Waking up to another round of layoffs at a major company can be disheartening, especially when it’s announced that the latest loss of human workers is due to AI.
A slew of AI-driven firings have been seen at massive enterprises — Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and Salesforce are just a few of the businesses that have released a depressingly high number of their workers as they pursue more AI-focused initiatives. In comparison, it’s increasingly rare to see a story on your timeline where a company reverses its decision to rely on AI too heavily and reverts to the human workforce it released or refocuses its efforts to employ new staff.
Thankfully, that aforementioned rare occurrence has become a reality, according to a recent Bloomberg report. And that report showcases just how much someone in such a high position at a company is willing to admit the error in their ways when trying to pursue bigger moves in the AI space.
Here’s a bit of cheerful news for those who’ve been treated to far too much doom and gloom about AI negatively affecting the job market.
On the road back to human ingenuity
Ford reportedly adopted AI across several sections of its car-making operations. During an October 2025 earnings call, COO Kumar Galhotra noted that the company was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system.” Those plans included a mass rollout of 900 AI-powered cameras in its manufacturing plants that were meant “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions.”
But it seems like those efforts fell short of expectations, as Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, noted how the company’s automated tools lacked the training and expertise of its experienced engineers. Ford’s executives have seemingly rethought their decision to go all-in on AI, as it’s being reported that the company has rehired more than 300 veteran quality inspectors to pick up the slack that those AI tools are responsible for.
Galhotra alluded to less-than-stellar results emanating from the company’s increased AI usage, which has led to Ford bringing back its best technical specialists to “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.” Those specialists, who have lovingly been referred to as “grey bear” engineers due to their veteran status, have been brought back to train Ford’s younger staff and refine its AI tools. So far, that decision has seemingly paid off, as Ford CEO Jim Farley has alluded to the company having lowered warranty and recall costs as of late.
Ford isn’t the only company that decided to rehire its formerly laid-off employees after deciding to go big on AI. After Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski commented that a chatbot was handling the work of 700 customer service reps in 2024, the company began restaffing humans in 2025.
And according to a Careerminds survey conducted in February, 32.7% of companies that have conducted AI-led layoffs have rehired between 25-50% of the roles they got rid of beforehand and 35.6% of the companies that were surveyed noted that they rehired for more than half of the roles they initially laid off.
Final thoughts
Amidst the dark clouds brought on by companies laying off so many of their employees as they continue to invest in AI automation efforts, it’s nice to see a slight shining beacon emerge as some businesses reverse their layoffs and bring back the humans they need to do the work AI simply can’t master.
And to see another major company like IBM, which has simultaneously installed more AI into its systems while also having plans to hire more software developers, is amazing to see.
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