Key Points:

1. AI achieves its greatest potential not by replacing humans, but by augmenting and enhancing human capabilities

2. Mass layoffs tied to AI adoption risk damaging reputation, innovation capacity, resilience, and ethical oversight

3. Organizations that prioritize human-AI collaboration—through hybrid workflows, upskilling, and governance—position themselves for long-term success

Duolingo, the world’s leading language-learning app, is getting rid of their contract employees and replacing them all with AI. Any human worker that wrote lessons or innovated ways to translate phrases from one language to another are being let go. This news comes on the heels of Duolingo letting go of 10 percent of its workforce last year.

Terminating employees and replacing them with AI is not new. Shopify, Expedia, and Cars24 are but a few examples of dozens of large organizations around the world following suit.

The reasons? There are a few and they are not unusual. For someone it’s about an “AI-first strategy”—to prioritize technology as a driving force for completing daily tasks. For others, it’s about cost reduction, streamlining operations, automating innovation and marketing, and so forth.

For many readers and especially us here at VS, these stories are unsettling. They are harbingers of what so many workers fear: that AI may eventually replace us.

However, beneath the surface of these stories are important lessons—about the myths we tell ourselves about AI, about the real value of humans, and the long-term consequences organizations face when they idealize technology to the extent that it removes people from the equation of work.

Busting the “AI Will Replace Everyone” Myth

Let’s begin where most of these media stories stop. The assumption that AI is here to “replace” workers is a misunderstanding of what AI can actually do and what value it provides.

In fact, AI significantly boosts productivity and creativity up to 40 percent, providing that AI is paired with skilled human workers. Simply put, productivity gains do not come when AI eliminates the human role. Rather, they come when AI enhances human capacity, for example, by reducing manual data entry, accelerating review processes, and freeing people up to focus on complex problem-solving, creative design, or interpersonal work.

The lesson here is simple. AI does not need to be about mass replacement because it is evidently about reshaping roles, tasks, and collaborations in ways that empower, and not replace, people.

Organizations are at Risk when they Overlook the Value of Humans

Here’s where the cases of employers replacing workers with AI really gets interesting.

While companies like Duolingo and Expedia frame their layoffs as part of their strategic shift to AI tools, a closer look raises some important questions:

What institutional knowledge was lost when long-term people were cut?

What nuances in language, culture, and humour went out the door with those workers?

What risks do these companies now face when AI-generated outputs are misaligned with user expectations?

One thing AI does not have is lived experience. It cannot speak from personal context because it has none. AI merely mimics patterns in data. When it does so without careful human review–—that important Human-in-the-Loop— it outputs errors, biases, or tone-deaf missteps that can be extraordinarily costly to clean up financially, reputationally, and legally.

Moreover, humans are simply better suited for complex tasks that require real-time adaptation to rapidly emerging changes. As David De Cremer and Garry Kaparov eloquently put in their co-authored article with the Harvard Business Review:

“Contrary to AI abilities that are only responsive to the data available, humans have the ability to imagine, anticipate, feel, and judge changing situations, which allows them to shift from short-term to long-term concerns. These abilities are unique to humans and do not require a steady flow of externally provided data to work as is the case with artificial intelligence.”

Essentially, short-term gains in efficiency not only seed long-term structural vulnerabilities, but they also place organizations at risk of permanently losing critical capabilities that only humans can provide.

The Hidden Value of Keeping People

Organizations that embrace a human-centric AI approach tap into some things that are profoundly valuable. Let’s look at a few of them:

1. Embedded institutional memory. Seasoned employees know the why, not just the what.

   
   

2. Cultural fluency. People bring deep cultural awareness and ethical discernment to decisions.

   
   

3. Creative adaptability. When AI encounters novel problems, humans are the ones who figure out how to pivot, adapt, and respond.

   
   

4. Critical self-reflection. People are better at determining when issues need to be escalated. Whereas AI models can drift overtime and become worse at detecting and solving critical issues, people remember from experience what is expected of them in high-stakes scenarios.

   
   

As Christina Catenacci recently summarized in her review of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s “The Future of Jobs” report, companies that retain, retrain, and reposition human workers alongside AI adoption outperform competitors on innovation, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty.

The Consequences of Getting It Wrong

Employers who misread the AI landscape and pursue mass terminations under the illusion that AI can simply replace people, several risks emerge.

First, is reputational fallout. Customers and clients increasingly value ethical, human-centered brands. High-profile layoffs tied to AI sparks backlash and can truly risk tarnishing a company’s public image.

Second, is loss of resilience. Hollowed-out workforces are brittle. Without internal talent, companies become overdependent on external vendors or off-the-shelf solutions, making them less adaptable in fast-changing markets. This, of course, leads to reduced quality of products and services—clients will notice.

Third, are innovation slowdowns. While AI can efficiently handles certain tasks such as generating images, it truly struggles with ambiguity. Without people who understand edge cases, novel demands, or cultural shifts, companies are at significant risk of losing their innovative edge.

Lastly, is increased risk. AI systems are only as strong as the oversight and governance structures around them. Layoffs often undercut those ever-important human guardrails, increasing the odds of ethical missteps, legal violations, or data breaches.

What Should Employers Do Instead of Replacing People with AI?

Instead of treating AI as a magic bullet for growth, forward-looking organizations should approach AI as a multiplier— as something that augments the capacity, creativity, and performance of humans.

Here’s a few ideas business leaders can consider:

1. Invest in upskilling and reskilling. As AI takes over routine tasks, workers need new training to focus on higher-value tasks; in this way, workers can be challenged with higher-level and more complete roles. Prioritize making your people AI literate and ready to embrace a culture of AI-supported growth.

   
   

2. Design hybrid workflows. Map out use cases and the subsequent critical operational business processes that might benefit most from human-AI collaboration rather than one-sided automation. Remember, Human-in-the-Loop is crucial for any AI to work.

   
   

3. Build a governance framework. Ensure AI deployments have human checkpoints, clear accountability, and robust compliance safeguards. AI is considered to be human-centric when people are supported and guided in how they use AI. It is important to point out that this is exactly what AI governance frameworks do.

   
   

4. Communicate transparently with employees. People are more willing to embrace AI when they understand how it supports their work, not threatens it. That is, employees are more willing to accept AI if employers are open, honest, and communicate regularly about AI usage in the organization.

   
   

AI’s Power is Human-Centric

The stories we began with may seem like a sign of things to come, but it’s just one chapter in a much larger story.

The deeper truth is that AI is merely a tool. It is not a replacement. Its most powerful applications are those where humans and machines collaborate side by side, amplifying each other’s strengths and compensating for each other’s weaknesses.