{"id":202,"date":"2026-07-28T02:27:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T02:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/?p=202"},"modified":"2026-08-02T19:02:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T19:02:23","slug":"early-signs-of-rehiring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/early-signs-of-rehiring\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Signs of Rehiring"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A short update to an earlier post<\/a> on the AI jobs debate.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks ago I argued that the AI jobs debate was asking the wrong question. My point was that the layoffs of the past year were mostly a bet, not a result. Companies were cutting in anticipation of what AI would let them do, ahead of the implementation that would justify the cut. Cut first, capture the savings later, and hope the two line up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wall Street Journal reported this week<\/a> that, for a lot of large employers, they did not line up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the article says<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Big companies are hiring again. The Journal reports that employers from CSX to Alphabet told investors in recent days that they plan to add people, a reversal after eighteen months of treating hiring as a last resort. The CEO of the HR platform Lattice said many companies stopped hiring junior staff on the assumption that AI agents would cover the work, then realized humans are still needed to work alongside the tools. Her line: having coding agents does not mean you stop hiring engineers, and AI sales agents still need salespeople.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Separately, initial jobless claims fell to 187,000 for the week ending July 18, the lowest level since September 1969. I checked that against the Labor Department figures, and it holds across Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNN. The year opened with predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse. It is currently producing the fewest unemployment filings in nearly sixty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why this fits my argument<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What the reporting confirms is the narrow prediction. Cutting on anticipation, ahead of what the technology could actually deliver, was premature, and some of it is now being unwound. The rehiring is the anticipation bet reversing. When the country’s largest employers cut on the theory that agents would absorb the work, then hire back because the agents did not, that is a story about companies acting on a capability that was not there yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the reporting does not confirm is my deeper claim. My argument was that the real constraint is coordination, the cost of making capable systems work together and with the people around them. The Journal says companies are hiring because of cost, limitation, and uncertainty. It does not say they are hiring because their AI deployments fell apart at the seams. So take this as evidence that the premature-cut prediction was right, and as an open question on the coordination claim, which is the one still worth watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two caveats on the numbers. Economists describe this as a low-hire, low-fire market: layoffs are low, but hiring is soft too, and June’s dip in the unemployment rate owed partly to a shrinking workforce rather than a boom. And a single week of claims data is noisy, prone to summer seasonal swings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The line that spoke the truth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The MIT labor economist Paul Osterman gave the Journal the most honest sentence in the piece. Asked whether companies need more people or fewer, he said no one has any idea. That uncertainty is the actual state of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The jobs question was never how many humans the machines replace. It was whether an organization understands its own work well enough to know what it can safely hand off. Several did not, so they guessed, and some are now hiring back the people they let go. That is a coherence story, and it is the one I will keep following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This argument runs through my book, Coherence<\/a>, arriving this Fall. If you want to follow the thinking as it develops, join the list at coherise.com<\/a>. The one-page decision tool from the book is the first thing I send.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A short update to an earlier post on the AI jobs debate. A few weeks ago I argued that the AI jobs debate was asking the wrong question. My point was that the layoffs of the past year were mostly a bet, not a result. Companies were cutting in anticipation of what AI would let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-argument"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coherise.com\/ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}