#layoffs · How AI Is Reshaping Work

GitLab's May 11 「Act 2」 letter: undisclosed cuts by June 1, R&D split into ~60 autonomous teams, up to 3 management layers removed, country footprint trimmed 30%. The CEO says this is not a cost-cut. The market sent the stock down 7% after-hours anyway.

Walmart is eliminating or relocating ~1,000 corporate workers, merging its global-technology and AI product teams under Daniel Danker and Suresh Kumar. CEO John Furner's framing is 「growth at a much lower marginal cost.」 The largest private employer in the U.S. now reads from the same May script as Cloudflare, PayPal and GitLab.

General Motors cut ~600 IT roles — about 10% of its IT org — beginning Monday May 11. The replacement requisitions name prompt engineering and AI-native development. Detroit just formally joined the May-2026 skills-swap cohort.

On May 7, Fidelity announced ~1,000 cuts at 1% of its 80,000-person workforce, scrapped its agile-squad model, and queued 5,300 new hires — 2,000 of them early-career. The company says AI played no role. The Boston Globe's May 11 follow-up disagrees.

On May 5, Live Nation reported Q1 revenue of $3.79B, +12% YoY, with a $450M DOJ legal accrual eating the GAAP line. On May 6, Ticketmaster cut 350 jobs — 8% of staff across 25 countries — with the new Global President framing AI as a 「new utility」.

On May 7 BILL bundled fiscal Q3 +13%, a 30% workforce cut, $30–60M of charges, and a $1.0B buyback into one press release. Stock rallied. The 「AI native」 line did the math.

Freshworks beat Q1 estimates with $228.6M revenue (+16% YoY), announced its two largest contracts ever, then cut 11% of staff the same week — because, in CEO Dennis Woodside's words, more than half the company's code is now written by AI.

The Mag-4 finished Q1 earnings and the 2026 AI-capex number revised up from a $650B Q1 guide to $725B — a 77% jump on 2025. In the same window, layoff trackers crossed 95,878 workers across 249 events at 864 a day, while ~275,000 AI-skill job postings sat unfilled. Big Tech is funding the build-out by cutting the workers it does not need, and the workers it does need are not the same people.

Sama, Meta's data-annotation contractor in Nairobi, sent redundancy notices to 1,108 employees on April 16 after Meta terminated the contract they had been staffing. Their job was labeling the images and bathroom-footage that trained Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses. Their reward for training the AI: the AI no longer needs them.

Snap is cutting 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 people — and closing 300+ open roles. CEO Evan Spiegel said the quiet part out loud: more than 65% of new code at Snap is now AI-generated, and the company expects to book over $500M in annualized savings by the back half of 2026.

Turns out the chatbot you replaced your support team with could not, in fact, handle an angry customer. 55% of executives now regret their AI layoffs, and a third spent more rehiring than they ever saved.

Reuters says Meta has pencilled in May 20 for the first wave — 10% of headcount, about 8,000 people. Round two is already scheduled; the only question is how much of the 20% total gets cut before December.