Companies fired their staff for AI. Now they want them back, on worse terms.

Nearly one in five U.S. workers surveyed by talent firm SHL say they have been laid off due to AI and then asked to return, in what researchers are now calling "AI rebounding." In May 2026, employers cited AI as the primary reason for almost 40% of announced job cuts. By June and July, a meaningful slice of those same employers were phoning round asking if anyone fancied coming back.

The reason, it turns out, is that AI is more useful when a human is steering it, which is something that Harvard Business School's Joseph Fuller characterises carefully as needing "contextual intelligence." What he means is that the AI didn't know the customers, couldn't read a room, and had absolutely no idea where the difficult client file was kept.

The workers, having absorbed all of this, are not feeling especially conciliatory. Almost half want a significant pay rise to return. Forty-three percent want written job security guarantees. Thirty percent want a formal apology from leadership, which must be a bracing meeting to schedule.

Only 6.6% say they'd refuse to come back under any circumstances. The rest will return. But as SHL's Lucy Beaumont puts it, "You've really broken the trust with those people." Cheaper than the redundancy packages, perhaps. Costlier than anyone budgeted for.