Neil Patel argues that companies blaming AI for layoffs are actually just missing their growth targets. They hired aggressively on optimistic forecasts, fell short, and now use AI as cover to protect stock prices instead of admitting underperformance.
It's the narratives. A lot of this has nothing to do with— Fundamentals. Yeah, fundamentals. It's like, it's just a narrative. And all of these guys, when they're doing layoffs, they all pitch the same narrative. We're reinvesting the savings into AI, or, hey, our employees are so much more efficient because of AI. I'm not saying it's not true to some extent, but the real reason that most of these companies are laying off is because they're just not growing the way they expected, and they made these hires assuming they were going to, so now they got to cut back. And when your stock price goes down, you need to figure out how to make your economics look better for the market. And you got to paint a narrative. You can't go to the public markets and say, hey, we're missing our numbers and we don't think we're going to actually grow the way we projected over the next few years. So we're going to fire a ton of people. Your stock's just going to tank even more. It's marketing. They're just spinning the verbiage and the messaging to make themselves look better.
