Complaints from frustrated customers have prompted e-commerce and financial technology companies to quietly rehire some content writers, software engineers and customer service workers they had replaced with AI bots.
Brands such as IBM, Salesforce, Google and Meta have added undisclosed numbers of workers in redefined roles since late last year to help steer their generative artificial intelligence services.
Job listings for marketers, copywriters, content moderators and human resources administrators have also seen a partial revival as employers restaff in some previously eliminated roles.
“Some organizations moved quickly from ‘AI can assist this work’ to ‘AI can replace this work,’ and they are now recalibrating as they better understand where humans still add critical value,” said Jessica Smith, a Texas-based consultant and former human resources officer at Meta and Amazon.
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Because AI-related layoffs are usually embedded in broader restructuring and productivity changes, there is no reliable national count of workers replaced by chatbots who later regained their jobs.
Nevertheless, Gartner, a leading business technology advisory firm, projects that half of all companies that cut jobs for AI-related reasons will rehire people for similar roles by next year.
“Some firms got ahead of themselves,” said Scott Beaulier, an economist and dean of business at the University of Wyoming. “The reality is that many tasks still require judgment, escalation, quality control, and human interaction.”
While some firms have reacquired former employees to retrain, others have recalibrated and reposted jobs to find workers better trained to refine their public-facing AI programs.
Lacey Kaelani, CEO of Metaintro, said her New York City-based job search engine has tracked a surge in companies reposting junior-level jobs that resemble roles they eliminated 6 to 12 months ago.
“Customers know when content is really just AI slop and when they’re talking to a bot on the phone,” Ms. Kaelani said. “A lot of companies are suffering from a higher volume of customer dissatisfaction.”
Keith Spencer, a career expert at the employment search website FlexJobs, said layoffs over the past three years created “an empathy gap” by canning workers who understood complex customer requests.
“In some cases, organizations found that smaller teams struggled to maintain existing levels of quality, oversight, or customer responsiveness once those roles were eliminated,” Mr. Spencer said.
The Chicago consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas tracked nearly 55,000 job cuts directly attributed to AI in 2025. That’s 4.5% of the roughly 1.2 million layoffs nationwide.
On the rehiring side, the workforce development firm Careerminds reported in a survey last month that roughly a third of companies that conducted AI layoffs had rehired 25% to 50% of the roles they cut.
Another 35.6% rehired more than half of those fired because of AI, including one in three employers who spent more on restaffing than they saved from the layoffs.
“Instead of simply replacing people, it’s really about human-AI collaboration, and that has to be intentional and built in,” said Chris Willis, chief design officer at the Utah-based software company Domo.
Jason Leverant, president of the national staffing company AtWork, said companies have learned over the past year that AI hasn’t evolved far enough beyond routine tasks to handle situations requiring “human-to-human trust.”
“The idea of AI-based customer service is good from a management level, but, as a consumer, we hate it,” Mr. Leverant said.
Forrester Research, a leading technology research firm, recently estimated in its 2026 Future of Work report that 55% of employers regretted laying off workers for AI-related reasons.
As a result, several experts predict that successful companies will rely on smaller teams to work with AI on outward-facing services in the future, rather than eliminate entire departments.
“AI is more than up to the task,” said Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech, an AI-driven software company in Austin, Texas. “What these companies discovered is that they weren’t. They skipped the hard part.”
Most analysts agreed it would take more time for employers and workers to adapt to the new technology.
Huntr, a Seattle-based AI resume builder, found in a survey last year that 13% of job seekers reported losing jobs to AI, while another 7 in 10 thought the technology posed no threat to them.
“To me, this signals that we are unprepared for what is happening,” said Sam Wright, Huntr’s head of partnerships and operations.
