This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "The REAL Reason Big Companies Blame AI for Layoffs" (uploaded 2025-11-13). The excerpt is a single-speaker commentary in which the speaker (labeled SPEAKER A) explains how large multinational corporations prefer to frame layoffs as the result of AI-driven efficiencies rather than admitting weak growth — describing two marketing narratives and why companies choose the AI-efficiency story to paint a better picture.
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If you work at a big corporation that's global, they'll have a lot of CEOs, CFOs, et cetera, for each country. They're making cuts, but they're painting the narrative of, hey, we're being efficient with AI. And one of them said to me in a funny way, he's like, you're a marketer, right? I'm like, yeah. They're like, imagine this, you have 2 options of narratives. Which would you pick if you were in marketing? Narrative 1, we hired a lot of people, we realized we don't need those people, and we were hoping that we would end up needing them because our business units were growing fast enough, but they're actually, some of them are not growing fast enough and some are actually shrinking. shrinking, so we got to do layoffs. That's narrative 1. The second narrative is, hey, we found a lot of efficiencies because of AI, so we're restructuring our organization and becoming more efficient and adapting this new technology. That's narrative 2. They tend to pick narrative 2 because it just paints a better picture. It's marketing instead of narrative 1, when they are saying sometimes AI is making them more efficient, but a lot of it is in the reality which they're not getting the growth, so they're cutting.
