AI Fired Them, Then Came Crawling Back. Now Workers Want More Money

Nearly one in five American workers has lived the same whiplash: replaced by AI, then asked to come back. SHL's new survey, fielded in June and July, found 19.1% of U.S. respondents said they had personally been replaced by AI and were subsequently asked to return to their jobs. Across the U.S. and U.K. combined, that figure hit 16%.

The returnees aren't being shy about their terms. According to SHL, 51% want a substantial pay increase before agreeing to return, 42% are demanding written guarantees about future job security, and 40% want transparency about how AI will be used in their roles. SHL calls the phenomenon AI rebounding, and Lucy Beaumont, the firm's global senior vice president of product and design, said companies are automating roles before assessing the human capability inside them. The AI underdelivers, she said, and the business ends up rehiring the same experts it just cut, at a far greater cost.

Real companies are already in that spot. Klarna leaned hard on AI chatbots for customer service, then started recruiting human reps again — CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted the company went too far, per Bloomberg. A Klarna spokesperson told Fortune the human agents were needed for complex, sensitive cases, with the company directly hiring a small number of high-skilled people to find where the human touch matters most. Ford, meanwhile, hired and promoted 350 experienced engineers in June after its AI-powered quality control tools fell short, saying the tech matters but works best alongside deep technical expertise. Representing the automaker, a spokesperson put it plainly: these engineers carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.

A July survey from Robert Half backs the pattern. Among U.S. hiring managers whose organizations eliminated roles because of AI, 32% later had to reinstate the same or similar positions. Of those, 40% blamed institutional knowledge AI couldn't replace, 39% cited relationship management, 39% pointed to rising business demand, and 38% said the jobs needed more human oversight and quality control than expected.

The layoff side of the ledger is still swelling. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted AI as a factor in 121,401 announced job cuts through October, more than double the 54,836 announced layoff plans recorded for all of 2025. Younger workers are taking the hardest hit — a Stanford Digital Economy Lab study found employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations sitting 19% below where it would be if it had grown at the same pace as their less-exposed peers. SHL did find one sliver of good news there: 24% of respondents aged 18 to 24 said they'd been replaced by AI and asked to return, above the 19.1% national figure.