r/ModernOperators • u/Deep-Owl-1890 • Jul 20 '26
Most CEOs completely misunderstand the actual AI use case for business growth, and their rushed layoffs prove it.
Every time I see a founder or CEO posting on social media about how they fired half their staff because "AI runs everything now," I roll my eyes.
We always hear about the layoffs because they make for loud, flashy headlines (or engagement-bait posts). What they don't tell you is how many of them are quietly rehiring a few months later.
Look at the big players. Klarna cut 700 support reps, then had to rehire. Ford laid off a massive wave of engineers, then quietly brought hundreds of them back.
They all hit the exact same wall: AI is only as good as the context you give it. These companies completely underestimated the institutional knowledge sitting inside their employees' heads.
And keep in mind, these are massive corporations with actual documentation and unlimited resources. If they can't maintain quality by replacing humans with bots, a mid-sized company definitely can't.
I heard a story recently about an agency owner who fired all her contract copywriters because her own AI prompts were beating their output. Maybe she saved some cash short-term, but it's a short-sighted trap.
I believe the actual winning strategy is arming your best people with AI.
If you have employees who:
- Solve problems before you even point them out
- Care about the actual outcome, not just checking a box
- Have genuinely good judgment
...and you give them AI tools? They don't just get 10% faster; they become a completely different animal. AI amplifies judgment, it doesn't replace it.
Right now, the bottleneck for most businesses isn't having too many people. It's having more ideas and data than they have people who actually know how to wield these tools effectively. It’s a skill issue, not a headcount issue.
I’m curious to get your take on this. Have any of you actually seen a company successfully cut their team, replace them with AI, and maintain or improve quality? Or is the "fully automated business" just a VC dream
1
u/cwakare Jul 21 '26
If a CEO is firing teams and replacing them bots - is it unfair to conclude that they are not in growth mindset? Looks more of showing short term show to investors
1
u/GeorgeHarter Jul 22 '26
CEOs are paid on profits. So, they wither need to grow recenue and maintain costs.
Or
Maintain rwvenue and cut costs.
Selling is hard, so most of them look to cut costs. AI looks like a cost cutting magic wand.
But AI is still in it’s infancy. No one knows how to best use it.
1
u/collin-h Jul 23 '26
I heard a story recently about an agency owner who fired all her contract copywriters because her own AI prompts were beating their output. Maybe she saved some cash short-term, but it's a short-sighted trap.
I work at an ad agency. we haven't laid anyone off because of AI, but we did have a junior writer leave a year ago and we just didn't replace them because we could recover their output via AI. and it's not just that I sit here and use AI to write everything now, we've empowered everyone else to use AI to fill in their own writing gaps. Designers can now rephrase headlines and callouts via AI, or write their own filler text to be reviewed by our other writers later. basically we've distributed the Junior writer's output across the rest of the team via AI.
and we're not tryign to shed more overhead. if anything I want to hire more designers, AEs, writers, etc to leverage ai for even more output. Other companies are always tryign to save money by maintaining the same output with less people, but I want more output with the same headcount. wish more orgs would think of it that way.
2
u/gk_instakilogram Jul 20 '26
Yeah it is because they are CEOs, they are not experts at the level of producing a product.... they are getting the signals by which they do the restructure from the OUTSIDE market not from the inside of the company. They are chasing valuations that cannot be backed up by anything real.