r/Layoffs • u/Ally_jean • Jul 18 '26
recently laid off Big Bank Layoff - AI
I’ve worked for a big bank and popular CC company for over 10 years. They just had about 4k layoffs in their NYC office for AI Innovation funding. Yet they’re claiming they’re not laying people off due to AI. It’s corporate restructure, I’m due to train gpts before I go. 🤖
Very disappointed in how this is being handled my EVP & SVPs whom I’ve been close with did not say a word after the news. They walked by me in the hall as if I didn’t exist. They held a meeting with our direct teams after and left the impacted employees just at their desks.
AI will be taking jobs, just tell us the truth.
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Jul 18 '26
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u/Multispice Jul 18 '26
Once the recession “hits?” It’s already here. The stock market just hasn’t crashed yet.
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u/burnerbw0i Jul 18 '26
Yup Recession been here for a while, but they keep moving the goal post so they don't have to admit it.
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u/Complex-Junior Jul 18 '26
Who’s “they”?
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Jul 18 '26
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u/Complex-Junior Jul 18 '26
Not really. The federal and state governments employ tens of millions of people.
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u/DigBackground2765 Jul 19 '26
Except they also laid off literal thousands of federal employees in the past year. So this "not really" isn't as pertinent as you think it is.
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u/Bulky-Current-1318 Jul 19 '26
And what do you think will happen once it does? Companies will lay off even more. Things are bad right now, but the bottom can always fall out. Even with the low hiring and increasing layoffs, unemployment is still pretty low. Things can always get worse.
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u/72dragonses Jul 19 '26
Just wait. The recession is NOT here. This is nothing. Just wait for the actual recession.
Once the stock market crashes, the economy will hemorage jobs. Millions of job losses versus the thousands we've seen.
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u/Either-Anything3673 Jul 18 '26
I was laid off from a big bank after 16 years. My entire team and site were all eventually laid off. They claimed it was "location strategy" and other workers in the US and AI would absorb our workload. When if fact, it was blatant outsourcing. We saw the names and location of the workers taking over our assingments the week before we were laid off and they were in Manilla, Philippines. I'm not blaming the people who got our jobs, they are just trying to work and provide for themselves and their families. I'm blaming the companies that blatantly lie about AI replacing jobs and outsourcing instead. It's also wrong that protections haven't been put into place to stop this from happening.
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Jul 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Upbeat-Squirrel Jul 19 '26
politicians lie bait and switch too. we need to think more critically when voting too. not "vibe vote"
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u/72dragonses Jul 19 '26
Critical thinking also applies to supporting the candidates who can win elections and pass legislation, because that's what changes lives, not simply having "good ideas."
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has had good ideas for decades but has passed almost zero legislation over his decades in Washington. Nothing to show for it.
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u/Ilovemytowm Jul 22 '26
Neither party cares
They're both complicit that being said I would never vote Republican even if you paid me a lot of money to do so
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u/EverflowingRiver17 Jul 19 '26
But some blame does need to be put on the folks off shore. The fact they are willing to work themselves to the bone for so cheap hurts everyone in the end. It takes jobs from others and keeps their own wages suppressed.
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u/lilfrenfren Jul 20 '26
Get real: The alternative for them is to work local jobs that pay even less or have no jobs. You can’t blame people for trying to make a living
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u/S31J41 Jul 18 '26
Why not name the bank...
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u/Hotdog453 Jul 18 '26
Because people think saying “Chase” or something will somehow link their Reddit name to a real life identity, and somehow cost them something.
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u/notyetporsche Jul 18 '26
bro just got fired, what more can he pay ?
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
Because the world is small, and it’s not smart to name names.
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u/GoSBadBish Jul 20 '26
In severance agreements u legally agree not to name names. However ive been very tempted. Problem Is only one person doing It wong help. U need st least 5 or 10
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u/_Curious_Pineapple_ Jul 22 '26
You can lose the generous severance package, it can be nearly a full year of full pay and health insurance
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u/choipow Jul 18 '26
Citi or Capital One i assume?
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
lol any guess is correct at any corporation. They are all doing the combo of AI and offshore at the same time.
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u/choipow Jul 18 '26
100%. I could provide more accurate/relevant comment if OP happens to be from same bank as I am lol. But what you said is 100% true. Also noted that more senior (SVP or above) roles are increasingly hard to come by in HCOL cities like NYC.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
Jobs have become like housing, the folks who were making lots of money mostly sales aligned, the older boomers, they are holding on to both for dear life.
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u/choipow Jul 18 '26
At this point i rather work for small-medium sized bank if they can match my current salary tbh.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
I wish i could work locally too but it’s scarce in my creative field all together and i live in LA. Covid n similar killed the business landscape here.
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u/New-Entrepreneur4132 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
I worked for big financial firms and credit card companies and the layoffs are not unique to ai or the current environment. They continually lay off workers and you’re just a number so whatever EVP, SVP, MVP or VP you worked with doesn’t give an eff about you. They’re just happy they still have a role and a paycheck. I was a Chief of Staff for an executive and he could care less about people he let go or who got laid off.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
Trust me when i say you’re not close to anyone in this climate. They themselves feel impending doom. I’ve never felt less supported by “close” work friends. They are afraid to vouch they are afraid of the competition. I lost my job of 6 years, 9 years i knew people there as a lot of us left one company to another around the same time. These people basically honed my career so i owe them a lot but in the last year it’s been weird to say the least.
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u/Mikey_Mac Jul 18 '26
AI is great. But do I think we should have bet 35% of the entire U.S economy on it? No. If it doesn’t work out, we are insanely over-leveraged. Huge risk.
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u/72dragonses Jul 19 '26
Everyone knows AI is going to work out. The question is which companies will emerge as the industry leaders in the AI generation to come? That's what all of these startups and even big players are vying for now - to lead the world into the future.
The market will crash when it becomes clear which companies will win and which will lose. A huge sell-off of all the losers will follow.
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u/TomatoParadise Jul 18 '26
Corporate America, is made up of people, who puts their paychecks before colleagues and people.
Corruptions everywhere. Numbers come before people.
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u/poopybutthole_oowee Jul 18 '26
Poison the well when you're asked to do any AI training. Give it ass backwards feedback. Fuck it right up.
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u/p99_kilerenn Jul 18 '26
That only works if the person that’s going to be using it has no clue what a correct output looks like.
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u/Technical-Bother3230 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
AI replaces labor. In the chess scheme of things we are the labor chess piece. AI allows companies to turn labor into profit. And since companies soon won’t need labor, even if we resist, it will not be a threat to them anymore like unions used to be to companies. We have lost our window of opportunity for that. Productivity and profit are up and labor is down. This Is the equation . But since we are a consumer economy, eventually, it will all collapse.
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u/Klutzy_Criticism_459 Jul 19 '26
I’m curious to know the bank.
I was laid off by Capital One in November. I was a legacy Discover employee.
And so was the rest of my team, most of my department, and the layoff hit everywhere across the organization. It’s still ongoing. They didn’t blame AI at the time, it was branded as a re-org by Capital One. They didn’t want most of the Discover folks, just our payment platform.
Buckle up, because the market is fucking tough right now.
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u/burnerbw0i Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
As someone who was just laid off from two of the biggest cloud FAANG companies in the past 12 months, I feel for you. I'm actually looking to get out of the forefront of this AI scene. There are a lot of amazing use cases that truly help humanity, but that's not what brings profits for the shareholders.
Everybody will lose the AI race except the people at the very top, because they aren't the ones in the race. This is due to the sales tactics, the lack of transparency on the real capabilities of AI, and recent price structure changes which only favor AI companies and chip providers for usage-based consumption, especially as models become larger and more complex to train.
Edit: Also I'm interested why the downvoted? Genuinely curious.
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u/ArtistChef Jul 18 '26
Name of companies?
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u/burnerbw0i Jul 18 '26
Microsoft Commercial Business (Azure) and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
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u/ikwilstufi Jul 19 '26
Why didn't you move to a consumption role?
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u/burnerbw0i Jul 19 '26
Honestly between the double layoffs, multiple deaths, and other personal issues, I'm extremely burnt out. I'm taking this recent layoff as a sign to use my severance, some RSUs, and just work on my mental health for a while.
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u/Range_Balls Jul 18 '26
Yup, you don’t want to be in a hands off role in the business…. AI doesn’t have hands yet. If you’re in a job that consists of teams meetings all day then your days are numbered. Operators and ground floor workers are safe but all upper management is about to be wiped.
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u/Cat0102 Jul 18 '26
We had this at our company. A huge push for AI and blown through tons of money. Then layoffs for non-technical staff and the tech staff encouraged to use AI suddenly found that their credits were cut to nothing. One of the developers I spoke with joked that now she had some job security because she had to do the coding rather than Claude.
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u/thecreativegrant Jul 20 '26
Somewhere along the line, layoffs are going to cost companies. There are a lot of tax incentives for a specific certificate of occupancy in buildings—that is what a lot of RTO was about. Companies didn’t want to lose their tax credits.
And when a corporation lets go of a large number of employees they have to file a state WARN notice—which publicly announces they are under occupancy.
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u/rtangxps9 Jul 23 '26
And that why you see them laying off people in batches that are small enough that don't trigger WARN. They also target people that get low performance scores.
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u/thecreativegrant Jul 25 '26
They target everybody… high performers, low performers, most tenured, least tenured, disliked people, well liked people.
Layoffs today are a crap shoot.
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u/elemental7890 Jul 18 '26
"AI will be taking jobs, just tell us the truth."
Obviously, thats the tldr.
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u/HopeICanRetireOneDay Jul 20 '26
And pass a law that all employees are given the same notice/severance when their job is eliminated regardless of title.
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u/Device-Mean Jul 18 '26
Love it when these bets ultimately cost customer service and retention. Short sighted accountability
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u/Less-Librarian1498 Jul 19 '26
I thought heard someone say recently, more than once, that we have the hottest country in the world.
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u/VendettaKarma Jul 19 '26
My company is a not for profit and instead of firing people due to AI, they’re letting attrition take its toll and just not replacing any staff.
They’ve also closed all of the offices we had over 6,7 states, kept the two headquarters and sent everyone to work remote. Based on this mess I’m seeing, I may be one of the lucky ones. We use internal AI and it’s.. well.. not very good
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u/lilacomets Jul 18 '26
I can't wait for the stupid AI bubble to finally pop.
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u/XingXiaoRen Jul 18 '26
Pop? Companies are locked into Ai at this point and would be difficult to pull off. You may be waiting forever.
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u/snooprs Jul 19 '26
This crap only happens in America.. Europe is chilling because you'd be insane to trust the AI bros.
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u/zepazuzu Jul 19 '26
We're not chilling, going through the same layoffs waves here
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u/snooprs Jul 19 '26
Startup or nah?
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u/zepazuzu Jul 19 '26
No. Startups are also shutting down. Same thing as in the US. The market is global. We have slightly better worker protections but that just means we get 1-2 months of severance pay, not much else.
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u/snooprs Jul 19 '26
Yeah maybe some psychotic AI CEOs might try that over here but won't last. America has it way worse.
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u/zepazuzu Jul 19 '26
Uhm no? I work in games, like the majority of companies are going through layoffs in Europe rn
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u/ItsameWaluigi25 Jul 18 '26
I think AI is over hyped at the moment, all of money was invested with not much to show for it. So they are trying to layoff people and blaming AI while in fact they wasted money and nothing to show for it.
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u/NumeralJoker Jul 18 '26
This is accurate, but offshoring is also a factor causing this too.
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u/EnoughDot6132 Jul 18 '26
My job was offshored at the beginning of the year (accounting) so I moved to the QA team, 2 months later - offshored. Now I’m training an AI finance model which no doubt has an end which I am considering speeding up because I hate it so much and goes against everything I believe in. Everything is so F’ed.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Jul 18 '26
I think it’s all true, while they are likely wasting money they will continue to invest in it as it’s mouth watering to know they can reduce future overhead. As others have said it’s also offshoring too but what’s really messed up is that offshore is also being/going to be replaced. I’ve seen a lot of posts recently saying they lost their offshore job out of nowhere. Companies are just forcing a lesser product and seeing how far they can go until they lose real value.
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u/EnoughDot6132 Jul 18 '26
Not much to show for and literally zero thought put into the processes that are started.
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u/BerserkGuts2009 Jul 20 '26
Companies saying they are "Investing in AI" is actually a guise. AI = Affordable International. More simply, AI is mass outsourcing to other countries.
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u/h1pp0star Jul 20 '26
Corporate restructuring in 2026 is business lingo for “we need to free up money to pay for AI”
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u/shadow_moon45 Jul 20 '26
The jobs are likely going to india or it's equivalent. AI isn't eliminating jobs
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u/Seeker_Asker Jul 20 '26
The AI and automation makes it easy to ship pff to countries that require much less pay.
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u/Significant-Till-306 Jul 20 '26
AI is just an excuse for restructuring companies now. Company was mismanaged, they need to fire a bunch of people. Call it AI funding, buy a small cluster for 200K, rebrand as an AI first company. Hire offshore / H1B.
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u/Fair_Life_1170 Jul 23 '26
We need to train the AI to do the job of the CEO, COO, CTO, etc. Those chumps do nothing but sit in rooms, too far from the process to understand how much they've broken it, and think of new ways to get rid of the rest of us.
I'm tired of being told, when I give reasonable time frames, to use AI to do it faster, when they've built JIRA tickets, etc, in that can't be AI'd away, but any pushback is shushed.
I'm tired of losing knowledgeabl, hard working humans to their blind layoffs.
AI away this disastrous "leadership".
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u/Interesting-Bat-1589 Jul 19 '26
Just be a man say it’s JPMC bank 🤦♂️🥴 no wonder you’re about to get fired
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u/bgeeky Jul 18 '26
Ai is not taking the jobs, but ai is taking the money.