Global Firms Replace Entire Staffs With AI, Then Hire Them Back to Explain What the AI Is Doing
A wave of corporate AI adoption has produced a new job category: former employees rehired at lower pay to translate their own replacements' output for the executives who approved the cuts.
Companies across three continents have completed the largest workforce substitution in corporate history, dismissing entire departments in a single morning and installing AI systems in their chairs before the departing staff had cleared their desks, according to a survey of corporate announcements released Tuesday.
The rehiring began within weeks. Firms that had eliminated their customer service, accounting and research divisions discovered that the AI systems produced output no one remaining at the company could interpret, and began recruiting the same dismissed employees back under a new «machine whisperers.» The role pays a third of the former salary and requires the worker to sit beside the system that replaced them and explain, in plain language, what it has just done.
«We are not reversing the restructuring,» said one chief operating officer at a manufacturing group that dismissed its entire procurement staff in March and has since rehired most of them as contractors. «We are simply adding a human layer on top of the AI layer so that the executive layer can understand what the AI layer is telling the human layer.»
The practice has spread to the point that recruiters now advertise «re-onboarding» packages, in which former employees return to the same desks, log in under new guest accounts and are billed for their own coffee. One logistics firm has installed a bell in its lobby that departing workers ring on their way out and ring again, at a lower tone, when they are brought back.
By Friday, the same companies had announced a second round of cuts, eliminating the machine whisperers on the grounds that the AI could now explain itself.
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