Cuts Without Returns

A Gartner survey of 350 global executives at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue found that roughly 80 percent of organizations piloting or deploying autonomous AI capabilities reported workforce reductions. The same study found that those reductions did not correlate with stronger return on investment, with companies cutting staff and companies amplifying staff reporting nearly identical AI ROI outcomes. (Source: Gartner)

Helen Poitevin, a VP analyst at Gartner, said in the release that the impulse to demonstrate AI returns through headcount cuts is "misplaced." Organizations seeing real ROI gains, she said, are the ones investing more in human skills and operating models rather than eliminating roles. (Source: Fortune)

The data is landing in the middle of a wave. Tech-sector layoffs in 2026 have already passed 100,000 jobs, with roughly 50,000 of those explicitly tied to AI restructuring. (Source: TechSpot) In May alone, Intuit cut 3,000 workers — 17 percent of its staff — while citing an AI focus shift, Meta began laying off 8,000 workers under the same framing, Coinbase eliminated roughly 700 employees, and PayPal announced plans to eliminate about 4,760 roles, or 20 percent of its workforce, over the next two to three years. (Source: Yahoo Finance)

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Monday — a 42,300-word document titled "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." The encyclical was signed May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the 1891 text that anchored Catholic teaching on labor and capital. (Source: Vatican News)

The document warns against "a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets" driven by "the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance," and calls for stronger regulation of private AI companies, worker protections, and constraints on autonomous weapons systems. The pope frames mass unemployment from AI adoption as "a true social calamity that especially requires the State to exercise responsibility," and writes that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means." (Source: TIME)

The Vatican presented the encyclical alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah — a deliberate signal about which AI lab the Holy See views as a credible partner on safety, given that Google and OpenAI were not on the stage. (Source: Anthropic) Vice President JD Vance called the warnings "profound."

The encyclical's structure echoes Rerum novarum, Centesimus annus, and Laudato si', explicitly placing AI inside the Church's labor and ecology tradition. (Source: Axios)