Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 26th February 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts.
A few months ago, a friend forwarded me his layoff note. Nothing dramatic, no scandal, no anger. Just a polished message from leadership that tried to sound calm while telling hundreds of people their lives were about to get messy.
One line stuck out because I have seen it everywhere lately: "As we integrate AI..."
That phrase is starting to do a lot of work. It shows up in press releases, earnings calls, and LinkedIn posts written in the same soothing tone. It shows up right before the cut. It turns a decision made by people into something that sounds like weather.
Sometimes AI really is changing how work gets done. Plenty of teams are shipping more with fewer people. Tasks are getting automated. Managers are finally asking questions they avoided for years: what can we remove, what can we compress, what can we stop doing.
But there is another pattern hiding in plain sight. A lot of companies are using "AI" as an alibi for layoffs they were going to do anyway. Sam Altman said it bluntly recently, and he is right. What matters is not whether a model can draft an email or summarize a ticket. What matters is how quickly leaders learned that AI makes layoffs sound inevitable.
A normal layoff has fingerprints. A forecast missed. A bet failed. A team grew too fast. A product stalled. A margin target tightened. Somebody chose a plan and signed it.
"AI-driven" language tries to wipe those fingerprints off the glass. It lets leadership speak as if the choice arrived from outside the building. And once the story is framed that way, the moral weight gets lighter. Nobody has to say "we chose". The machine becomes the author.
I do not think this is mainly a communications trick. It is a shift in how power talks.
When leaders blame AI, they are speaking to three audiences at once. Investors hear discipline and modernity. The public hears inevitability. The people who stay hear a warning: do not ask too many questions, because this is what progress looks like.
That last part is the real damage.
For decades, the deal at work was flawed but readable. You gave time, effort, and attention. The company gave money, some stability, and a story that made the exchange feel fair. The story mattered more than we admit. It helped people tolerate imperfect bosses, confusing priorities, and weeks that blurred into months.
AI-washing chips away at that story. It says: do not expect fairness, because you are not negotiating with management anymore. You are negotiating with "progress". Progress does not owe you an explanation. Progress does not feel guilt. Progress does not have to answer follow-up questions.
Once a company sells a layoff as progress, anyone asking for details starts sounding like a holdout. That is the point of the framing. It turns accountability into a vibe problem.
Now let me be fair. AI is real. Work is being reshaped. Some roles will shrink. Some work will not come back after attrition. A few companies are serious about rebuilding workflows around automation.
But a lot of what gets labeled "AI displacement" right now is something older wearing a new costume.
Overhiring corrections. Cuts to protect margins. Offshoring. Layer removal. Backfill freezes that quietly become permanent.
In many of these cases, the work does not vanish. It moves. It moves onto fewer people. It moves into contractors. It moves into longer days. Then leadership points at AI because AI sounds like strategy, while cost cutting sounds like panic.
So here is a simple way to tell the difference, without needing inside access.
When AI really replaces work, you can usually see it without believing a speech. Something concrete changes. A workflow runs end to end. Cycle time drops. Customers notice the product behaving differently.
When AI is mostly cover, nothing concrete improves. Headcount shrinks, but the work does not. Timelines do not get shorter, they just get tighter. People call it "efficiency" while the same roadmap gets carried by fewer shoulders.
This is why AI-washing hurts even if you keep your job. It protects bad decisions from scrutiny. A company spends heavily on AI, then the next quarter arrives and leadership wants a story of fast returns. "AI" is the cleanest story available. It makes cost cuts look like strategy, and it lets leaders skip the hardest sentence in business: "we got this wrong".
So here is the thought i want to leave you with. AI-washing is not mainly about robots taking jobs. It is about leaders taking cover.
The next time you see that line, do not treat it like fate. Ask what it is hiding.
"As we integrate AI..." is in most cases just AI washing.
What decision is being hidden inside that sentence? Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.