Artificial intelligence is moving deeper into one of corporate America's most consequential decisions: who gets fired. A July survey found that 59% of managers who responded use AI when making layoff decisions, while 43% of those users said they had allowed the technology to make a final termination decision without human review.
The findings come from ResumeTemplates, which surveyed 1,000 managers at U.S. companies with more than 500 employees. The results point to a widening gap between the speed at which companies are adopting AI for workforce decisions and the governance systems intended to ensure those decisions are fair and defensible.
Among respondents, 24% said they use AI in layoff decisions often or all the time. Another 20% reported using the technology to perform work previously handled by employees or contractors, illustrating how AI is influencing both staffing levels and decisions about which workers remain.
The most significant concern isn't simply that managers consult algorithms. It is that some are allowing AI recommendations to become final decisions without an additional layer of human judgment.
Julia Toothacre, chief career strategist, said that practice becomes particularly problematic when companies don't understand how their systems evaluate employees. "When the managers using AI were never trained on it and the company cannot confirm the tool was tested for bias, there is no way to know what it weighs or whether the decision is defensible," she said.
The survey found substantial uncertainty around those safeguards. Some 58% of managers couldn't confirm whether the AI systems they used had been tested for bias before deployment, while 38% said they had received no ethical training on using the technology.
The findings arrive as major U.S. employers are simultaneously cutting workers and increasing spending on artificial intelligence. That doesn't necessarily mean AI caused each layoff, but some companies have explicitly connected automation and AI adoption to changes in workforce requirements.
Oracle, for example, reported that its workforce declined by roughly 21,000 employees over 12 months, or about 13%. In a regulatory filing, the company said the adoption and deployment of AI technologies had resulted, and could continue to result, in workforce reductions.
Oracle is also reportedly preparing additional cuts in August while investing heavily in AI infrastructure, with some teams potentially facing double-digit percentage reductions. Oracle has declined to comment on the reported plans.
Other large technology companies have made significant reductions while expanding their AI operations. Amazon eliminated 16,000 corporate positions in January, while Salesforce has reduced staffing as it builds out its Agentforce technology.
Block cut roughly 4,000 positions in February-nearly half its workforce-with Chief Executive Jack Dorsey pointing to AI-enabled productivity and smaller teams as elements of the company's evolving operating model. Meta eliminated about 8,000 positions in May while shifting thousands of workers into AI-related roles.
Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 positions, representing about 17% of its workforce, while redirecting resources toward artificial intelligence. GitLab separately cut around 350 jobs as it increased investment in infrastructure supporting AI workloads.
The relationship between AI and layoffs, however, isn't uniform. Etsy eliminated approximately 220 positions in August, concentrated in Product and Engineering, but Chief Executive Kruti Patel Goyal explicitly said AI wasn't responsible for the decision. Zillow similarly cut more than 500 employees while saying artificial intelligence wasn't the reason.
Those distinctions are important because companies frequently restructure for overlapping reasons, including weaker demand, cost reduction, changing investment priorities and organizational consolidation. AI can be both a tool used during those restructurings and an investment receiving money freed up by them without necessarily being the direct cause of every eliminated position.
Media reports have estimated that more than 180,000 jobs have been lost to AI since May 2023, including 112,000 during 2026. Such estimates should be treated cautiously because determining whether a particular position was eliminated specifically because of AI can be difficult when companies are simultaneously responding to financial and strategic pressures.
