Hello,
I've been staring at this email for an hour because I don't know how to write what I want to say without sounding like I'm trying to scare you. I'm not. But I read something this week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about, and I think I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't share it.
108,435 layoffs were announced in January 2026. That's the highest January since 2009. Since the financial crisis.
Only 5,306 new hires were announced in the same month. The lowest January since records began. For every one person hired, twenty were let go.
Amazon cut 16,000 jobs. UPS cut 30,000. Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, cut 40% of its entire workforce. Their CEO wrote in a shareholder letter that AI means a smaller team can now do what a bigger team used to do. Then he let 4,000 people go.
7,624 of those January layoffs were officially labelled "AI cuts." That's just the ones companies were willing to say out loud.
Three of my closest friends are out of work right now, and all three of them told me the same thing: "I didn't see it coming." And I think a lot of people reading this feel safe in a way that might not last as long as they think.
What I Think Is Actually Happening
The economy is growing. Profits are up. GDP is up. And layoffs are at a 17-year high. Those two things aren't supposed to happen at the same time. But they are. Because companies have figured out they can make the same money, sometimes more, with fewer people. And AI is how.
This isn't the sci-fi version of AI replacing jobs. Nobody's being replaced by a robot. What's happening is quieter than that. It's a team of ten becoming a team of seven because the other three were doing work that software now handles. It's a company that used to hire for a role, deciding not to fill it because they've built a workflow that doesn't need it anymore.
The people getting cut aren't bad at their jobs. Most of them are good at their jobs. But being good at your job isn't enough anymore if someone else is good at their job AND using AI to do it twice as fast.
That's the shift. Not "AI is coming for your job." It's "the person next to you learned AI, and now the company needs one of you instead of two."
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
A few years ago, I was sitting in a corporate job, thinking I was safe. Seventeen years in finance. I knew my stuff. I was good at what I did. And I thought that was enough. It wasn't, but I was lucky because I chose to leave before the ground shifted. A lot of people won't get that choice.
And that's the part that keeps coming back to me. Not the 108,000 number. The fact that every single one of those people went to work the week before, thinking they'd be going back the week after. Nobody gets an email saying, "in six months, we're going to replace your role with software, thought you should know." It just happens. And then you're sat at your kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon updating a CV you haven't touched in four years, wondering how you got here.
The difference is simple, and it's uncomfortable. The people who kept their jobs knew how to use AI to do their work faster. The people who lost them didn't. That's it. There's no deeper lesson. There's no inspirational way to frame it. It's just the truth, and it's happening right now, to real people, who were just as qualified the day they got let go as they were the day before.
I did this the hard way. I tested every tool going, wasted months on ones that did nothing, and slowly figured out that the answer wasn't more tools, it was fewer. Two. ChatGPT and Claude. That's what actually works.
I run a 6-week cohort called AI, Done Properly, starting March 23rd. Small group, max 15 people, I work with everyone individually on their actual role. Two tools, not a hundred. A system, not a tutorial. Find more details here, or reply to this email with any questions. https://configurai.com/
Thanks for reading,
See you next Tuseday with more ways to use AI without losing your mind (or your credibility).
Orgesa Meli
P.S. If someone you know lost their job recently or is worried about what's coming, forward this to them. Sometimes just seeing the numbers clearly is enough to make someone act.
