The numbers come first. In May 2026, Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio eliminated a number of roles at her workplace-analytics company as part of what she described as a company redesign. Among those let go was Jonathan Vidales, a labor economist who had been with the firm for five years. By August, Vidales had applied for a newly opened role and was rehired.
On a Zoom call, Vidales told Colacurcio that returning felt like 'sneaking back in the house after I got kicked out.' When his account was reactivated, he found the original restructuring announcement still sitting in his inbox — and told her how impersonal it felt. 'In my mind, we were announcing a restructuring,' Colacurcio wrote in a Fortune commentary piece. 'In his, people he knew and worked alongside had just lost their jobs.'
The Syndio episode is not an outlier. AI-attributed job cuts peaked in May 2026, when U.S. employers announced 97,000 job cuts and blamed 40% of them on AI, according to executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Zillow cut more than 500 people earlier in August, with the announcement coming the day before earnings. Three in ten employers eliminated positions after implementing AI, only to later add those roles back, according to an April 2026 study by global staffing firm Robert Half.
Colacurcio also cited former Lululemon executive Julie Averill, who wrote in the New York Times that corporate leaders are either engaging in 'AI wishing' — believing they can fix a problem by waving AI at it — or 'AI washing,' blaming job cuts on efficiency gains that do not yet exist.
Colacurcio's own diagnosis is blunt: 'Companies are imagining what AI might make possible, and making moves before fully understanding how to get there.' She also noted that several employees she had expected to retain — workers asked to take on expanded roles with higher earning potential — resigned within months of the restructuring, costing Syndio talent it needed.
Her conclusion cuts against the prevailing narrative that knowledge work is becoming irrelevant in the AI era. 'AI can make experienced people even more valuable, if you give them the right tools to adapt,' she wrote. 'Roles can evolve. Skills can be rebuilt. But that requires leaders to invest in training and creating a path for people to make that transition.'
CEO Times take: Free enterprise runs on clear incentives and honest accounting — and that includes accounting for human capital. The AI restructuring wave is producing a predictable market correction: firms that cut institutional knowledge to chase a model they had not yet mastered are now paying twice, once in severance and once in rehiring costs. The lesson is not that companies should resist change; Colacurcio is right that restructuring is sometimes necessary. The lesson is that capital allocation requires discipline, and replacing proven talent with a speculative efficiency gain is a bet that the data — three in ten roles added back — suggests executives are losing more often than they admit. The market has already voted. Institutional knowledge has a price, and right now, many CEOs are discovering it on the back end.
