This week Barry Phillips asks whether we are beginning to see genuine AI redundancies happening in the island of Ireland. 

Transcript: 

Hello Humans! And welcome to the weekly podcast that aims to cover an important AI development for HR in around five minutes. My name is Barry Phillips.

This week's question: AI redundancies. Is this now a serious thing we’re likely to see so much more of? Or, if you prefer, is the dam wall really beginning to break?

Let's start in the United States. We learnt this week that AI is now the number one reason American employers give for cutting jobs. And it isn't a one-off. AI has topped the list for months now, and it appears in roughly 23% of all job-cut announcements in 2026. To put that in context, it was just 0.6% in 2023.  

It's a big headline. So what do we do with it?

My advice: treat it with a healthy dose of scepticism. Notice the word cited. These figures record what employers say, not necessarily what's actually happening. As one labour economist put it, a company can say AI is why it's making layoffs, but that doesn't mean it's the real reason. Some analysts have even coined a term for it: "AI-washing".  

And we've seen this film before. Business leaders would much rather blame an external event, like Brexit or Covid, than their own poor decisions when the bottom line is looking sorry for itself. AI is the perfect scapegoat. It's modern, it sounds inevitable, and "we're restructuring for an AI future" plays far better with shareholders than "we got it wrong."

So when your leadership team reaches for the AI explanation, ask the awkward question: which tasks, exactly, has AI taken over? Show me. Because if they can't, you may have a redundancy rationale that won't survive contact with your workforce, or an employment tribunal.

But what about closer to home? What about the UK and the island of Ireland?

Here, the evidence is anecdotal for now. But anecdotes are often the first drops through the wall. A senior employment lawyer at a large commercial firm in Belfast told me recently that she has just dealt with her first big AI redundancy. And a personal friend of mine has just been told that she and three colleagues are being let go from a healthcare company because of AI.

Not a tech start-up. Healthcare.

Two stories don't make a trend. But they do tell me that AI redundancy has moved from conference keynotes to kitchen tables. And remember, the law hasn't changed. A genuine redundancy situation, meaningful consultation, fair selection and proper consideration of alternative roles all still apply, whether the cause is a recession or a robot.

So where does that leave us?

Perhaps we've now entered the era many predicted. AI will augment most roles, but it will replace some too. The World Economic Forum has been telling us for some time that AI should ultimately create more work than it destroys. But the message underneath was always that the transition wouldn't be smooth. Jobs disappear quickly. New types of work take longer to emerge. In between, we may have to accept a period of higher unemployment, and that gap is where real people get hurt.

Which brings me to you, the HR profession. If the dam wall is beginning to break, HR cannot be standing downstream holding a clipboard, counting the casualties. We need to be the engineers on the wall. That means challenging the lazy narrative when AI is being used as cover for poor management, and being honest and rigorous when it genuinely is the cause. It means building workforce plans that look at tasks, not just job titles, so we can see which roles will be reshaped long before they're removed. It means investing in reskilling now, while there's still time, rather than writing redundancy letters later. And when people do have to go, it means treating them with the dignity, transparency and support they deserve. AI may well change what work gets done. But how organisations treat people through that change is still a human decision. And that, more than ever, is HR's job.

I'm Barry Phillips. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week.