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The AI Boomerang Is About To Hit Hard

5 min readJun 21, 2026

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I, along with many others, have been yelling from the sidelines that AI can’t replace jobs for a while now. They cost too much, are far too inaccurate to be genuinely autonomous (given that they aren’t actually intelligent), and don’t increase productivity in a way that threatens human labour on any meaningful scale. Well, it turns out the people who have been almost pervertedly pushing for AI to eradicate human workers have only just discovered the truth and are now rapidly U-turning on this ‘revolutionary’ technology. Who would have guessed?

There is a lot of evidence out there that the corporate world is rapidly bailing on AI.

Forrester Research found that 55% of employers who laid off workers because of AI now regret that decision. OrgVue found something almost identical, with 55% of business leaders admitting they made the wrong call eliminating jobs and replacing them with AI. Earlier this year, Gartner predicted that half of all companies that replaced customer service or operational employees with AI will be forced to restaff those roles. Sinch, a cloud communications company, surveyed 2,500 AI decision-makers across multiple industries and countries and found that AI customer communications agents have a 74% rollback or shutdown rate. Customer communications was once considered…

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Will Lockett
Will Lockett

Written by Will Lockett

Independent journalist covering global politics, climate change and technology. Get articles early at www.planetearthandbeyond.co