June 3 was a productive day for corporate communications departments. In Tel Aviv, digital marketing firm Skai laid off roughly 100 people — about 20% of its workforce — and attributed the cut to artificial intelligence. In San Francisco, Uber cut nearly a quarter of its People division and insisted, through a spokesperson, that AI had nothing to do with it. Same day, same kind of decision, two opposite scripts. Reading them side by side is more instructive than reading either alone.
Skai: the AI explanation that doubles as a sales pitch
Skai — founded in 2006 as Kenshoo, backed by Sequoia and Qumra, run by co-founder Yoav Izhar-Prato — employed about 550 people before this round, Calcalist reports. This is its second reduction in recent years, after cutting about 80 employees in 2024. The company’s statement says it has “launched several artificial intelligence-based products” over the past year, changed how work is conducted “with an emphasis on artificial intelligence,” and now needs — this is the actual phrase — “a configuration suited to the current era.”
Note what Skai sells: AI-based marketing software. A company whose pitch to customers is that AI changes everything has a structural incentive to tell the exact same story about its own org chart. Attributing your layoff to AI costs nothing, signals technological seriousness to investors, and functions as product marketing. Whether AI actually eliminated those 100 specific jobs is a separate question the statement never quite answers — “several departments” were reduced in a “broad adjustment process,” which is the corporate equivalent of a shrug with a press release attached.
Uber: the layoff that swears it isn’t about AI
The same day, CNBC reported that Uber is cutting 23% of jobs in its People division — recruiting and human resources — as part of a streamlining under new president Jill Hazelbaker. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s memo said the “changes are necessary to maximize the effectiveness of the People team and the enormous potential ahead of us,” which is the kind of sentence that means nothing at any reading speed. A spokesperson stressed the cuts amount to “well under 1%” of Uber’s 34,000 employees, and — explicitly — that they did not result from AI.
Maybe. But two details sit awkwardly next to that denial. First, Uber’s tech chief said earlier this year that the company had exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget within four months — spending so enthusiastic it broke its own plan. Second, consider what got cut: recruiters. A company trims recruiting capacity when it expects to hire fewer humans. HR headcount is a derivative of expected human headcount — arguably the most honest leading indicator a company publishes, precisely because nobody treats it as a disclosure. Retail traders on Stocktwits called the cuts “aggressive”; the senior-role skew suggests this is restructuring, not trimming.
Attribution is a choice, not a fact
Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted AI as the number-one cited reason for US job cuts in both March and April — 21,490 cuts in April alone, 26% of the month’s total, 49,135 year-to-date. Meanwhile MIT’s Paul Osterman, covered here three days ago, argues the AI label is frequently a 20-year-old cover story with fresh branding. Both can be true at once, because layoff attribution is not a measurement — it’s a positioning exercise. You blame AI when transformation is what your investors want to hear; Skai sells AI software, so “AI restructured us” is practically a product demo. You deny AI when the optics are ugly; Uber cutting the department that hires humans, months after blowing through its AI budget, is a dot-connecting exercise the company would prefer readers not complete.
The tell is never the press release. It’s the org chart. Skai cut “several departments.” Uber cut the people who hire people. TrueUp’s layoff tracker now counts roughly 150,000 tech workers displaced in 2026, and an increasing share of the announcements arrive with an AI story that is either suspiciously loud or suspiciously quiet. When the explanation is this flexible, watch what gets eliminated, not what gets said.
