and LinkedIn manifesto; the disruption-is-good communications machine never sleeps.

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The doctrine comes for us

The latest layoff wave is not being driven by financial distress. The companies cutting hardest are posting record results. They’re cutting to redeploy capital toward AI and reduce labor costs. Cisco cut 9,600 in 2024 when I was laid off. Meta announced 8,000 last week. Block reduced its workforce by nearly 40 percent. Amazon’s leaked internal documents revealed another 16,000 coming. Atlassian’s CEO tied his layoffs explicitly to AI investment.

AI was the leading reason companies cited for layoffs for two straight months this spring, accounting for 21,490 cuts in April alone - 26 percent of the total.

Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters, announcing 7,800 cuts amid strong earnings, summed it up bluntly, saying he was replacing “low-value human capital.”

He apologized about his choice of words today but it was too late. The damage was done. The message clear. The substitution of workers “in favor of machines will accelerate as we go forward into AI.”

The people now being eliminated are, in many cases, the same demographic that wrote the obituaries for previous waves of automation. Manufacturing in the 80s. Retail in the 2000s. Customer service in the 2010s. We covered those stories from positions of safety. I wrote about laid-off refinery workers at BusinessWeek in the late 80’s and early 90s, between profiles of high-flying new tech companies like Compaq and Dell. The future, as we told it, belonged to tech.

What’s being lost is bigger than headcount. Strip out the knowledge class and you don’t just lose jobs - you lose the apprenticeship system that produces judgment. The good boss who saves you. The colleague who teaches you. The twenty-three-year-old who learns by watching senior people make hard calls under real pressure. AI can replicate the output. It can’t replicate the experience or the room. Or human relationships that serve as the glue holding teams and organizations together.

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Many knowledge workers will find a way through. Those who can do work AI cannot - judgment under ambiguity, persuasion across power lines, ethical decisions that carry personal consequence. Those who can manage AI rather than be managed by it.

Those willing to leave the comfortable for messier work that still rewards human presence.

But the path is narrower than the disruption gospel ever advertised.

The narrators built a doctrine of perpetual adaptation. They taught the displaced to retrain, the obsolete to reinvent, the laid-off to lean in. Most of us have reinvented ourselves many times already. This time is different. The world we’re being told to adapt to is telling us, in the same breath, that it doesn’t need us. Whether we believe it - and what we do if we don’t - is the work ahead.