Survey: Most Firms That Cut Jobs for AI Would Reconsider, While Broader AI Layoffs Continue

Nine out of ten companies that cut jobs due to artificial intelligence would now rethink those decisions, according to a Careerminds survey of 600 human resources professionals who oversaw layoffs in the prior 12 months. ZeroHedge reported the findings. Three out of four respondents said their organizations had eliminated positions because technology replaced the work.

Only 8.4 percent reported that AI produced the expected outcomes. James Calloway, chief operating officer at Stealth Agents, said his firm has seen an increase in clients pausing or scaling back AI deployments over the past year. One e-commerce client discovered licensing, integration, and prompt-engineering expenses ran two to three times higher than projected.

The company instead hired two human virtual assistants and reduced per-ticket resolution costs by nearly 40 percent. Jon Hill, CEO of The Energists, described similar reversals. One client found projected savings from automating compliance reporting and technical support disappeared once cybersecurity, oversight, and API costs were included.

Cloud-compute expenses alone can reach six- to seven-figure annual sums, Hill said. Matt Baharav, CEO of MKB Media Solutions, stated the firm stopped using an AI content assistant last quarter after paying thousands of dollars monthly for software that required extensive human rewriting. The company redirected the budget to hiring writers and reported net savings.

Mavvrik’s 2025 State of AI Cost Management report found 80 to 85 percent of companies missed AI infrastructure forecasts by more than 25 percent, while 84 percent recorded significant gross-margin erosion from miscalculated expenses. Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning research, told Axios in April that compute costs for his team already exceed employee costs.