Hey, it's Mark. Welcome back to the Employee Survival Guide, a podcast that arms you with uh no BS strategies. You need to protect your career, your paycheck, and your sanity in today's cutthroat workplace. Today we're tackling one of the most sneakiest corporate tactics I've ever seen in all my years of litigating. It's called AI washing. If you ever heard your CEO suddenly drop lines like, We're becoming an AI first company, right before layoff rumors start swirling, buckle up. This episode is your survival manual. By the end, you'll know exactly what AI washing is, how it's being weaponized for terminations, the red flags to watch for, and most importantly, the concrete steps to make sure you're not the one getting washed away. Let's dive in. First, the definition AI washing. What is it? It's the business business world version of what's called greenwashing. Companies slap the AI logo on everything, products, processes, and even their layoff announcements, to look like cutting edge and innovative or efficient when the actual AI involvement is minimal, non existent, or years away from being useful. It was coined back in 2019 by the AI Now Institute, and regulators are already cracking down. The SEC has fined investment firms hundreds of thousands of dollars for lying about using AI in their services, but here's the part that hits you in the wallet. In 2025 and 2026, companies started using AI washing as cover for mass terminations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself called it out just days ago, quote, there's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there's some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs. According to Challenger Gray and Christmas, over 54,000 U.S. layoffs in 2025 alone were publicly blamed on AI. That sounds scary until you realize experts say the technology isn't mature enough to replace most of those roles yet. Many of these cuts were really about correcting pandemic era overhiring, squeezing margins, or plain old cost cutting. AI just became the perfect PR-friendly scapegoat. Your company might be firing people and calling it AI transformation because it sounds better than quote, we messed up our hiring and now we need to save money. Let's name names because you need to see the pattern of behavior that corporations are currently playing. Amazon laid off 14,000 employees in October 2025 and another 16,000 in January 2026. Internal Memos hyped AI enabling faster innovation and the need to be organized more leanly. The CEO, Andy Jassy, walked it back, saying it's not really AI driven, it's culture. So he had to walk those words back. Salesforce slashed customer support roles from 9,000 to 5,000, with the CEO bragging about AI agents doing the work and wanting a lesser headcount. HP CEO announced 6,000 cuts over the next few years, specifically tied to AI boosting productivity. Duolingo went AI first with contractors. Klarna projected cutting a third of its workforce by 2030 because of AI, the pattern, big AI announcement, vague efficiency claims, and pink slips. There you go. Then in some cases, rehiring months after because AI couldn't actually deliver. So the companies had to rehire those folks, which actually you've been reading about in the papers. Here's your personal radar. If you hear three or more of these, start updating your resume and possibly contacting an employment lawyer like myself. Number one, sudden AI first or AI-powered town halls with zero technical details or demos. Number two, layoff rumors hitting right after an earnings call with the CEO, name drops AI three times. Number three, performance reviews now mysteriously include AI fluency and willingness to adopt new tools with no training provided. We're starting to see that a lot, folks, so be on the lookout about that topic. Number four, department's budget for AI tools gets cut while headcount is frozen. Number five, leadership uses budgewords like synergistic AI augmentation. Who makes this shit up? I mean, honestly, instead of explaining what the AI actually does, HR suddenly rolls out an AI-driven performance software with no transparency in how decisions are made. That one you need to pay attention to because when you're starting to see that happen in your workplace, an AI-driven performance software, you know, essentially your review being done that way, be on the lookout that something is clearly amiss here and AI washing might be taking place. If it smells like marketing spin, trust it probably is. So there's your radar. So what can you do about it? That's what you always rely upon me to give you some pointers. I'm always researching this issue. That's AI washing is a new issue. We're seeing it happen. We see it happen in the employer's response to our demand letters, where we are. I actually have uh a current case where there's an AI-focused company. And they actually use AI washing language. Uh, they're not a SEC reporting company. I'm sure that they they want to be, at least the CEO wants to. And they are spinning everything regarding this pregnancy case we have, uh, where the CEO made some pretty dramatic statements about a pregnancy, about uh how uh people want to get pregnant. It's not their place to work at that company. So it's pretty shameful behavior, and they try to smooth it over with this whole AI washing explanation. I kind of laughed at the response by the defendant's counsel, but it exists, and you need to be aware of it. Uh employers are trying to put anything under that big old AI washing rug they can. Move number one, what you can do is become faster, meaner, more literate about AI than you can before it washes you out. Don't wait for the company training, spend uh maybe 30 minutes a day mastering the tools that actually exist. Be what's called a power user, an AI power user. So learn everything possible, and then use it in your workday to become more effective and you know, show your boss and take documentation that you're making these wins because you're being more effective using it as a person. Build your own, what's called a human-only moot. AI sucks at empathy, flex stakeholder management type of behavior, creative problem solving, ethical judgment. AI can't do that just yet. It's just uh words on uh screen, it can dump out material back at you. But double down and you know, on those human aspects which you can de demonstrate your ability to uh you know, where your potential or your value as a company, why they hired you in the first place. Make yourself irreplaceable in those gray areas. Number three, document everything like your job depends on it, because it does these days. I I talk about documenting all the time. Keep it running brag file, metrics, emails, praising your work before and after examples of your impact. If AI is used in performance scoring or layoff selection, you may have grounds to challenge biased outcomes. I'll get that in a second. Know your legal rights cold. If you have a mass layoff, you know, the warning notice is basically roughly 60 days in both states. If AI was used in determination decision, you have a right to under certain emergent laws and EOC guidance and state law to know what data was fed into the model and request a human review. You might find out there's uh AI bias and there's uh current litigation that's pending right now about AI bias in the AI software being used. Biased in AI tools can trigger discrimination claims, so especially protective characteristics were unintentionally weighted. That's it does happen, folks. There's humans who are coding these uh AI algorithms, so you know, and they're feeding the information into it, so bias in, bias out. And number five, network like it's 2009, your internal network is about to shrink because it's gonna reconnect with five former colleagues or LinkedIn contacts every week. Try to build your network stronger, a larger network so you can land a job faster in the event that you're terminated for AI disturbance, create your own personal runway. You know, you need funds to survive if you are laid off. So, you know, gather together six to nine months of cash. Don't uh sacrifice it, you'll need it. Number seven, if you have an extra strategy, get one. If you don't have one, get one. Update your resume today with uh quantifiable wins, tailor those, you know, those wins to the roles you're looking at. Number five, the mindset shift. Real AI will change jobs, of course it will, but companies that AI wash today are often the ones who will be disparately rehiring humans tomorrow when the tech falls short, because it will. I mean, there's no one out there saying it's a 100% positive, although we are all acting like it. Your job is not your job is not the if you're AI, your AI, your job is to ride the wave, use it, master it, make yourself an employee who can make AI look good. So, with that, focus on the realities of AI here. It's being used to to cut you, you know, to evaluate you, to review your performance, and also to determinate you. And you need to be aware of how you can combat that. And, you know, it's not you can build a case for discrimination of many types. You can build a case of whistleblowing, retaliation, but you need to document things. And that's how you arm yourself against this, you know, this huge wave that's happening in our workforce today. So, with that, thank you for letting be a service and talk to you soon.