Executives fired people because a chatbot could write emails. Now they're hiring them back because the chatbot can't actually do the job. This cycle took six months. These are the people running your economy.
The AI panic started when some VP asked ChatGPT to summarize a quarterly report and decided the entire workforce was obsolete. Customer service got cut first. Then data entry. Then anyone whose job title included the word "analyst" but whose actual job was copying numbers from one spreadsheet to another. Margins looked great for exactly one quarter.
Then the complaints started rolling in. Customers wanted to speak to someone who understood their problem instead of a bot that apologized in seven different ways while solving nothing. Projects stalled because nobody could explain why the AI kept hallucinating revenue figures that didn't exist. Turns out you can't just prompt engineer your way to profitability when the machine keeps inventing facts like a retail trader explaining his Tesla position.
Now these same companies are posting job listings for the exact roles they eliminated. Same responsibilities. Same requirements. Lower pay, obviously, because they know you need the job more than they need to admit they f*cked up. They're calling it "strategic workforce optimization" instead of "we made a catastrophic error because we believed a demo."
The employees who got rehired now work alongside the AI that was supposed to replace them. They spend half their day fixing what the AI breaks and the other half pretending the AI is helpful during meetings with executives who still think they're visionaries. It's like hiring a toddler as your co-pilot then taking credit for landing the plane safely.
Every one of these companies will issue a press release about their innovative human-AI collaboration model and act like this was the plan all along instead of an expensive admission that they fired people for no reason except cowardice and trend-chasing.
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