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2025: the year of rehiring humans after AI fails
It’s not so easy to replace humans with AI, it would seem.
The rise of AI, in particular agents, has naturally led to concerns about job losses. But swapping out humans for bots isn’t as simple as it may seem to the C-suite. After all, AI agents remain a very new technology, and we humans have all sorts of benefits that executives may not realise.
But research suggests that 55% of companies regret AI redundancies, saying it turned out to be the wrong decision.
And that means hiring back humans to replace AI may well be 2025’s hottest trend – for business tech, at least.
Gartner: forget cutting jobs with AI
Analyst house Gartner has predicted that half of companies that had expected to slash their customer service workforce using AI will abandon those plans by 2027.
Instead, a Gartner survey from earlier this month showed that 95% of customer service leaders will keep human agents around to help “strategically define AI’s role”, rather than mass fire everyone and force customers to chat with AI.
“While AI offers significant potential to transform customer service, it is not a panacea,” said Kathy Ross, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice.
“The human touch remains irreplaceable in many interactions, and organizations must balance technology with human empathy and understanding.”
She added: “A hybrid approach, where AI and human agents work in tandem, is the most effective strategy for delivering exceptional customer experiences.”
Hiring back humans
Consider Klarna. The Swedish pay-in-three-installments company used AI to cut back its customer service department, saying its AI chatbots would handle it instead. It later announced plans to reduce headcount across the company using AI and even froze hiring for a year. Now, Klarna is on a hiring spree – of the human kind.
CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski once expressed hopes to be OpenAI’s favourite guinea pig. This year, amid a rehiring effort, he said: “As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organising this, what you end up having is lower quality… Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
Language app Duolingo was similarly enthusiastic about AI, with CEO Luis von Ahn saying the company would replace contract workers with AI and only hire new employees if a team finds it can’t automate more of its work.
A week later, he walked that back saying he does “not see AI as replacing what our employees do – we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before”.
2025: the year of AI agents?
So much for 2025 being “the year when AI agents will work”, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted.
A handful of companies rolling back such efforts may not constitute a backlash, but Gartner says 2025’s latest trend is rehiring humans to replace AI, but we should also expect to hear a lot about the “hybrid approach” and “AI/Human collaboration.”
In other words, AI agents are here, but we still need humans to get work done. It’s nice that bosses are learning that lesson, but remember that to get rehired you still have to get fired first – it’s safe to expect more CEOs will choose to learn this the hard way, just like Klarna’s Siemiatkowski and Duolingo’s von Ahn.
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