This Week In AI Business: Beneath the AI Narrative Lies Structural Collapse [Week #46-2025]
The headline writes itself: “AI Drives Highest October Layoffs in 22 Years.” Technology companies eliminate thousands of positions. Amazon’s CEO warns AI will shrink the workforce. Over 31,000 October job cuts directly attributed to artificial intelligence. The story seems clear—automation is replacing workers at unprecedented speed.
But this narrative, while accurate on the surface, obscures what’s actually happening. The AI explanation functions as a convenient simplification of a far more complex structural crisis. Yes, AI is displacing jobs. But it’s doing so inside a collapsing institutional framework where the mechanisms that once synchronized the labor market—corporate planning systems, policy coherence, and educational preparation—have simultaneously lost function.
*For this analysis we used the data from Bloomberg, full source here.
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The weekly newsletter is in the spirit of what it means to be a Business Engineer:
We always want to ask three core questions:
What’s the shape of the underlying technology that connects the value prop to its product?
What’s the shape of the underlying business that connects the value prop to its distribution?
How does the business survive in the short term while adhering to its long-term vision through transitional business modeling and market dynamics?
These non-linear analyses aim to isolate the short-term buzz and noise, identify the signal, and ensure that the short-term and the long-term can be reconciled.