The companies winning with AI are the ones not cutting jobs, says Palantir’s CTO. Here’s what they’re doing instead.
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Companies are feeling layoff remorse. 55% of employers that cut staff citing AI now regret those decisions, a sentiment that’s showing up across multiple studies. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar has seen it firsthand.
In a recent Stratechery interview, Sankar says “almost all” of the customers he’s worked with who wanted to use AI to cut headcount failed to even hit that goal. The ones pulling ahead? They’re leveraging AI to take on work that was previously too expensive or time-consuming. This is allowing smaller teams to punch above their weight:
Eve, an AI platform for plaintiff law firms, says it has enabled customers to double their capacity with minimal new headcount.
- Mithril Medicine, a one-person biotech, was recently acquired by Anthropic after founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to take a rare-disease treatment from idea to promising results in under 18 months.
- Cisco is giving a 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite the company’s legacy code, after the engineer pitched the project to president Jeetu Patel directly. The president’s response: “Go nuts.”
Doing more with less. This doesn’t mean the AI layoff wave is over: Microsoft just offered buyouts to 60,000 employees last week. But it’s a sign that sentiment may be starting to shift in boardrooms around the world.
This post was originally posted on Superhuman