Asha Sharma, new CEO of Xbox, announced this week the dismissal of 1,600 people from its division. It is the first tranche of a plan that foresees more cuts, up to 3,200, this year. Three days later, the US Federal Reserve announced his appointment to a group that advises on “employment and productivity in the age of AI.” Black moon emoji. She is accompanied by Marc Andreesse and a Stanford economist who works with Anthropic. The irony: whoever has just decided what work is left over in their company will now have an opinion on what work is left over, in general.
The numbers that Sharma presented in your statement are incontestable: Xbox has lost 64 cents for every dollar invested in small, independent studios, with margins three to ten times worse than any comparable business. But the statement says, almost in the same sentence, that these positions are not taken away by AI, and that the company reorients people and investment towards its AI priorities. The staff is told one thing. To the investor, the opposite.
And here is the almond tree trick: AI has become the perfect alibi. It serves to justify both the more aggressive expansion of one company and the more honest surrender of another.. It no longer describes a technology. It is an absolution of universal validity. The pattern is repeated everywhere, always with the same verb: reorient, never replace.
- Amazon: 16,000 layoffs in its second round in three months, on top of another 14,000 in October, while it puts 200,000 million into AI infrastructure this year.
- Goal: 10% of the workforce out while spending on data centers skyrockets.
- Google: has quietly emptied part of Cloud (including the unit that sells cybersecurity as an argument for trusting its cloud) claiming that “we must reinvest in growth areas, such as AI.”
- Cloudflare: 1,100 out “preparing for the agentic era.”
The dismissal itself no longer says much. The clue is where they get the money from: they do not cut where the AI already does the work, but where the business has a worse multiple, less future story. The AI does not execute the layoff, but decides which division survives the scissors.
And it is not even the same movement in all cases. SAP has frozen hiring to finance its “significant bet on AI” while Its stock has plummeted 49% in one yearits CEO has said that he doesn’t know if in two or three years anyone in his company will still be programming. Intel has done just the opposite: it admits that it is no longer among the top 10 in the sector, that it is late against NVIDIA, and it fires 20% to retreat to on-device AI, away from data centers. You bet everything. The other gives up. They both call it the same: “AI strategy”. It will be or it will be. But the label does not describe what is going to happen, but rather what needs to be said today so that no one keeps asking.
STMicroelectronics announced 2,800 departures within a plan that started in 2024, just before “IA” was the joker universal and yet the press release found space to mention it. The restructuring would have come the same. The label is new.
What these companies buy with their layoffs is not, yet, the productivity that AI promises. It is credit against a market that In June it punished Microsoft with its worst month since the dotcom bubblefor not seeming committed enough, for having only thrown one ball into the matter and not both. Layoff is the entry toll to continue telling the story that the technology is going to work.
And there is a place where this story meets flesh and blood: in Bethesda, HR ordered the removal of a small memorial that the colleagues themselves had left with photos of those fired. It did not fit into the environment that the company wanted to project.. So the next time someone tells you that they fire “because of AI”, or that they don’t fire “because of AI”, the question we should ask ourselves is who decides what counts as a healthy business, when the diagnosis is signed by whoever benefits from it.
Featured image | Xataka
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