The Real Reason Companies Are Blaming AI for Layoffs

Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.

HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. When you look at how ChatGPT includes Wikipedia, they'll include sites like Healthline and others along with it.

But on the flip side, if you look at Google, they include the social networks, Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Facebook, along with Wikipedia. So Google views Wikipedia more like a social network. Although, and ChatGPT, which is quite a bit different, looks at it as more of like an authoritative source, like Encyclopedia Britannica, the Webster Dictionary, Cleveland Clinic, Headline, Mayo Clinic. These are all examples of other sites that are sorted or that are cited along Wikipedia on ChatGPT.

But the Google examples and area overviews, Wikipedia typically gets cited with YouTube, Reddit, Britannica, Quora, IMDB, Facebook. Right. Most of them are social. This is interesting.

So basically, this shows the difference between ChatGPT, Wikipedia versus Google Wikipedia. So if you look at the table over here, Google AI overviews. So YouTube co-occurrence rate 13 percent, Reddit 9 percent and Encyclopedia Britannica. And then you have Quora, IMDB, Facebook.

OK, so a lot of these are kind of social platforms. And then you look at this one over here, top co-citations alongside Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica. But by the way, we haven't heard of Encyclopedia Britannica in a very long time. Like that's something you use when you're a kid, but I guess they're still around.

And you have a Webster dictionary, Mayo Clinic and all that. So it's interesting. But the question is, Neil, what are the implications? Sorry, thank you.

I forgot to mute. That's okay. So what do you think the implications are behind this? I don't really think there's any implications. It's more so Google doesn't view Wikipedia as as authoritative as chat GPT does.

Right. Cause I would assume that Google doesn't view social content that anyone can just create as valuable as let's say, um, authoritative content from an expert like Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or Healthline, right? They're very picky about eat signals when it comes to health.

If you look at ChatGPT, they're putting Wikipedia along with expert-created content. Dude. You know, speaking of content, I want to talk about how to automate quality content marketing. But before we do that, Neil, I just want to show you something.

So I was publishing something today where it's like a newsjacking thing because Opus 4.8 came out. And I'm like, man, I can't publish it today because like my video editor is not available. And then, you know, our thumbnail person can't get it out that quickly. And you know what happened, Neil?

Here, I just published this. You can't quite see it that well. Maybe you can see the thumbnail a little bit, right? I can see it. It says Opus 4.8, right?

It doesn't look bad as a thumbnail, right? And I got that done as I was just talking to you. And I'm just publishing it right now. It looks pretty good.

Yeah. Yeah. So my point is like, there should be no excuses now. Like I think if someone like you and me, cause we're, we're more business operators than creators, but we're still creators.

Right. But if I want to react to a video quickly and I have a, I have a viewpoint on it, I'm just going to take what videos I have. I'm going to use chat GPT images and I'm just going to crank it out. And I showed it to my team.

Cause I was like, Hey guys, this is really frustrating. Cause I really want to get this video out right now, but I can't do it. And I just, I just opened up chat GPT images. I was just like, Hey, use this.

I did it a little bit. And then I just published it. So, um, I think this solves a lot of problems. We'll just leave it at that. Okay. So I want to show you something, Neil.

So this is, do you want to know how you can automate quality content marketing? Go for it. Okay. So check this out. So this is from Ryan Law of Ahrefs.

Okay. So I think Ryan's really smart. And he's just like, look, content marketing is going through the biggest step change since Google appeared. One personal example, I have an old website I built a decade ago.

The content was old. The design was old. I had no time to improve it. It was resigned to a slow death, whatever this French line is. But now I migrated the website from Squarespace to static HTML.

I vibe coded a brand new design with tons of custom widgets. I hooked it up to Codex and now every day Codex chooses one old article to improve automatically. So those of you that are listening right now, watching this right now, you might be thinking, oh, it's probably crappy quality. But I can assure you, Ryan is a really smart content marketer.

He doesn't just publish crap. Okay, I'll just leave it at that. And so he says, It is literally like having a team working for me to my exact specification, reviving all my own projects and it cost me $20 a month.

And so he's like, this is just a dumb hobby project, right? So content marketing is absolutely crazy right now. And frankly, I'm having the best time. But, you know, he's like, I think there's always going to be value for and reward for extremely high quality content.

And strangely, I think AI is about to become essential for making competitive, high quality content. But traditional content marketing, how can traditional content marketing compete with automated content updating, with deeper research, with unique data visualizations and custom-coded page experiences? So my take on this, Neil, is that I think – What he said over here, the last part is very important.

So sure, maybe he's running these kind of basic updates right now and maybe they're working to a degree. But my belief, just like what I just showed you with the thumbnail, it's going to enable us to create more data visualizations, more images and things like that. I think it's going to help more. It's going to democratize the ability to create higher quality content.

So I actually think we're going to see more high quality content. And I actually think we're also going to see more high quality poo poo content too. Yes, and you saw the announcement Google did with YouTube and the change they made with flagging AI content. Yeah, they're doing it.

Instagram's doing it. Yeah, so YouTube is labeling if content is AI created. If you're a creator and you believe your content wasn't AI created, you can flag it, but they're pretty much marking it. And I think this is gonna be a standard and I believe what's gonna happen is even though content marketing is getting easier because of AI, I believe AI generated content won't do as well in the long run.

And Lily Ray's done a lot of studies on this, and she's posted quite a bit of stuff that breaks down how you're getting short-term boosts in traffic, long-term declines. I do believe you can use AI, but AI needs to be combined with a human. If it's pure AI, I believe you're just not going to get the views and the traffic and the engagement than if it was human-created. And you could say, well, what was if the AI content is so amazing?

It's just like a human or even better. I'm not joking. I believe all the systems eventually are going to start having to flag this from a legal perspective. I'm not a lawyer, but this is just my guess and prediction that eventually these guys are going to get pressure from regulators all around the world.

They're going to have to flag AI content more. And people are using these as LLMs to create the AI content so they know what's being created by them. And what's going to eventually happening is you're just not going to get the results you're looking for or expecting. Well, let's talk about this topic that you have over here that relates to it.

So where we see AI content winning and losing. Yeah. So I see it winning for things like helping you brainstorm, helping you update old, outdated content. Like the example that you gave, I believe the guy's name was Ryan from Atrefs.

Yep. Right. Updating content, helping you translate and transcribe your content so you can go global faster. You know, helping you, you know, research,

gaps, stats, data, so that way you can cite things, helping you come up with better hooks and headlines, fine tuning what you're doing, right? I use it for, I use AI for that as well. Like sometimes I'm creating charts on something because my team will send me data and I'm like, okay, and I'll give you a great example of this.

My team worked with, I don't know how many companies and we started, these companies were asking people, how'd you hear about us for customers that were checking out?

So customers would say social, Google, you know, chat GPT, et cetera, right? Email, whatever the channels may be. When they selected Google, we would dive in more and ask follow-up questions. And these were just like a tick box, like, you know, like a multiple choice answer.

So you could say AI overviews, traditional Google search, paid search, map results, you know, videos, images, whatever it may be, shopping, et cetera.

So I was just like, oh, cool. I don't want to create a chart that showcases how people or how customers are learning about businesses. I wanted to create a chart that breaks down where inside Google are people actually learning about a business when they use Google. And I was trying to come up with a chart idea.

And this no joke was yesterday around like one something AM because I slept in the plane. They didn't have Wi-Fi. So I was wide awake and I was like, all right, let me, you know, crank this out into a chart idea because my team already sent me the data. We just needed a tile for a chart.

So I plugged in the data into chat GPT. And I was like, I'm stuck on a chart idea or a title for it. And it says, how about where brand discovery happens on Google? And I was like, cool, this works.

They gave me like 10 options, right? And out of the 10 options, where brand discovery happens on Google, they gave me a longer variation of it. It wasn't too much longer. I cut out a few words and adjusted one or two.

And I'm like, this is good to go. Um, so I think you can help it a lot for fine tuning, even if you're good at what you do, because even if you're good at what you do, sometimes you're not always going to be on your A game. Sometimes you have burnout. Sometimes you're tired.

Sometimes you just have brain fog. Um, but where I don't see AI helping with content and it being successful in the long run, is it just doing everything from soup to nuts and it just being successful because I believe the platforms are going to flag it, even if the content's amazing and it's just going to get crushed over time. Yeah, so here's my take on it. I'll show a couple of examples here.

So I think what's helpful, okay, so let me share two things real quick here. So here's how I think AI is going to, AI is affecting marketing itself. content marketing in general. So if I share this screen with you over here, you can see this, right?

So basically I was messing with this today and I was making a skill. So I was like, Hey, look at the all in podcast and Neil, this actually applies to our podcast marketing school, right? I'm like, you know, they actually do a good job with the, I think their thumbnails are pretty good and their titles are pretty good. So I was like, hey, based on this, I want you to make a skill here.

And what the skill does every single time is that when we have a new podcast that's like over an hour or so, I just wanted to use this skill. So come up with the ideas. And so I was playing with it today. And for today's podcast, I took all the titles over here.

And I was just like, hey, use this and tell me what titles you would pick. And in fact, it was like... because we're going to talk about why ClickUp shed 22% people to build 100X team. And, you know, there's all these different topic ideas here, right?

And so I think it does a good job with coming up with titles potentially, and then you can iterate on them. I don't think you just go with what they say, at least right now. It comes up with good thumbnails. And I just showed you the thumbnail that I did on the screen earlier.

And that was really good. That was using ChatGPT images. But not only that, Neil, this is super half-assed yesterday, but I saw someone post something about what charts tend to work on LinkedIn.

So I took that X post and I went to my AI, my Hermes, I was like, hey, make it into a skill. So it made this image over here. It's like, yeah, what clients buy versus what must exist. Outcome above the waterline.

Machine underneath. So it created this chart. And is it perfect? No. You can see the text is overlapping here. But what did it generate? 35 bookmarks on X, which is not bad from this half-assed image, and 33 likes, right?

And I know I can iterate off of this. So I think when it comes to making charts, graphs, images off of raw data that you have already, that's great. And then you, the creator, you need to be able to speak to what your angle is or what your opinion is on it. I think that's the part that makes you unique because we're all different.

Yes. Yes. The number one way or let's go back on this. You use AI with content and I've used AI for content as well. If you had to pick just one, what has been your biggest ROI from using AI in content?

Driving... Okay, so the X posts that it creates drive hundreds of thousands of views that actually drive pipeline and pipeline that is closed. So it does drive revenue. And specifically for creating content for X and articles, not tweets, articles.

Correct. They're articles for X. Yeah. And then for me, I would say the highest ROI by far, it's a leader. I don't have the exact percentage, but I know because we do a weekly marketing standup and it's just so much larger by multiples is...

translating and transcribing our campaigns using AI. So if something works for English, we'll just whip it out. And all the countries that have a similar culture to the US, so whether it is whipping it out for Canada and French or Portuguese or Spanish or whatever languages that the team wants to test, we find that that helps us scale faster and it just replicates the campaigns and it produces a really positive ROI. You just whip it out, huh?

Whip it out. All right. Keep going here. All right. So click up. I want to talk about crank it out as a better term, but yeah. Quick break. One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90 plus hours a month on content alone.

ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work, not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice. It helps you with other areas such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs.

We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show.

I want to talk about something here. So Neil, obviously you've seen this, that ClickUp, you know, they cut 22% of staff and they're talking about getting 100x employees. And then Cloudflare did this thing where they did a layoff and then each of their CEOs wrote a really long post on X and it cut millions and millions of views. And then, you know, you've heard people that have different opinions on this, right?

So let me pull this up real quick and then we can react to this because I want to talk about this from a business operator angle versus just reacting like someone from the news. So Jason Lem can put this up here. So

So Zeb from ClickUp, I just want, he's a CEO founder of ClickUp. And so this post has 9 million views. Oh my God. Wow. Okay. So I think folks are partially missing the story here.

ClickUp is in the category perhaps most devastated by AI. So we kind of talked about this last week, but I want to react to it more. So Monday, Asana, et cetera, further down than anyone else. At last, Ian Jira was too until the last quarter, literally the worst category of software in the AI age.

What I want to talk about here is this whole idea of focusing on 100x employees. Because, you know, if he needs to like ClickUp or Cloudflare, they need a cut. And they're talking about making way for 100x employees. Like, you know, Naval has talked about this concept of you're not even like a 10x engineer anymore.

You're not even a 100x engineer. You could be a 1000x engineer in this case. And when I look at the way I'm working now, just on the right side of my screen, I can't help myself, right?

And I even asked my Hermes, I'm like, how much faster am I, right? And so I do think it's smart. Like, even when I talk to our recruiter right now for people that are looking for, let's say, a lot of money that we have maybe very over budget for what we budgeted for that role, I'm like, hey,

If they're really good, I still want to have them on the bench because as we continue to scale with these things, we're going to need amazing people. And if these people can do, you know, 10x or 100x of the job, we want to pay these people. And that's what I think this kind of goes back to what you're saying earlier, where it's like, you know, are you trying to fire people because of AI? No, not necessarily.

It's more so we want to find all the people most like as many as we can, that can be 10x or 100x or so. That's what really it comes down to. It's not really like an AI or not AI thing. Yeah.

Yeah, and when I look at this post, I'm not doubting that you can't have better employees. I think all organizations can have better employees because if you're at scale, you have people that are dragging a company down. That's in all corporations.

But if you look at the companies that are performing the best in the stock market, how many layoffs do you think they're doing, Eric? Yeah. Or what percentage of them do you think that are doing layoffs?

Are we talking about the Magnificent Seven? No, I'm talking about the ones that are gaining the most traction from a stock price, which is mainly all the AI companies. Yeah, I don't think many of them are.

Exactly. And there's been a counter argument to this. If you look at the companies that are booming the most, like MU, you know, Scandis, and the list goes on and on. Eric also shared me a list with all the AI stocks that are booming.

And if you just look at all those companies, most of them are not doing layoffs. Just in general, the companies that are growing the fastest in the public markets, most of them are not talking about layoffs at all. It's the companies that are struggling that are doing the layoffs and they're coming up with different narratives. I'm not saying the 100X employee isn't true or the 1,000X or the 10X or even 5X because even if you double employees' efficiencies, that has huge impacts on our organization.

But I think a lot of the companies that are pushing out this narrative – are struggling in some way and they're looking to pivot and make changes. I'm not saying these changes are bad or good. I'm just saying they have no choice but to make changes because of the position they're in.

So I think, I think there's multiple things going on here. I'm actually, I'm having a Google chart this out for us right now. But I do think like a business, like a click up is, is that that's a troubled category right now. And I hope they figure it out.

I trust that they will. But I, I will say that also if we look at like Amazon, for example, right? So 16,000 corporate positions acts and then you have Meta that cut 16,000.

I think they had another small one this week. And so, you know, those I think are pretty good companies. Oracle cut 30K, but I wouldn't say they're cream of the crop, but, you know, they're still a pretty good company.

And then you have... Then there's others out there, like you have Block, for example, that cut $4,000. So let me just show this to you real quick. There's a graph here, Neon.

We can talk about this. And then we can talk about these other stocks, too. This is not financial advice for anybody. But so, excuse me, UPS cut $30K.

This is 2026. Oracle cut $30K. Excuse me. city bank cut 20k amazon 16k uh meta 16k and sd lauder 10k cisco 4k block 4k i would say cream of the crop of this list over here neil we can we can disagree on this one or agree but i think amazon's cream of the crop i think meta is a really great company too um they also have hundreds of thousands of employees just fyi um i think city bank's a pretty good company too and i think these are all pretty good companies but i think amazon meta kind of stick out to me here

Yeah, but if you look at... Forget what we think about the companies, like our own perspective. When you look at it from just this pure stock price perspective, right? Amazon and Facebook...

are still growing. They're just not necessarily growing as well. Like when I look at Facebook, where's Meta? Year to day, what are they at? Meta's down 3%.

I know Citi is booming. Citi must be up a lot for this year. But some of these are doing well. Some of them aren't as doing well. But when you compare them to like the high flyers, like, you know,

MU, Intel's been crushing it recently. You know, and my mom has a different stock agenda. This is not financial advice. She rides the trends and the waves.

Like she doesn't look at the financials. So my mom will be like, oh, Intel's cheap, $19. Bye. Like literally, I believe she bought at $19 and she's up maybe 5x her money at this point because I believe it's trading at over $100.

Intel's financials haven't improved that much. It's worth, I think, around $500 billion. I'm more of a value-add buyer where I look for things that are just really crushed and depressed and the fundamentals are really strong from a revenue and profitability standpoint and a growth standpoint.

But my mom's actually crushing me with her portfolio versus mine. No research. She despised the high flyers. None of these are really some of them may be laying off like Intel may have done so in the past when they were struggling.

But she's just looking for the ones that are just on a tear because of AI. And most of these companies are on a hiring binge, not a firing binge. So let me show you something, Neil. So there's two things we can talk about here.

So I have more charts for you because we like charts here. So you can see on my screen over here, I pardon for all the tabs. I haven't restarted for a while because with all the AI stuff, I don't like restarting my computer anymore.

Your tabs are like NASCAR, dude. It's usually not like this. I usually, I used to turn off my computer every night. Now I almost, I don't turn it on for like days or weeks at a time.

So anyway, so here's a normalized year to date percentage returns. If we're looking at Amazon, Oracle, if you look at this chart over here, this chart's very hard to read. So I'm just going to give you kind of the TLDR from January until now. To Neil's point,

Meta is down 3.5%. Cloudflare is down 2.1%. Citibank is down 1%. No, this is off. Citibank is not down. Do you have something that's more relevant? Citibank is up 6.35% this year.

No, yeah, 6.35%. On all year-to-date numbers, especially Citibank. So let this be known that it hallucinated in front of us. UPS, did they say 5.5% up?

No, Citibank, UPS is a 5.5, yeah. And then Amazon, it says it's up 19.1. Yeah, I know Amazon's done decently well this year. Okay, so here, here. It says Citibank is up 7.7% and then Amazon's up 16.8.

Is that somewhere right? No, Amazon's closer to 19%. The first one was right. And Citibank is up, let's see, year to date, 6.35%. So my point here, Neil, is I still think it's kind of like, I think in some cases they're cutting people.

In many cases, they're cutting people that just aren't a fit that don't fit the AI narrative. Now, speaking of AI narrative here, I want to show you this one. So I've shown Neil some of these stocks over here.

If you look at stocks like AXTI, Intel, Marvel Technology, and Vertiv, I can speak to these in a moment. But if you look at one year, AXTI is up 6,800%. And then Intel is up 500%. Marvel Technology is 243%.

Vertiv, which does cooling, is up 188%. Speaking of narrative, Neil, we talked about this last time, but AXTI, it's not like they're crushing it from a revenue growth standpoint or cash flow growth standpoint. It's the narrative that's tied to this. Yes.

And I totally agree. It's the narratives. A lot of this has nothing to do with... Fundamentals. Yeah, fundamentals. It's like, it's just a narrative. And all of these guys, when they're doing layouts, they all pitch the same narrative.

We're reinvesting the savings into AI or, hey, our employees are so much more efficient because of AI. I'm not saying it's not true to some extent, but the real reason that most of these companies are laying off is because they're just not growing the way they expected. And they made these hires assuming they were going to. So now they got to cut back.

And when your stock price goes down, you need to figure out how to make your economics look better for the market. And you got to paint a narrative. You can't go to the public markets and say, hey, we're missing our numbers and we don't think we're going to actually grow the way we projected over the next few years. So we're going to fire a ton of people.

Your stock's just going to tank even more. It's marketing. They're just spinning the verbiage and the messaging to make themselves look better. Yeah. Last thing, then we can move on from this, but I just want to go through what the CEO of ClickUp said here.

So the whole concept of the 100x organization here. So the primary change is that what we're restructuring around what I call the 100x org. The goal is 100x output. So the roles required to build the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago.

Build at the highest level. incremental improvements existing systems won't get us there we need new ones that means creating enough disruption to rebuild rather than iterate on what's already broken the common narrative is that ai makes everyone more productive it doesn't many of the workflows of today if left unchanged create bottlenecks in ai systems these roles will evolve but waiting for that to happen naturally means falling behind now that part i agree with the 100x org is actually heavily dependent on people infinitely more than today. This is only possible with 10x people that have embraced and adopted new ways of working.

That I agree with as well because the thing is, I look at how we're doing things now. For example, the agents that we have, there's a lot of debugging that's required with these agents. So you're going to need to hire agent managers and you're going to need to hire more developers, more forward deployed engineers, more customer success people.

But more importantly, they need to be able to do these things, right? Because if they can't, they're actually going to be a hindrance to your organization. Yeah. And when you look at,

when you look at what these guys are doing i'm telling you like my just personal beliefs is they don't have a choice cool this is awesome well that is uh i think that will wrap us for today hope you enjoyed this and uh we will catch you tomorrow