Employers are quietly rehiring the people AI replaced, and paying them less to come back

Forrester reports that 55% of employers regret laying off workers for AI and expects half of AI-attributed layoffs to be quietly reversed, with jobs returning offshore or at significantly lower wages. In Europe, a revised directive will require consultation before such decisions, backed by financial penalties.

The companies that cut jobs for AI are having second thoughts. Forrester reports that 55% of employers regret laying workers off for AI, and expects half of all AI-attributed layoffs to be quietly reversed.

That reversal is not the happy ending it sounds like. Forrester says the jobs come back offshore or at significantly lower wages, which means the correction costs the worker rather than the employer.

The fear has not moved with the evidence. A Reuters Ipsos poll found 53% of Americans worry AI will put someone in their household out of work, and TNW has asked what AI is doing to European jobs on the same question.

Inside the workplace the number is identical. A 2026 Software Finder report found 53% of workers worry AI tools will make their role feel less necessary.

Gartner’s Jackie Swanson describes the gap precisely. “Every organization has an AI adoption roadmap. Almost none of them have an honest plan for what AI is doing to their people, their pace and their pipeline of future leaders,” she wrote.

The fixes companies are reaching for are all voluntary. Ironclad’s chief technology officer taught internal classes, the syrup maker Torani has gone 103 years without a layoff, and Superhuman lets teams choose their own tools.

“We don’t start with a top-down AI mandate,” said Kenny Mendes, Superhuman’s chief people officer. Teams close to a problem pick up a tool themselves, which he says stops the change reading as cost-cutting.

In Europe none of this is a management philosophy. Informing and consulting workers before a decision that reshapes their work is a legal duty, in a region still arguing over whether rules can protect jobs without slowing innovation.

That duty is about to get sharper. Directive 2025/2450 revises the European Works Councils rules, must be transposed by 1 January 2028, and requires consultation in good time and in a form that allows a thorough assessment before decisions are taken.

It also arrives with money attached. Member states must impose effective and dissuasive financial sanctions calculated with company turnover in the mix, in a period when Meta alone cut 8,000 jobs while redirecting billions toward AI infrastructure.

So the two continents are having different arguments. America is debating whether to tell workers what AI is doing to their jobs, while Europe is settling when, in what form, and what it costs to get it wrong.