The Mass Layoffs Might Not Even Be About AI

Microsoft is reportedly about to cut thousands of jobs, and everyone already knows who's getting blamed. AI, obviously – that's the headline every outlet reaches for lately. 267 layoff events have been logged so far this year, more than 185,000 people affected, and over half of those announcements point straight at artificial intelligence as the reason.

Except Deutsche Bank isn't buying it. Neither is OpenAI's own chief executive, who's said out loud that some companies are using AI as cover for cuts they'd have made anyway. There's a name for the move now – AI redundancy washing. Point at the algorithm and skip the harder conversation about the actual spreadsheet.

Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer, reckons this is exactly what happens every time a technology gets big enough to blame things on.

"The Luddites blamed the loom. The clerks blamed the spreadsheet. Both times the story was that this technology would replace every worker on earth, and both times it was wrong – it just took a fundraising round or two before anyone admitted it."

We checked our own numbers rather than take either side's word for it. If AI verification and oversight work – the jobs that exist specifically to check AI's output, exactly the kind of work that's supposedly about to be automated out of existence – were genuinely collapsing, that would show up somewhere. It hasn't. Around 350 of those jobs got posted on Freelancer last month, more or less flat against the month before.

One number keeps moving in a direction that means something – startup-tagged work is up 10% on the platform in the past fortnight alone. Not a landslide. Real, though, and pointing somewhere more useful than another layoffs tracker.

Take the case of one particular Freelancer user who’s a software engineer I was recently speaking with, who did ten years at Microsoft, got laid off, and instead of firing off two hundred identical resumes, built his own content production company instead. He's since grown a health-focused podcast to 40,000 YouTube views in three months and got a book out along the way. Nobody handed him a severance-shaped consolation prize for that. He built it.

That's closer to the pattern worth watching than whichever analyst turns out to be right about Microsoft's real motive. The more useful question, when the email lands, is what you do the day after – and increasingly the answer isn't sitting around, waiting for the next employer to want you back.

Make a job. Don't take one. Freelancer exists for exactly that moment – whenever someone decides their next move is theirs to make, not HR's.