By Elena Vasquez

19.1% of U.S. respondents said an employer had replaced them with AI and later asked them to return, according to talent assessment firm SHL’s June-and-July survey.

Across the U.S. and U.K., 16% of respondents reported the same reversal. SHL calls the pattern “AI rebounding,” which the firm views as an early indication that some companies are discovering the limits of replacing human employees with AI.

What does AI rebounding reveal?

Lucy Beaumont, global senior vice president of product and design at SHL, said in a press release: “Organizations are making fast, sometimes myopic, decisions about their people based on an incomplete picture of what their employees can do with or without AI.”

Beaumont said AI rebounding occurs when a company automates a role before assessing its human capability; when the system fails, the gap becomes obvious and the business rehires the experts it released at greater cost.

What do returning workers demand?

SHL found three conditions for a return:

• Among returnees, 51% wanted a substantial pay increase before agreeing to return, SHL found.
• 42% of returnees said they would require written guarantees about future job security.
• 40% wanted transparency about how AI would be used in their positions, according to SHL.

Why do employers restore eliminated roles?

A July Robert Half survey found that 32% of U.S. hiring managers at organizations that eliminated positions because of AI later reinstated the same or similar roles.

Within that group, Robert Half respondents identified several operational limits:

• 40% said the positions required institutional knowledge or context that AI could not replace.
• 39% cited relationship management as necessary to the role.
• 39% pointed to increased business demand.
• 38% said the positions required more human oversight and quality control than expected.

Which employers have restored human roles?

Klarna began recruiting human customer service representatives after relying heavily on AI chatbots. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski acknowledged that the company had gone too far in its reliance on automation, according to Bloomberg.

A Klarna spokesperson told Fortune that human agents were needed for complex, sensitive cases. The company began directly hiring a small number of high-skilled people into customer service to identify where the human touch could add the most value for customers.

Ford hired and promoted 350 experienced engineers in June after AI-powered quality-control tools failed to perform as expected. The automaker said AI contributed to quality improvements but required experienced engineering teams alongside it.

A Ford representative previously told Fortune: “These engineers carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.” The company said pairing AI with deep technical expertise remained necessary to deliver quality gains.

Is AI still driving job cuts?

Despite the reversals, the number of employers citing AI as a reason for workforce reductions grew substantially, Challenger, Gray & Christmas data showed.

Challenger counted 121,401 announced job cuts through October that cited AI, more than double the 54,836 layoff plans announced for all of 2025.

Younger workers face sharper exposure. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab found employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations highly exposed to AI was 19% below where it would have been had it grown at the same pace as employment among less-exposed peers.

SHL found a higher reversal rate among the youngest workers. Among respondents aged 18 to 24, 24% said they had been replaced by AI and later asked to return, compared with 19.1% of U.S. respondents overall.

The pattern leaves employers with a measurable cost: automate roles, test the technology, then restore the human capability the systems proved unable to replace.