The Truth Behind AI Layoffs and the Future of Work Trends for 2026

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
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**Alexis Wierenga** (0:39)
Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Alexis Wieregna. We're starting the new year by breaking down Gartner's top Future of Work Trends for 2026 What's shaping the workplace now, and how AI will continue to redefine roles, workflows and leadership priorities. We've all seen the headlines around AI-driven layoffs, but is AI truly the culprit, or are there other factors at play? And beyond the hype, what trends will define how work gets done in the year? Joining me again is Gartner Senior Director Analyst, Emily Rose McRae, a leading voice on the future of work and this year's trends. We'll explore the truth behind AI layoffs, the biggest workforce risks and opportunities, and what leaders should do now to prepare for what's next. Emily Rose, welcome back.

**Emily Rose McRae** (1:22)
Thanks. It's really nice to be here, Alexis. Thank you.

**Alexis Wierenga** (1:25)
Yeah, excited to speak with you again. So let's start big picture. When we talk about the future of work in 2026, what's different compared to last year beyond just more AI?

**Emily Rose McRae** (1:37)
It's kind of interesting because it's like more AI, but also not that much more, if that makes sense, because the updates to the models that were released came out in the spring of last year. So everyone's going to be like, so what's next? But there's a lot of anxiety that what's next will somehow be transformative in a way that organizations either won't be ready for, or that will require massive amounts of change management.
Outside of AI, the biggest difference, and this is somewhat driven by AI, is executive expectations of performance increasing. There's suddenly expectations that people can do 10% more, or that teams can produce 10% more. But not really a theory as to how or why, just that it's possible. That's creating a lot of stress for leaders, and managers, and employees. And then also on the HR side of things, it's really hard, because that has so many implications for what the organization's culture might be. But also the overall question that I've gotten more and more lately is something of how do we know we even have the right people in the right roles, and we're getting what we should out of that? And there's this anxiety that somehow as organizational leaders, we're forgetting something or missing something that everyone else has figured out and we're getting left behind.

**Alexis Wierenga** (3:02)
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of anxiety around performance. Am I, are we doing a good job? What does that even look like? Have we measured that? And on top of that, we're seeing AI layoffs dominating headlines. From Gartner's perspective, what's really happening? Are companies cutting jobs because of AI, or is the story a bit more complicated than that?

**Emily Rose McRae** (3:22)
The story's a lot more complicated than that. So some of my colleagues did something really smart, and when they looked at worn-out notices for layoffs in the United States for the first half of 2025 We haven't had a chance to look at the second half of 2025 yet, but that'll definitely be in the works. Worn-out notifications are required during layoffs for large employers. When they looked at them, they found something interesting, which is despite how much the press coverage and the media announcements related to layoffs have said that it is an AI-driven, that we're seeing so much productivity, or we expect to see so much productivity when we're doing layoffs. In practice, what we're actually seeing is that most of the layoffs aren't related to AI at all. In fact, 79 percent of those layoffs in the first half of the year were completely unrelated to AI. So what about that remaining 21 percent? Because that would still be pretty concerning if 21 percent of layoffs were coming from, say, we were able to do this job faster with AI and we don't need you now, which would be pretty upsetting.
There, it's an interesting story. So we talk about three different ways that an organization might end up changing how it's approaching its workforce due to AI. One might be, and this is specifically in terms of the number of people working there, one might be that you decide to restrain hiring. So just a restrain strategy. It's not we're laying people off, but we're not necessarily backfilling when we have openings or when we have someone leave. Then there would be, we're actually replacing. So as a result of using AI tools, we no longer need people in these jobs because AI is doing some component of it. And then there's reframe approach, which is more, actually, we don't want to be in this particular market anymore. Maybe AI makes it easier, maybe to do a different market. For instance, maybe you want to move to a different location that previously wasn't possible as a growth market. But now that you have AI-assisted translation, that seems more feasible. And so you've decided, all right, we're going to aim there. We're going to stop this other expansion we had going. So there have been, it's about 4% restraint type layoffs where it was more, we're not hiring after a backfill or after a departure. 1% of organizations were actually seeing less than 1%. We're actually seeing a, like, true, we are replacing headcount because of productivity. And then for the remainder, it was much more, we need to put our workers where they're going to have the biggest impact and we don't want to go down this business path anymore. So it was actually a business decision related to AI. It might be that they're going to move into a more AI-enabled tool space or that there's a different, like I said, there's a different market or audience that they can target now. But it wasn't AI took the job, it was AI gave us a new opportunity that meant we're deploying our resources differently.