SHL: 19% of US workers displaced by AI asked back by employers
TL;DR
- SHL's June-July survey finds 19.1% of US workers displaced by AI have been asked back by former employers; 16% across the US and UK combined.
- Among returnees, 51% demanded substantial pay increases, 42% required written job-security guarantees, and 40% wanted transparency on AI use.
- A separate Robert Half poll found 32% of US hiring managers whose firms cut roles for AI later reinstated the same or similar positions.
Nearly one in five US workers displaced by AI has been asked back by their former employer, according to a June-July survey by workforce-assessment firm SHL and reported by Fortune. The figure is 19.1% in the US and 16% when UK respondents are included; among workers aged 18 to 24, it climbs to 24%.
Returnees are not coming back cheaply. SHL reports that 51% demanded substantial pay increases, 42% required written job-security guarantees, and 40% wanted transparency about how AI is used in their jobs. Lucy Beaumont, SHL's global senior vice president, framed the pattern as the aftermath of automation that ran ahead of any genuine assessment of what humans were actually doing.
A parallel Robert Half poll in July found 32% of US hiring managers whose organizations had cut roles for AI later reinstated the same or similar positions. Their reasons: 40% cited institutional knowledge AI lacked, 39% pointed to relationship management, 39% to recovering business demand, and 38% said the work needed more human oversight than anticipated.
Two named reversals sit around the survey data. Klarna, the Swedish buy-now, pay-later firm, began recruiting human customer service representatives after leaning too hard on AI chatbots, with a spokesperson saying humans were needed "for complex, sensitive cases." Ford hired and promoted 350 experienced engineers in June after AI-powered quality control fell short, saying: "These engineers carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design."
The reversals land against a rising cut count. Challenger, Gray & Christmas has tallied 121,401 AI-related announced job cuts through October 2026, more than double the 54,836 recorded for all of 2025. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab separately found employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations is running 19% below expected growth. The Fortune piece sits inside a dense run of AI-labor stories we track; 119 in the last 90 days have followed the same question from different angles.
Originally reported by fortune.com
Read the original article →Original headline: SHL Survey: 19.1% of US Workers Replaced by AI Have Been Asked Back to Their Old Jobs