Companies aren’t being disrupted by AI. They’re being exposed by it.
The real crisis isn’t about technology replacing workers. It’s about a decade of misallocated value finally coming due.
When companies talk about AI right now, they tend to frame it as a staffing solution. Trim the headcount. Reduce the overhead. Find the light at the end of a very long, expensive tunnel.
I understand the impulse. Since Covid, businesses have absorbed supply chain shocks, rising merchant fees, shipping disruptions, and a softening consumer. The pressure to cut has been relentless, and AI arrives looking like a clean answer to a messy problem.
But here’s what I’ve seen from the inside, across multiple departments, over many years: the problem most companies are trying to solve with AI isn’t actually an AI problem. It’s a structural one. And they’re cutting in the wrong places.
Goldman Sachs Research recently found that AI has reduced monthly US payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs but the impact isn’t uniform. In roles where AI substitutes human labor, jobs are disappearing. In roles where AI augments human judgment, employment is actually rising.
That distinction matters more than most companies realize when they’re making staffing decisions.
Marketing, creative, communications, operations leadership - these are roles where human judgment, relationship intelligence, and institutional knowledge aren’t incidental. They’re the product. Yet these are often the first positions eliminated when a company needs to show the board it’s being decisive.
Meanwhile, finance, procurement, administrative operations, and data management - the departments with the clearest, most immediate case for AI augmentation - frequently go untouched. Partly because they’re harder to visualize cutting. Partly because they sit closer to leadership’s comfort zone. And partly because the people doing that work are rarely the ones blamed when revenue softens.
As Bozoma Saint John, former CMO of some of the world’s most recognizable brands, recently noted: marketing is not a tenured position. It is, historically, where CEOs look first when results disappoint.
But is it really the marketing budget that’s broken? Or is it the systems, the processes, and the departmental silos that marketing was never empowered to fix but was always held responsible for?
The companies that will actually benefit from AI are not the ones using it to eliminate roles. They’re the ones using it to finally fix what was always inefficient, and investing in the people who can bridge the gap between systems and humans.
Because AI doesn’t fix a culture that undervalues its most versatile people. It doesn’t repair the damage done by asking one person to carry three roles without support, recognition, or a path forward. It doesn’t replace what’s lost when institutional knowledge walks out the door.
The question isn’t “how do we replace people with AI?” The better question is: “where have we been misallocating human talent and how do we finally fix that?”
The businesses that answer that question honestly will be the ones still standing in five years. Not because they found a technological shortcut, but because they finally looked clearly at what they were building and decided to build it better.
What’s your experience - are you seeing AI used as a genuine growth tool, or as cover for decisions that were already made?