Read the headlines from late 2024 and 2025, and you’ll see a familiar story. A major tech company announces layoffs. 10,000 jobs cut. The press release cites a “strategic pivot to AI.” The CEO goes on TV and talks about automation, efficiency, and the brave new world of agentic workflows.
The stock price jumps. The narrative is set: Robots are replacing humans.
But if you look at the job boards in Bangalore, São Paulo, and Tashkent, you will see a very different story unfolding.
Those same companies that just fired 10,000 US-based employees are quietly opening thousands of requisitions in emerging markets. They aren’t replacing humans with AI. They are replacing expensive humans with more cost-effective humans.
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The AI Layoff Myth
Let’s look at the data. In October 2025 alone, the tech industry cut over 33,000 jobs, the highest monthly total since the post-COVID crash. The cited reason was almost overwhelmingly “AI adoption.”
But here is the catch: AI isn’t ready to take those jobs. A recent study on “Remote Labor” analyzed the performance of leading AI agents (including models from OpenAI and Anthropic) on real-world remote work tasks. The success rate? A staggering low of ~2.5%.
You cannot run a billion-dollar company on a 2.5% success rate. So, who is doing the work?
People. Just not people in San Francisco or New York.
The “AI Pivot” is often a PR-friendly cover for massive offshoring. It sounds much better to shareholders to say, “We are becoming an AI-first company” than to say, “We are moving 40% of our engineering to India to save on OpEx.”
The Boomerang Effect
This strategy is already backfiring. We are seeing a massive “Boomerang” effect in the market. Companies that cut too deep, believing the AI hype, are realizing that ChatGPT cannot debug legacy code, handle irate enterprise customers, or architect scalable microservices.
They are now scrambling to re-hire. But they can’t afford to hire back the US staff they just let go. So, they flood into the traditional offshore markets, India and Latin America.
The result? Chaos.
- India is Overheating: As we discussed, wage inflation and attrition in India are spiking as thousands of US companies try to hire simultaneously.
- Quality is Dropping: In the panic to “re-staff,” hiring standards are lowered. We are seeing a rise in “ghost employees” and dual-employment fraud in these saturated markets.
The Hidden Human Layer of AI
There is another layer to this irony. Even the companies that are successfully building AI products are finding that AI requires more humans, not fewer.
Who cleans the data? What team member labels the training sets? Who evaluates the model outputs (RLHF)? And someone has to write the Python scripts that glue the APIs together?
AI doesn’t eliminate the need for engineering. It shifts the need from “coding from scratch” to “integration and oversight.” It requires a higher level of technical competence to manage.
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The Better Way: Transparent Global Teams
If the goal is efficiency, let’s be honest about it. You don’t need to hide behind an AI narrative. You need a talent strategy that works.
Replacing a $200,000 US engineer with a “black box” AI that fails 97% of the time is suicide. Replacing them with a random freelancer in an overheated market like India is a gamble.
The strategic move is to find High-Performance Human Talent in markets that are stable, skilled, and cost-effective.
This is why Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan) is winning in this new reality.
- Real Engineering: You aren’t hiring “data labelers.” You are hiring Masters-level computer scientists who understand the math behind the AI.
- Stability: You avoid the chaotic churn of the “Boomerang” markets.
- Cost Efficiency: You achieve the OpEx reduction your CFO demands, without sacrificing the human intelligence your product needs.
The Verdict: AI is a tool, not a workforce. The companies that win in 2026 won’t be the ones with the best prompts. They will be the ones with the best humans leveraging those tools.
Don’t buy into the myth. Don’t fire your intelligence only to try and hire it back in a panic. Build a sustainable, high-quality team in Central Asia that can actually wield the power of AI with the help of Truss.
