How AI-Driven Attrition is Quietly Reshaping the Workforce

Plus: China's increasing role in reshaping oil markets during the Iran war

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Cheddar's Big Business This Week
July 16, 2026

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Every month, investors pore over the U.S. jobs report looking for clues about the labor market. But what if the biggest AI-driven employment trend doesn’t show up in the data until it's already happened? Big Business This Week editor Peter Green spoke with Bradley Taylor, CEO of headcount forecasting firm Clearcast, who argues that companies are increasingly reducing employment through attrition rather than headline-grabbing layoffs. By analyzing millions of job postings and company data, Clearcast believes it has identified a pattern of "quiet restructuring" that could provide an early warning of AI-driven workforce reductions.

Peter Green: How can you tell that AI-related layoffs are coming? 

Bradley Taylor: We identified four signals that, taken together, make us feel confident something is going on. We don't have insider knowledge about specific layoffs, and we're not trading against these businesses. But when you combine these signals, the pattern becomes compelling. 

The first is companies with at least 20 technology mentions in their job postings, mentioning Salesforce, Microsoft, Workday and so on. That tells us they have a baseline level of technological sophistication to deploy AI. Second, their headcount has been flat over the previous 12 months. They aren't growing their workforce. Among companies showing those two characteristics, we then look for businesses projected to decline by at least 5% in headcount over the coming year. Finally, we look for leadership departures and transformational hires such as a Chief AI Officer. 

If you're an employee, those are the things to watch. Are positions simply not being refilled? Are leaders leaving without replacements? Has the company hired someone to oversee AI strategy? Those signs suggest the business may not announce a formal layoff but could instead slowly reduce its workforce over time.

So this isn't necessarily about firing people. It's about deciding not to replace them.

Exactly. The question becomes, "Do we really need to rehire that role? Why can't we use Claude or another AI tool to do that job?" Ultimately, companies want to grow revenue with fewer people. Can the position be replaced with AI? Can we do more with less? If the answer is yes, then they may continue serving customers without adding headcount.

One of your indicators is companies with at least 20 software mentions. What does that actually measure?

We analyze millions of job postings using AI and identify which software platforms companies mention. If a posting asks for experience with Workday, UKG or Ceridian, for example, we can infer which technologies the company uses. The point isn't that they're trying to connect all those systems with AI. It's more basic. Do they have enough technology in place to make AI deployment possible? Twenty software mentions by themselves may not mean anything. But when you combine that with flat hiring, projected headcount declines and leadership changes, you begin to see a meaningful correlation.

Clearcast's core business is forecasting company headcount. How do you make those predictions?

That's exactly what our company was built to do. We use proprietary machine learning models trained on job postings, news articles, firmographic information, Census Bureau data, public filings and many other inputs. We've back-tested the models over roughly 15 years. We started with public companies because their SEC filings disclose employee counts, allowing us to compare our predictions with what actually happened. Our original goal wasn't AI. It was helping companies understand whether their customers would grow or shrink. If your revenue depends on charging per employee, knowing whether your customers are adding workers or losing them becomes critically important. As AI layoffs started making headlines, we realized our forecasting tools could also identify signals before those announcements occurred.

Why aren’t these trends obvious in the monthly jobs report?

The jobs report is backward-looking. It tells you how many jobs were added last month. What we're trying to identify are the signals that suggest companies may reduce headcount in the future. We're seeing just under 10,000 companies showing the early signs of what we call quiet restructuring. These are often large businesses with thousands of employees. If enough of them stop replacing workers and gradually reduce staff through attrition, those changes won't necessarily appear as major layoff announcements. That's why we're trying to make people aware that there's activity beyond the handful of widely publicized AI layoffs in the technology sector.

Should workers be worried?

I think people should pay attention. A company doesn't have to announce that it eliminated 8,000 jobs. Someone quits, and the company simply doesn't replace that person. Another employee leaves, and AI absorbs part of the workload. Over time, that's a meaningful reduction in employment without a dramatic headline. That's really what this pattern illustrates. Businesses aren't necessarily getting rid of people all at once. They're doing more with less, allowing natural attrition to shrink the workforce. The next step for us is quantifying what that could mean nationally if this pattern continues. But the important point today is that there are early signals people can watch. More data is becoming available, and we don't always have to wait until after the fact to understand what's happening.

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week

This week, big business!

War Story

  • China’s Rising Dominance in a Volatile Oil Market:  Move over, OPEC. The real decision maker now for global oil markets is China. China stocked up last year, when it saw the war coming, and it’s been drastically cutting its reliance on imported oil going back years, with massive solar electrification projects, hydroelectric dams and even the revival of some coal-powered power plants. In fact, China cut so much of its oil use this year, that it effectively kept global oil prices from rising. “China effectively operates more market power [over oil prices] than any nation on earth, including Saudi Arabia and the U.S.,” Eurasia  Group analyst Gregory Brew told The New York Times. But there’s a flip side to the inventory issue. Most countries have few reserves left to pull from. Even the U.S. strategic reserve is wearing thin — its equipment is aging, and the salt caverns that store the oil are leaking. “What cushioned the initial blow this time is that energy markets had room to maneuver and absorb it,” the IMF said in a blog post. But if the Strait is closed again, “that room is now smaller and shrinking further.” The first three months of war took 1.1 billion barrels of crude off the market, or enough to run the world for 10 days. With forecasts for global growth shrinking over the war, the Fund said “A quick supply recovery is essential to avoid further damage to the global economy.” And prices show no sign of coming down: When Trump briefly announced he’d close the Strait a few days ago, oil futures jumped 10%. Brent Crude is up more than 12% this month to $81 a barrel, that’s nearly a third more than it was before the war began, whcih is money coming out of consumers’ pockets. And if you wanted further proof that, as former U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler said in his book of the same name, “War is a racket,” Iranian negotiators tell Drop Site News that they’ve calculated that alleged market manipulation by people with advance access to Trump’s statements on the war have made $9 billion in profits, and Iran wants half of that money.

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The Usual Suspects

  • PayPal payday? Shareholders in PayPal $PYPL ( ▲ 2.18% ) saw their holdings rise 16% on Wednesday after closely held payments rival Stripe and PE firm Advent International, together with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payment firm Block $XYZ ( ▼ 0.35% ) , are offering $53 billion to take over the online payments firm. The three are reportedly offering $60.50 a share, a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing price on Tuesday. So why didn’t the stock jump right up to the offer price? Despite a 40% drop in market value in the year before the advent of the Stripe/Advent offer, as PayPal struggles against Apple Pay $AAPL ( ▲ 1.61% ) and Google Pay $GOOGL ( ▼ 4.48% ) , investors feel they’re being low-balled. In April, 2021, PayPal peaked at $296 a share. It no longer has the market share it had then, but in the right hands it’s worth more. Stripe can merge PayPal and use it and Venmo (which PayPal bought in 2013) to boost its own business and push its crypto payment offers onto PayPal’s 400 million users. Together, the two firms would create the world’s largest payment system outside China, processing $3.7 trillion in payments. TD Cowen analyst Bryan Bergin told Reuters that a purchase would give Stripe "direct consumer relationships, with a large user base and the potential for ‌future financial-services distribution, ⁠which PayPal has recently increased its efforts on.” That leaves the company with three paths and three possible takeover prices based on whether it can generate more, according to analysts: $50-$65 in its current state, with current management, $65-$75 in the hands of a financial investor, but $75-$90 for a strategic investor like Stripe that can easily grow the business.

  • IBM’s Big Blues: It was a blue Tuesday for IBM $IBM ( ▲ 3.72% ) , the Dow stalwart known as Big Blue. A profit warning noting that its customers where shifting spending from IBM’s software and mainframe infrastructure to AI hardware and memory chips, a business that the U.S. computing and consulting giant has been largely absent from, sent its shares plummeting more than 25% (they were down 27% at midday Thursday). Demand dropped even for IBM’s z17 mainframe, designed for AI. “Markets are going to punish legacy players showing signs of losing ground in the AI race,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. IBM has been a favorite of TV business pundits, with Jim Cramer saying this month that “it’s got AI and it's a great computer company at 22x. I think this one works."

  • WBD/Paramount trouble: Nepo-mogul David Ellison must be channeling Michael Corleone right now: Just when he thought he’d won anti-trust approval from the SEC, state attorney generals suede to block the debt-addled acquisition by Ellison’s Paramount $PSKY ( ▼ 1.19% ) of Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD ( ▼ 0.24% ) . A group of 12 states including California and New York sued to block the $111 billion merger, arguing the deal would harm movie theaters and give the combined company too much power over distributing basic cable channels, like CNN. “The likely result is higher prices, lower quality and less content for film,” the states said in their lawsuit. That lawsuit may be tough to win, largely because Paramount, even combined with WBD just isn’t that big a player in movies or cable. “The states are going to have a difficult time establishing that the disappearance of a relatively insignificant player will have the wide-ranging ramifications they allege,” said Reuben Miller, head of antitrust at Dealreporter. Even if the deal goes through, the enlarged Paramount faces a huge debt challenge: With a total $79 billion in debt, it will have a 4.3x net debt to EBITDA ratio, and Paramount already has a junk rating from Fitch. Ellison still says he’ll achieve $6 billion in “synergies,” bring the debt rationdown to 3x, and turn out more movies, and profits.  Paramount shares are down more than 10% in the past month and 50% in the past year. WBD shares have more than doubled since the deal was announced.

  • Magic Markets: Clock another blockbuster quarter for big banks, as the business of business leads to record profits. All those mega-share sales (SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 3.08% ) Alphabet $GOOG ( ▼ 4.43% ) , SK Hynix $SKHY ( ▼ 13.69% ) ) are a big boost to the bottom line, as Wall Street reports its earnings: Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▼ 4.91% ) , profits up 78% over last year, share price up 7.2%, Morgan Stanley $MS ( ▼ 4.45% ) profits up 58%, shares up 0.4%, Citigroup $C ( ▼ 2.36% ) profits up 45%, shares down 4.2%, JPMorgan Chase $JPM ( ▼ 1.12% ) profits up 41%, shares up 3%; Bank of America $BAC ( ▼ 0.2% ) profits up 26%, shares up 2%;  Wells Fargo $WFC ( ▲ 0.63% ) profits up 17%, shares fell 4.4%. So what’s up? Why the disconnect between profits and share hikes (except for Goldman?). For one thing, bank shares have been largely climbing over the past quarter, so profit expectations were already baked in, but the banks also reported growing expenses and what JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned are “tectonic” risks, “including geopolitical tensions and wars, sticky inflation, large global fiscal deficits and elevated asset prices.” The other fear: Too many new issues, overwhelming the market’s ability to absorb them with fresh cash. That’s what helped lead to the 1999-2000 dotcom crash, in fact. Magic markets, indeed.

Tech Trauma

  • Does Apple’s OpenAI suit fit? Lagging in thh AI race and facing a looming threat to the iPhone’s global supremacy from OpenAI’s chat GPT, Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 1.61% ) filed a lawsuit last Friday alleging OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.49% ) stole Apple trade secrets when it hired a cadre of top Apple product engineers. OpenAi is reportedly developing a line of hardware devices, and reports say its first device will be a screenless speaker “companion” that uses ChatGPT. Altman posted on X that he’s “not afraid of Apple.” In 2010, Apple sued a raft of smartphone makers alleging theft of its IP. The suits dragged on until 2018. Shares in Apople are up 9.4% in the past month.

  • Meta’s AI layoffs. Another month another Meta $META ( ▼ 2.65% ) AI misstep. Remember Galactica (it generated fake research papers); BlendBot3 (it generated fake election claims); the Fake AI profiles; or the Ai characters that led to chatbots’ improper relations with children? Well a group of fired employees are now alleging in a Federal suit that Meta used AI to determine its latest round of 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, in May. They say the company used internal AI tools to target employees by productivity and use of AI tokens. The problem is that the tool ended up targeting employees on medical or parental leave. Allegedly, that’s discrimination. Meta denies the claims.

Car Talk

  • Detroit’s China Syndrome: There’s a specter haunting Detroit and its the specter of China’s EV success, Ford’s $F ( ▼ 0.18% ) executive chairman, Bill Ford, warned this week, even as Congress considers a bi-partisan bill banning Chinese cars.  “We can’t expect to keep them out forever, and we have to be able to beat them at their own game,” said Ford. Ford is preparing the paunch of a $30,000 EV pickup to win over Americans, but the Trump Administration has cut EV subsidies and backed off emissions rules that helped EVs gain ground. That’s slammed local EV makers like Lucid $LCID ( ▲ 8.57% ) and Rivian $RIVN ( ▼ 5.06% ) , both of which are losing money and have seen their share prices tank. Lucid shares fell as much as 40% Tuesday, before closing down 16%. Shaking off rumors of bankruptcy, Lucid said this week its hiring a turnaround adviser. That hasn’t stopped BYD whose head of international operations told the FT that it can overtake Toyota $TM ( ▲ 1.61% ) , the world’s largest carmaker with 10.5 million cars sold last year, within five years, even if it’s shut out of the U.S. BYD claimed sales of 4.5 million vehicles last year. That may come back to haunt U.S. car makers. Last year one in four vehicles dold globallyy was battery-powered, and China makes 74% of them. The U.S. only makes 5%, and after scrapping dozens of EV models after the Trump rule changes—and writing off more than $50 billion in EV development costs—it may never be able to catch up, even as EVs overtake internal combustion engines.

  • The hurt is overseas as well. Volkswagen Group $VLKAY ( ▼ 0.99% ) plans to cut another 50,000 jobs, after 50,000 it already initiated in 2024. CEO Oliver Bume said VW’s production costs are 20% above the industry average, and that the European carmarket is oversaturated with “un-needed” cars. He said VW will have to cut its production by a fourth, from 12, million to 9 million a year across its stable of brands. VW shares are down about 30% this year, but up 5% since Blume’s announcement. He’s facing stiff opposition from unions, which have a seat on the firm’s supervisory board.  

The Short Stack

  • Buffet’s Gates Diss: Every year since 2006, Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.A ( ▲ 0.73% ) founder Warren Buffett gives away millions of dollars in shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which works on issues including ending malaria. But not this year. In March, Buffett said he hadn’t spoken to his one-time pal “since the whole thing” of Gates’ ties to Trump pal and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was revealed.

  • Forget Coals and Newcastle: Chipotle $CMG ( ▼ 1.24% ) is bringing its tacos, burritos and bowls to Mexico. Mexico? Yep. The company is betting it will be the chic option. “The difference would lie in the bowls,” analyst Sharon Zackfia of William Blair told the New York Times. If similar efforts are any guide the going is gonna be tough: Starbucks $SBUX ( ▲ 3.1% ) has only 50 shops in Italy, mostly in trendy tourist spots, out of about 152,000 bars and cafes in the country. And it’s been forced to lower its price — and cut extra charges for oat milk and other specialties- to keep up with the locals. 

  • Disney’s Moana Moan. How Moana is too much Moana? Three films, it seems. Disney’s $DIS ( ▲ 2.64% ) live-action pic of Moana, coming just two years after the release of its animated Moana 2, is shaping up to be a box office splat. Starring the real life Rock (Dwayne Johnson, who voices demi-god Maui in the animated versions), it took in about $95 million worldwide in its first weekend, a weak start for a film that cost $250 million to make and $100 million to publicize. The shaky start raises questions about Disney’s plan to add live-action versions to its other animated successes. That said, shares in Disney are up a little under 2% this week.

Elon’s World

  • Rockets go down, too. Where will the invisible hand of the market grab Space X shares as they fall back to Earth? The gigantic metal chopsticks work on SpaceX rockets, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent to protect the company’s shareholders. SpaceX shares briefly fell below their IPO price of $135 on Wednesday before recovering to just $135.27. Shares peaked at $220 days after the IPO. That’s got Wall Street traders betting against the company, even as sell-side analysts predict a glowing future for the rocket firm. SpaceX short interest rose to 181 million shares this week, or 28% of its tradable float, while the unrealized gains for short sellers have already hit some $3.88 billion, according to data compiled by S3 partners. Besides expectations of growth coming back down to earth, the big pressure on SpaceX is the forthcoming expiration of a series of lockups that have kept early private investors from selling their shares on the public market. “The largest IPO in history is also shaping up to be the largest exit liquidity operation in history,” investor George Nobel wrote on X this week. That may be because the early investors are happy to walk away with 10x or 20x their initial investment and invest now in the next big idea. Or it may be because they don’t see a business there at the valuation now on the table, so they are taking their money and running. So what is there to SpaceX? As Nobel says, “rip away the science fiction and the only business inside SpaceX that reliably earns money is Starlink, which produced $1.2 billion of operating income last quarter. A wonderful business worth hundreds of billions on its best day. NOT $2 trillion,” he wrote. “Serious fair value work lands around $30 a share. Yikes!

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Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story. Email him here.