A friend of mine was recently laid off from a major High-tech company. I have changed identifying details to protect the people involved, but not the substance of what happened.

This person had helped build some of the company’s internal AI tools. During the week before the dismissal, one of the people involved in the decision asked for help understanding how those tools worked.

A few days later, the employee was told that the role had been eliminated as part of an AI-driven restructuring.

There is something absurd about a leader using a technology they do not yet understand to explain why the person who built it is no longer required.

Except there is nothing funny about losing your job.

I am not an AI sceptic. Quite the opposite.

AI has already made me substantially more productive. In sales, research, financial analysis, meeting preparation, writing, and the development of new ideas, it allows me to do more in less time. It can give an individual or a small team capabilities that once required an entire department.

That is precisely why the current explanation for so many layoffs bothers me.

Technological revolutions have always disrupted work. The agricultural revolution changed how societies produced food. The industrial revolution transformed manufacturing and transport. The digital revolution eliminated some tasks while creating industries that previous generations could not have imagined. Over time, each expanded human productivity and raised living standards, even though the transition was painful for many people.

Few people today would choose a horse-drawn carriage over a car. The car more directly and completely performed the carriage’s central function. It was faster, more scalable, and eventually supported an entirely new economic system.

AI is already replacing certain tasks, and it will eventually eliminate some roles altogether. But much of today’s office technology is not yet a car replacing a carriage. It is closer to giving the driver better navigation, a more efficient engine, and the ability to travel further in the same amount of time.

In many workplaces, AI allows capable employees to produce more. Whether that productivity becomes growth, better service, new products, reduced working hours, or a smaller payroll is not a decision made by the technology. It is a decision made by leadership.

The responsibility of leadership is to redesign work around the technology: identify which tasks can genuinely be automated, retrain and redeploy strong employees, reduce unnecessary hiring, and measure whether the promised gains are actually appearing.

When leaders do not know how to do that, “AI transformation” becomes a sophisticated phrase for an ordinary cost reduction.

Show me the financial evidence

As someone with a master’s degree in financial economics, I keep returning to a simple question: where is the causal bridge?

I have not yet seen a public filing that cleanly connects a specific round of layoffs to a quantified AI productivity gain: a defined set of tasks removed, a measurable increase in output, and a demonstrated improvement in revenue, margins, or free cash flow that could not have been achieved through ordinary restructuring.

I have seen many presentations about AI. I have seen fewer financial statements that establish that link.

Consider two recent, real examples from publicly traded technology companies in Israel. The companies are deliberately unnamed here because the point is the pattern, not to turn the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)