💯 Digest: AI isn't cutting jobs, it's changing how teams work

👋 Hey, it's Max

Last week, I spent hours inside a spreadsheet that tells stories.

It wasn’t revenue data or open rates. It was the final reflection form from the 30 Days of AI challenge we ran in September. Thousands of rows of raw thoughts from people who’d just spent a month building with AI.

Somewhere between the “this changed how I work” and the “I finally feel confident using AI”, one trend jumped out: people aren’t exactly scared of AI taking their jobs anymore but of not evolving fast enough inside them.

A few days after this realization, I came across this headline: 📰 IBM fired 8,000 workers for AI then rehired just as many.

Let me explain why that headline and that dataset tell the same story but before we dive in, I thought you might enjoy looking at this IBM datacenter from the 1960s as much as I did:

The AI rehiring loop

IBM’s CEO recently revealed that after automating thousands of roles, the company immediately began hiring again not to replace those people but to fill new roles that didn’t exist before. The new hiring was explicitly not to refill the automated jobs. Instead, they shifted the focus to roles requiring critical thinking and human interaction, such as:

• Software Engineers (to build the AI itself)

• Sales & Marketing (to sell and explain the new AI-powered services to clients).

• Other high-value roles in areas like cybersecurity and cloud computing.

And they’re not the only ones figuring this out. Microsoft has quietly rebuilt whole departments this year trimming admin roles and retraining staff into what they now call “AI copilots.” Accenture’s doing the same on a massive scale, re-skilling over 800,000 employees. Their CEO, Julie Sweet, put it simply: some jobs won’t survive, but people will, if companies treat upskilling as continuous learning instead of a one-off project. Even PwC threw a billion dollars at retraining its consultants to use AI daily instead of hiring new ones.

So no, it’s not about layoffs anymore,

This is a realignment story and it’s exactly what participants in 100 School programs have been describing in their reflections:

“My biggest win wasn’t automating tasks. It was realizing I can now redesign how my job works.” - Participant, 30 Days of AI

“We started sharing mini-use-cases in Slack every week, and suddenly everyone wanted to learn. It became contagious.” - Team Lead, 30 Days of AI

This is a pattern I started noticing especially with regular professionals realizing they don’t need to wait for permission to evolve their workflow.

What the data (and IBM) are really saying

The uncomfortable truth is AI doesn’t shrink teams but reshapes what teams are for. In our own assessments (data from teams training), we saw the same thing IBM’s seeing at scale:

• Stage 1: Panic (everyone fears layoffs)

• Stage 2: Play (a few people start testing it out)

• Stage 3: Redesign (people reimagine how their roles actually work)

I think many teams will be living through this redefinition of roles over the next year.

Max 👋

P.S. Want to make your team & company AI-first? Let us help here.