Business Insider reported on Wednesday that Amazon is reaching out to former employees, including workers it laid off, to fill AI and cloud roles as part of a “boomerang” hiring push. This isn’t an isolated case, according to a survey which AI-centric global digital transformation company GFT Technologies released today.
The study, which was conducted in August 2026, saw Wakefield Research ask CIOs and CTOs at $500M+ dollar companies all over the world about their feelings towards AI and its implementation in their workplaces.
An overwhelming majority of U.S. tech leaders reported feeling skeptical about the true reason for AI-related layoffs, with 93% of U.S. respondents claiming that some public companies cite AI to justify workforce changes that are primarily intended to boost their share price.
Many of the North American respondents also said that their companies had actually implemented similar course corrections to Amazon after layoffs, with 27% of them reporting that they had rehired employees that they had previously let go.
These rehires may be a result of the speedy and unsuccessful delegation of work previously assigned to employees to AI; 37% of North American respondents said that their organizations were now re-delegating the tasks that AI was meant to handle back to human employees, a sign that AI adoption hasn’t been the clean substitution for headcount that some layoff announcements initially suggested.
Rishi Chohan, CEO of GFT Technologies USA, believes that growing AI-related skepticism and the hasty redelegation of work back into human hands have a common ancestor: Chohan feels that many organizations embraced AI hastily, before the infrastructure, governance, and talent needed to make the pace of AI adoption sustainable were put in place
“U.S. technology leaders are carrying more pressure than most, over whether AI is delivering real value, workforce trust, and their own personal exposure if something goes wrong. With so much AI investment concentrated in the U.S., the resulting scrutiny makes it all the more important to recognize that the foundation underneath AI, from infrastructure and governance to the right talent, matters as much as the technology itself,” said Rishi Chohan, CEO, GFT USA.
Goldman Sachs estimates that AI investment in the U.S. will account for 1.9% of U.S. GDP in 2026, and a study by the Brookings Institution predicts that total investment in AI infrastructure, such as data centers, will reach $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032, which is equivalent to an annual average of 3.63% of U.S. GDP.
However, these enormous figures point to the breakneck speed of AI adoption across the U.S. and the world, which is concerning many tech leaders; 89% are concerned that global AI investment could be growing faster than the business value it can realistically deliver.
In practical terms, this mismatch is revealing itself in an overreliance on legacy infrastructure, the report found.
84% of CIOs and CTOs surveyed reported having to cancel at least one AI pilot or project because of legacy system limitations, and a further 93% fear that this lack of modernization will cause enterprise-wide security crises.
The report does not suggest that tech leaders are considering abandoning AI completely, but rather shows that the AI’s risks are accelerating in conjunction with its adoption, which is prompting business leaders to call for managed and responsible implementation of AI systems in a way that doesn’t endanger jobs or company security.
Featured image: Getty Images via Unsplash+
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
