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Posted on 04/05/2026 8:56:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
* Artificial intelligence was the leading cause of U.S. layoffs announced in March, accounting for roughly a quarter of the total, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report Thursday.
* Overall, U.S. employers announced 60,620 job cuts last month, a 25% increase compared with February, the report found. The month’s total included 15,341 layoffs attributed to AI.
* “Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at the Chicago-based firm, said in the report. “The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions. Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs.”
The tech industry announced 18,720 job cuts in March, more than any other sector, bringing its first-quarter 2026 totals to 52,050, a 40% increase from a year earlier, according to the research. It marks the industry’s highest first-quarter total since 2023, when the sector recorded 102,391 cuts, the outplacement firm said.
Dell said last month that its headcount stood at 97,000 employees as of Jan. 30, 2026. That’s down from 108,000 a year earlier.
“Throughout fiscal 2026, we remained committed to disciplined cost management in coordination with our ongoing business modernization initiatives and continued to take certain measures to reduce costs, including employee reorganizations, limitation of external hiring and other actions to align our investments with our announced strategic and customer priorities,” the company said in a 10-K filing.
“These actions resulted in a continued reduction in our overall headcount. Despite these difficult decisions, we continue focused efforts to empower our employees and attract, develop and retain talent,” Dell added.
Oracle and Meta are among other tech giants that announced layoffs in March, the Challenger report noted. “More layoffs are likely to come from technology companies in 2026,” it said.
Despite the monthly surge, job cuts were down 78% in March on a year-over-year basis.
Public-sector layoffs have declined sharply, with a total of 2,270 year to date compared with 279,445 a year earlier, when the Department of Government Efficiency was a leading reason cited for cuts.
The latest report showed hiring plans rose sharply in March to 32,826, up 157% from February and 149% compared with a year earlier, though year-to-date hiring remains slightly below last year’s levels at 50,887 compared with 53,867 in 2025.
Besides AI, major drivers of layoffs last month included closings, organizational restructuring and economic conditions.
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AIs with H1B visas anyway...
I’d check out your source.
Just a thought.
Most the USA population are Idiots,
That is why we have democrats.
Our problem is how to deal with
them when they discover nobody
needs or wants them?
RE: I’d check out your source.
Here’s the source of the article:
https://www.challengergray.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Challenger-Report-March-2026-1.pdf
The source is CHALLENGER GRAY & CHRISTMAS
Challenger, Gray & Christmas is widely regarded as a reputable, long‑standing labor‑market research source, especially for layoff tracking, job‑cut announcements, and workforce trend analysis. Their data is routinely cited by major news outlets, financial analysts, and policymakers.
hmph
I seriously doubt that AI caused a quarter of all US layoffs. You can read dozens of credible articles that AI still isn’t ready for prime time. There is an article that just came out that Microsoft Copilot is a disaster that they are rebranding as entertainment because businesses are not adopting it despite Microsoft spending billions to develop and market it as a business efficiency tool. AI may get there one day but that day isn’t today.
I basically agree.
On the one hand, I do think AI is going to be very transformative, and I do think it will happen pretty soon. But it’s not clear that today is the day.
But there is a lot of evidence that companies want to prune their workforce. Sometimes it’s because they are planning to hire H1-Bs. Sometimes they just want fewer workers. And they need to come up with an excuse and they want the stock market to see the company as “cutting edge” and “ready for the future”. So they announce layoffs because of the benefits of AI. It’s not true, but it’s a good story.
[there, fixed it]
In many cases AI is simply the latest excuse for a company weighed down with HResources crappola to purge their company of accumulated crap employees hired for DEI rules.
Just because it’s not ready for prime time doesn’t mean companies aren’t drooling over the imagined cost savings. Remember we’re a quarterly report driven economy now. Everybody wants to tell stockholders they did everything necessary to hold down costs. People are expensive, CEOs think AI won’t be (it will be). So ax the people.
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