Q1 2026: 78,557 tech workers laid off. 47.9% of those cuts explicitly attributed to AI and automation. 890 people per day.
Same quarter. Same industry. A Gallup survey of 23,717 U.S. employees: only 25% receive any AI training from their employers.
Do the math on that gap. Companies are cutting people because of AI faster than they're preparing anyone to do what comes next. The people being displaced aren't being reskilled. The roles being created aren't being filled internally. And the companies doing both — cutting on one side, hiring on the other — are spending premium dollars to backfill capabilities they already had in the room.
That's not strategy. That's chaos with a press release.
The IBM Move Nobody Talked About Enough
IBM quietly announced it was tripling entry-level technical hiring this quarter. When the rest of the industry is cutting, IBM is going the other direction — and not for senior roles. Entry level. Trainable. People who haven't yet calcified into pre-AI workflows.
That's a specific bet. IBM is saying: the experienced people we'd hire externally are priced at a premium right now, and most of them carry habits from a world that no longer exists. We'd rather hire people who learned to work with AI before they learned to work without it.
Whether that bet pays off depends on what IBM builds around those hires. But the instinct is right. The people entering the workforce now don't have to unlearn anything. They're not fighting cognitive legacy.
The companies that only cut — without that investment on the other side — are trading short-term cost reduction for a medium-term talent deficit. The math feels great in the next earnings call. It looks different in 18 months when they're back in the market competing for the same roles they just eliminated, at a higher price.
What the 25% Number Actually Means
Only 1 in 4 workers receives AI training from their employer. Three out of four people in your organization are using AI the way they figured out how to use it on their own — inconsistently, without a standard, with no quality check and no shared mental model.
Some of them are productive. Some of them are generating outputs that look right, feel right, and contain errors nobody catches because nobody has the background to catch them.
The ones who are genuinely good at it found their way there without organizational support. They're carrying the load. And they're probably not staying at a company that doesn't notice them doing it.
That 25% training rate also explains why only 1 in 50 AI investments deliver transformational value. You can deploy the best tools available. If 75% of your people don't know how to use them correctly, the deployment rate is irrelevant. You've installed the equipment and skipped the training. What you get is expensive mediocrity at scale.
The Actual Strategic Move
Two things have to happen simultaneously, and most companies are only doing one.
If you're cutting for efficiency, the cuts have to be surgical enough that you're eliminating redundancy — not capability. The companies making the worst cuts are treating headcount reduction as a budget exercise rather than a capability exercise. They're hitting the wrong targets and then acting surprised when critical functions get slower.
And the training investment has to happen now. Not after the transition is "settled." Not once you understand the technology better. The companies building AI literacy into their teams today are accumulating a compounding advantage. Their people will be better at using next year's tools because they're fluent in this year's tools. The companies waiting for clarity will be perpetually behind.
The bridge between displaced talent and the talent you actually need isn't being built by most organizations. That's a failure and an opportunity at the same time.
The organizations that build it — that take the people already in their orbit, invest in the right training, and create a pipeline from current capability to future requirement — those are the ones that won't be bidding against everyone else for premium AI talent in 2027.
They'll have grown their own.
VC5 Consulting helps companies identify the talent worth keeping and build the hiring pipeline for what's next. If you're navigating cuts and growth at the same time — and most companies are — let's talk.