Every year, large companies secretly rank employees and then yank the 10% or so they consider low performing. This is called rank and yank [1]. If your company has performance reviews and is ran by MBAs it almost certainly uses it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
The most important aspect of rank and yank is that it has to be done in secrecy. Your company will not tell you it is using it. Even your manager might not know this.
When rank and yank is not done in secrecy, employees react to it by hiring the most mediocre people they can, sabotaging/isolating strong performers, hiring to fire, forming peer review/code review mafias, avoiding helping others as much as possible, etc. Anything they can do to not land in the bottom 10%. This cannibalizes the company and an example is what Ballmer did to Microsoft.
Any person with a ChatGPT account can now ask it to analyze the "game" of rank and yank from the perspective of game theory and realize how dumb the whole idea is. The rational strategy for the employee is to destroy the company from within. But MBAs love it because it involves a made up statistical distribution.
The only truth about rank and yank is that it's a stupid idea that has impacted the careers of millions of hard working people around the world, while also impacting many families and their future. It has converted thousands of companies into horrible places to work filled with workplace psychopaths at the top.
MBAs are people who believe in the work of the person that kickstarted the decline of American manufacturing, Jack Welch. Jack Welch extracted record profits from GE for 20 years, but left it a hollowed-out "pile of shit" according to his successor. The worse part is that MBAs aspire to be like him and in the process have ruined the whole manufacturing industry.
So to pull off a rank and yank every year you need a scapegoat, and this year the scapegoat is AI. In previous years it has been the economy, or some other excuse. AI will naturally become the scapegoat for everything.
Have you ever wondered why your company is laying off people while having job postings for the same positions? Does it happen every year? Does it happen after performance reviews? Is it always around 10% of the workforce? Oof... that's a tough guess, I wonder what it might be!
AI is the perfect scapegoat because the company can claim they're using AI and boost their value somehow. But if AI could reduce your headcount by so much then your company, your business model, your processes, your intellectual property, etc. have no intrinsic value anyways and the correct interpretation of the situation is that everyone should divest and make the share price go to zero.