In May, Syndio — a workplace-pay analytics company whose software helps large employers analyze and close pay gaps — eliminated a number of roles as part of a company redesign. One of the people let go was Jonathan Vidales, a labor economist who had been with the company for five years. Around the same time, other jobs were redefined, and those employees were asked to take on more responsibility and a quota. The assumption, Fortune contributor Maria Colacurcio — who co-founded Syndio and serves as its CEO — recounts in a commentary republished from her Pay Dirt Substack, was that no one would blink: these were leaner times, jobs were harder to come by, and the pendulum had shifted back toward employers. Staying in a beefed-up role with higher earning potential seemed like a no-brainer.

The assumption was wrong. Within a few months, several of the people the company had expected to keep resigned. "Suddenly, in our push to be more efficient in the age of AI, we lost some of the very talent we needed," Colacurcio writes.

There was good news as well: Vidales came back. In August, he applied for one of Syndio's newly opened roles, and the company rehired him — a "boomerang" hire, in HR parlance, the term for an employee who returns to a former employer. On a Zoom call, he told Colacurcio sheepishly that coming back felt like "sneaking back in the house after I got kicked out."

That was a gut punch, she writes — and the next part was worse. When the company reactivated his account, Vidales said, he found its cold, corporate restructuring announcement still sitting in his inbox. What struck him was how impersonal it felt. "In my mind, we were announcing a restructuring," Colacurcio writes. "In his, people he knew and worked alongside had just lost their jobs." Why, she asks, couldn't the company have simply acknowledged them — "and said something kind about the people who were leaving?"

A broader wave of AI-driven cuts

Colacurcio frames the episode against a backdrop in which every CEO feels they have to move faster, get leaner, and reorganize completely around AI — a climate, she argues, in which it is easy to undervalue the people a company already has.

AI-attributed cuts peaked in May, when US employers announced 97,000 job cuts and blamed 40% of them on AI — the third straight month AI topped the list of cited reasons. Zillow cut more than 500 people earlier this month, with the announcement made the day before earnings, according to executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

"The AI excuse is getting old," Colacurcio writes. Former Lululemon executive Julie Averill, in a New York Times piece earlier this month, described leaders who believe a problem can be fixed by waving AI at it ("AI wishing") — or who blame AI for job cuts ("AI washing"), crediting efficiency that doesn't exist yet. Companies, Colacurcio writes, are imagining what AI might make possible and making moves before fully understanding how to get there.

Three in 10 employers eliminated positions after implementing AI, only to later add those roles back, according to an April 2026 study by global staffing firm Robert Half — a pattern that makes Syndio's August rehiring less an outlier than one instance of a wider reconsideration.

What Syndio learned

Colacurcio is not arguing that companies shouldn't change — "that's not the lesson," she writes. Syndio itself had to change, shifting from more of a pure software consultancy to becoming an AI-centric technology company. Advisory work remains an important part of what the company does, but the center of gravity shifted; new priorities required new roles and, inevitably, some restructuring. What she learned, she writes, is the danger of chasing the Next Big Business Model before fully understanding whether the skills, experience, and institutional knowledge a company already has can evolve with it.

Against the market refrain that "knowledge work is becoming irrelevant in the age of AI," Colacurcio has come to believe almost the opposite: AI can make experienced people even more valuable, if they are given the right tools to adapt. Roles can evolve, and skills can be rebuilt — but that requires leaders to invest in training and create a path for people to make that transition. "And as leaders, that's on us."

The bottom line, in her words: "People aren't interchangeable parts." Institutional knowledge, trust, relationships, and expertise all take time to build, and sometimes their value isn't fully understood until they are gone.

She shares the story of Jonathan, she writes, because it is ultimately a story of second chances — an employee taking another chance on a company, and a company taking another look at what it values. It is also about reinvention. "As leaders, we spend so much time looking forward that we forget the value of also looking back, and questioning the decisions we made along the way."

It's okay to change your mind, she concludes — to reinvent yourself, your company, your team, your leadership style. "Sometimes moving forward means admitting you got something wrong — and getting a second chance to make it right."

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The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This is a repost of Pay Dirt, the Substack by Fortune contributor Maria Colacurcio about compensation, AI, and the systems we choose to build. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.