Are you sure you should be cutting those roles?

The AI boomerang: Why companies are rehiring the people they cut

DON’T COUNT THE humans out just yet. Sure, we may need to take breaks now and then, might care about pesky things like labour laws and our bones and gristle can tire — but as some companies are finding out, we are not yet fully replaceable by AI counterparts.

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According to a new report from talent-assessment vendor SHL, backed by a growing amount of anecdotal data, some employers that tried to cut workers in favour of AI replacements are now looking to get those workers back.

SHL surveyed around 2,000 workers in the U.S. and UK and found that around 16 per cent said they had, at one point, been replaced by AI and later asked back by the same employer, in a phenomenon SHL calls “AI rebounding.”

In Canada, a separate survey by Robert Half found that 34 per cent of hiring managers who cut roles after adopting AI have since had to reinstate them, suggesting that AI boomerang hires are a real phenomenon as companies figure out what can and can’t be done by AI.

“Two years ago, we said, ‘Would this happen?’ and now we’re saying, ‘Yes, it is happening in real time,’” said SHL’s global senior vice president of product and design, Lucy Beaumont, speaking to the Associated Press. “Maybe their shareholders love that they did this right-sizing motion… and then they have to turn around and quietly, with their tail between their legs, admit that they weren’t ready for that or they shouldn’t have done that.”

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A number of executives are admitting this is more or less an accurate description. “We moved really fast, [but] the technology wasn’t quite there yet,” said Maria Colacurcio, CEO of pay-intelligence platform Syndio, speaking to Business Insider.

One re-hired Syndio employee, Jonathan Vidales (now a global account partner), said he “wasn’t ready to go” when he was laid off, and added that returning felt like “sneaking back into the house after I got kicked out.”

Amazon, too, is reportedly trying to recruit back workers it previously laid off, though a spokesperson said that rehiring former employees is “a normal, long-standing part of how we recruit.”

Some analysts agree it is hard to tell exactly how widespread this phenomenon is, but also agree that having to backtrack on earlier automation plans is something many companies are now doing. “Early AI adoption helped automate certain routine tasks, but many organizations underestimated how much human judgment, context and oversight those roles require,” says Deborah Bottineau, managing director at Robert Half.

Possibly the most notable example of this in the past year or so is the Ford Motor Company, which backtracked and hired 350 veteran engineers earlier this year, some of them former employees who were being brought back after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

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“Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Ford’s Charles Poon.

And lo and behold, all that human flesh and brain matter has had a clear payoff for Ford. Pointing to things like lowered warranty and recall costs, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the rehires are “contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.” Kieran Delamont