Nearly one in five U.S. workers surveyed say they were asked back after AI cuts

An invitation back is not necessarily a return to the old terms. Nearly one in five U.S. respondents in an SHL-commissioned survey said they had been laid off or replaced by AI, then asked to return. The findings, detailed by CNBC on October 30, also show workers seeking better pay and stronger assurances before coming back.

From cutting jobs to asking workers back

The backdrop is a year of substantial AI-attributed cuts. Employers cited AI as the primary reason for almost 40% of job cuts announced in May 2026, according to a Challenger, Gray & Christmas report cited by CNBC. That measures employers’ stated reasons for announced cuts, rather than independently establishing what AI could replace.

SHL, a talent acquisition and management company, commissioned Propeller Insights to survey more than 1,000 U.S. workers and more than 1,000 U.K. workers between June and July 2026. CNBC gives a reported margin of error of 5%. The nearly one-in-five finding concerns U.S. respondents, not the combined sample.

Those responses describe workers’ experiences of losing a role and receiving an invitation back. They do not, by themselves, count completed rehires. Earlier employer-side research points to reversals too: a March Orgvue report found that 32% of organizations that had let workers go because of AI had needed to rehire staff. The two figures measure different groups and different outcomes.

Lucy Beaumont, SHL’s global senior vice president of product and design, interprets the findings as evidence that companies cut human staff too quickly. Harvard Business School professor of management practice Joseph Fuller describes a budgeting problem: employers can treat AI like previous software deployments, funding the technology through layoffs. But its usefulness, he argues, depends on workers’ knowledge of the business and its processes.

The more you know about important processes, the more value you can extract from the AI.

Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, speaking to CNBC

An offer back comes with conditions

An outright refusal was uncommon in the survey: only 6.6% of U.S. respondents said they would reject returning under all circumstances. But openness is not unconditional acceptance. SHL’s findings on returning workers’ demands span compensation, protection against another cut, information about AI and acknowledgment of what happened:

• Almost half of surveyed U.S. workers would require a significant pay increase to return.
• 43% would want written guarantees of job security.
• 40% would require full transparency about how AI would be used in their role.
• 30% considered an apology or acknowledgment from leadership a key condition of returning.

These are stated conditions among surveyed U.S. workers, not evidence that employers have agreed to them. Beaumont says the underlying demand is reassurance that the same thing will not happen again. She also warns that rehiring alone cannot repair trust: a layoff changes the relationship, and returning employees may not bring the same engagement or productivity.

Preparing for the next staffing decision

Workers are also reporting efforts to adapt. Among U.S. respondents, 44% said they were teaching themselves AI tools, while 42.6% were developing industry-specific skills that AI could not easily replicate. Another 40% were working on interpersonal and leadership skills, and 38% on creative and strategic thinking.

Fuller expects continuing changes to staffing as AI advances, and urges workers to practice using it. Beaumont’s prescription puts responsibility on employers too: identify training needs, new opportunities and routes into other internal roles. Her argument is that successful organizations will use AI to improve their work, rather than treating cost cutting as the sole objective.