Thought Leadership
By 2029, 30% of employees replaced by AI are expected to be rehired, often at a higher cost. Only 19% of companies have effective workforce planning in place.
By 2029, 30% of employees who were laid off and replaced by AI will be rehired, often at a higher cost. That is the forecast from market research firm Gartner. The reason is that many companies struggle to adapt workforce decisions to changing business needs. Gartner first published this prediction in September. At the Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, the company also introduced a new framework for strategic workforce planning.
Only 19% Have Effective Workforce Planning
According to a Gartner survey of 297 chief human resources officers conducted in July 2026, only 19% of companies have workforce planning processes that help executives understand how work is changing, account for the impact of AI, and align talent strategies with business objectives. Companies with effective workforce planning are 1.4 times more likely to exceed their revenue targets and 1.5 times more likely to meet their cost targets than their peers, Gartner reports.
Most companies take a bottom-up approach to workforce planning, starting with existing positions. Gartner’s new framework takes the opposite approach. It starts with corporate strategy and aligns workforce decisions with the work required to achieve strategic objectives.
AI Used as an Excuse for Restructuring
“Business and IT executives who use AI primarily as a tool for cost cutting risk making reductions that are too deep and too soon, affecting their ability to innovate their business model and compete in new markets as AI continues to mature. Instead, they should develop a ‘talent remix’ strategy that uses AI to reshape roles and redirect workers from less productive work, to new opportunities.”
Tori Paulman, VP Analyst at Gartner
Her team analyzed more than one million layoffs from 2025. Job cuts driven by AI making individual employees so productive that fewer workers were needed accounted for less than 1% of the total. According to Gartner, 17% of AI-attributed layoffs in the first half of 2025 involved shifting resources away from unprofitable business areas toward new AI products. Paulman believes some of these cases amount to so-called AI washing, where AI is used to justify conventional restructuring measures.
Gartner recommends redeploying employees from low-productivity roles to new responsibilities rather than laying them off. According to another Gartner forecast, by 2027, 75% of companies that primarily turn AI-driven productivity gains into cost reductions will be overtaken by competitors that reinvest those gains in innovation and employee training.
(Editorial Team)
