Silent layoffs are trending as AI takes over corporate America

In early 2024, a mid-level product manager at a San Francisco fintech startup logged into Slack and noticed something strange. Several team members, people she’d worked with daily had vanished from the company directory. No farewell messages. No calendar invites for exit interviews. Just… gone. Later that day, she learned that more than a third of the operations and customer support teams had been let go in a sudden internal restructuring. But there was no mention of layoffs in the next all-hands meeting—only a vague reference to “efficiency through AI.” In place of the humans? A freshly integrated backend system powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 API, quietly rolled out just weeks earlier. This scene, once jarring, is becoming routine across corporate America. Quietly and without