[Getty Images Bank]
[Getty Images Bank]

Internal warning signs tend to emerge before companies that have adopted AI carry out mass layoffs, giving employees an early sense that restructuring is coming, according to a new analysis.

Blind, an anonymous workplace community app, analyzed the activity of 101,632 employees at 10 US companies that announced workforce reductions between May last year and August this year, and found five common behavioral shifts that preceded each layoff announcement.

About 12 weeks before an announcement, employees began discussing indirect signals of organizational change — the end of remote work, hiring freezes, welfare benefit cuts, cost reductions and performance-review pressure. During the same period, users logged on more frequently and spent more time on the service checking layoff-related news.

Around 10 weeks before an announcement, posts and comments from workers trying to determine whether they were on a layoff list increased. Searches for performance evaluations, ratings and job grades also picked up noticeably.

Searches for severance pay, compensation terms and which job levels were being targeted then jumped sharply.

Activity around job listings at other companies and internal referrals picked up in earnest about eight weeks before an announcement.

The share of posts mentioning both AI and employment tripled over the past year, with three-quarters of those mentions classified as negative in tone. Anxiety spread beyond the departments directly targeted by layoffs, cutting across job functions and experience levels.

Participation was particularly high among workers with three to seven years of experience, Blind said.

"Workers tend to sense the possibility of restructuring or layoffs early, but they typically don't start preparing to change jobs until an announcement is imminent," a Blind official said.

However, Blind cautioned that the detection of such signals does not necessarily mean a restructuring will follow, and that patterns can vary depending on each company's business conditions and management practices.

Blind, whose verified corporate membership spans 480,000 companies worldwide, operates a service that uses AI to analyze anonymous workplace conversation data and diagnose organizational risk at companies.


klee@heraldcorp.com