Wellness
Rewards
Recognitions
Learn more about Wellable's all-in-one
employee engagement platform
The AI Acceleration Scenario: Are We Ready?
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
In this episode, Nick and Geoff review the fictional post-mortem report from Citrini Research that evaluates how we got to a June 2028 economy characterized by higher unemployment and lower stock valuations (hint: rapid AI advancement outpaces workforce adaptation). They explore the short-term and long-term implications for the workforce and corporate strategies.
Pressed for time? Here’s a quick summary…
- The Citrini scenario imagines unemployment surpassing 10% by 2028, driven largely by white-collar layoffs as AI boosts efficiency and reduces the need for human labor
- Block’s 40% workforce reduction illustrates a “rip the bandage off” strategy—accelerating AI adoption immediately rather than managing gradual layoffs that could erode morale
- Companies like Meta and Accenture are tying AI usage to performance reviews and promotions, signaling that AI fluency may become a core competency
- Organizations that educate, evangelize, and share AI success stories may see productivity gains without immediate workforce disruption but long-term structural risks remain
Episode Summary
The Cetrini Report: A Fictional Postmortem From 2028
The story that anchored this week’s conversation didn’t come from a typical research note. A relatively unknown hedge fund, Cetrini, released a report written not as a forecast but as a retrospective, dated June 2028, describing a future that had already happened and working backward to explain how the economy got there. Nick found the format itself notable: rather than presenting data points and probabilities, the report reads as history, which makes the scenario feel more inevitable than a standard prediction would.
The headline number is stark: unemployment rising above 10% by 2028, driven largely by layoffs as AI becomes further embedded in business operations. Geoff’s read is that the mechanism matters as much as the number. As companies trim headcount while holding output flat or growing it, GDP and other economy-wide measures can look relatively healthy even as a specific slice of the workforce, disproportionately white-collar employees in roles once considered secure, gets displaced by the very technology many of them helped build.
The report also introduces language built for the moment. “Ghost GDP” describes growth that looks strong on paper while masking real employment pain underneath. The “intelligence displacement spiral,” what Nick shorthands as IDS, describes a doom loop: AI-driven layoffs weaken consumer spending, which puts pressure on more companies to cut further. Whether or not the 2028 timeline plays out exactly as written, both hosts agree the narrative is uncomfortably plausible, and note that once a story like this takes hold, it becomes easy to find data points that confirm it while overlooking those that complicate it, like continued hiring elsewhere in the economy.
Block’s Bet: Ripping Off the Bandage
The same week the Cetrini report circulated, Block, Jack Dorsey’s company built on the foundation of Square, announced it would cut 40% of its workforce, more than 4,000 of over 10,000 employees. Nick offers an important caveat: a 40% cut sounds dramatic, but it largely brings Block’s headcount back to where it stood in late 2020, before pandemic-era overhiring. It’s a rationalization of staffing levels as much as a wholesale reduction, though that distinction offers little comfort to the employees affected.
What stood out to both hosts was Dorsey’s public memo explaining the decision. He doesn’t frame it as an obviously correct choice; he acknowledges the real risk involved. His logic starts from a strong conviction that AI efficiencies will be material to Block’s future, which leaves two paths: a gradual, multi-year reduction, or a single, immediate cut. He chose the latter, and his stated reasoning is that gradual layoffs erode morale in a specific way. Employees, including top performers, spend every quarter wondering if they’re next, and many high performers leave voluntarily rather than wait it out. Gradual cuts also create a perverse incentive problem: the more an employee helps the organization adopt AI successfully, the faster they may be accelerating their own redundancy, which discourages the very adoption leadership wants to see.
Geoff points to another line from Dorsey’s memo that stuck with him: the idea that AI tools paired with smaller, flatter teams enable a fundamentally different way of building and running a company. Geoff’s take is that this is likely true in part, and also a convenient frame for a workforce rationalization that was probably coming regardless. Presenting a headcount reduction through the lens of AI-driven efficiency makes the decision easier for markets to swallow (Block’s stock reacted favorably) even as it does nothing to soften the outcome for the employees now searching for their next role.
AI Adoption Becomes a Performance Metric
The conversation turned to how companies are formalizing AI adoption inside performance systems. Nick cited a headline from Accenture, the global consulting firm, reportedly weighing AI usage as a factor in promotion decisions, framed in the market as employees who aren’t “on board with the AI train” risking their advancement. Meta has taken a more targeted version of the same approach: for the 2026 bonus year, employees’ use of Meta’s internal AI tools will factor into performance reviews and bonus payouts, a policy that also serves Meta’s interest in driving adoption of its own large language model.
Nick’s framework for HR leaders trying to navigate this: if two employees are performing equally well, but one is leaning further into AI tools, that person likely has a higher ceiling and is worth coaching toward greater impact, not necessarily paying differently right now for equal output. The more effective lever for broad adoption, in his view, isn’t punitive; it’s evangelism. Sharing concrete internal success stories, a content writer who doubled output using AI and was promoted as a result, for example, gives employees a tangible reason to adopt the tools rather than a mandate to comply with one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cetrini is a hedge fund that published a report framed as a retrospective dated June 2028, describing how the economy arrived at a future scenario rather than forecasting one in the traditional sense. The report predicts unemployment rising above 10% by 2028, driven largely by AI-related layoffs, and coins terms like “ghost GDP” and the “intelligence displacement spiral” to describe the mechanism. It drew attention in part because of its format, presenting a prediction as already-settled history, and in part because it landed alongside other real-world stories, like Block’s layoffs, that seemed to reinforce its narrative.
Ghost GDP refers to economic growth that looks healthy by standard measures like GDP while masking significant underlying employment pain. In the scenario the Cetrini report describes, companies can trim headcount, particularly white-collar roles, while maintaining or growing output using AI, which keeps aggregate economic indicators strong even as a meaningful segment of the workforce is displaced.
The intelligence displacement spiral, or IDS, is a term coined in the Cetrini report to describe a feedback loop, or doom loop, in which AI-driven layoffs reduce consumer spending power, which weakens demand, which then pressures more companies to cut costs and headcount further, reinforcing the cycle.
Block, formerly known as Square and led by Jack Dorsey, announced plans to cut roughly 40% of its more than 10,000 employees. Notably, this brings headcount back to roughly where it stood in late 2020, largely reversing pandemic-era overhiring rather than cutting below historical staffing levels. Dorsey’s internal memo frames the decision as driven by strong convictions about AI-driven efficiency, and argues that a single rapid cut better preserves morale and retains top performers compared to a slower, multi-year reduction.
According to his memo, Dorsey believed a gradual, multi-year workforce reduction would damage morale over an extended period, with employees, including strong performers, constantly anticipating the next round of cuts. He also noted that gradual reductions create a disincentive for employees to fully adopt AI, since accelerating adoption could accelerate their own job loss. A single rapid cut, in his reasoning, removes that ongoing uncertainty and aligns the organization’s structure with its AI strategy immediately.
Yes. Accenture has reportedly begun factoring AI usage into promotion decisions. Meta has tied employees’ use of its internal AI tools to performance reviews and bonus payouts for the 2026 bonus year, which also supports adoption of Meta’s own proprietary AI model. HR leaders are increasingly expected to build AI fluency into formal performance and advancement criteria rather than treating it as optional.
Rather than relying solely on mandates, HR leaders can pair equal-performance compensation with targeted coaching for employees who show a high ceiling for AI-driven output, and can use internal success stories to make adoption tangible. Highlighting real examples, like an employee who used AI to meaningfully increase output and was promoted or given a raise as a result, tends to drive adoption more sustainably than top-down pressure alone.
Full Episode Transcript
Nick: Welcome to the Wellable Weekly podcast, where we cover key topics and trends at the intersection of well-being, HR, and technology. I’m Nick. I’m with my good friend, Geoff. Geoff, how’s it going?
Geoff: It’s going great, Nick.
Nick: Big news story this week in a lot of different ways, from geopolitical stuff to technology. I think the one that we will focus on is this report from this hedge fund called Cetrini. What I found really interesting about the report is that they didn’t write it in the sense of a traditional report, these are all the data points we’re looking at, and this is our prediction for the future. They wrote it as this fictional postmortem. It’s dated June 2028, so a little bit more than two years in the future, and they’re talking about a future that exists, and they’re saying, well, how do we get here? A huge piece of that economic history for how we got there is a narrative around AI, what companies were doing with it, and how it resulted in certain workforce and consumer changes.
Geoff: Yeah, interesting report. Cetrini’s not a household name, not one I’d heard of at least. Hopefully they were short software and technology stocks, because the fallout from this was definitely another pullback in US software stocks. Like you said, the way they wrote it was almost as if this had already happened and now it was more of a retrospective. The picture they paint is pretty grim for a report that’s effectively a forecast just a couple of years out, so I think that in and of itself is probably adding to the market spook we’re seeing. The prediction is that in just a couple of years, 2028, unemployment rises to over 10%, triggered largely by layoffs as AI becomes more and more ingrained in all facets of business and life. What happens to those software companies is, as we’ve seen a little bit already, they’re trimming headcount and relying more and more on AI capabilities to improve efficiency and output. Because of that, you need fewer workers, and fewer white-collar workers specifically. The outcome is fewer and fewer white-collar workers at these software companies that were once the real lifeblood of the stock market, at least. And because you’re able to trim headcount while maintaining or in some cases growing output, the net impact on the economy as a whole, as measured by GDP and other things, is actually relatively healthy. But you have an entire area of the workforce that’s potentially going to be decimated, in a way that many of those individuals who went into jobs once seen as really desirable and future-proof are now being displaced, in some cases by the very technologies they helped create and integrate.
Nick: Exactly. One of the other things I really liked about the report is it was written with all these buzzy terms that are now going to become part of our pop culture and business culture. There’s the idea of ghost GDP: GDP as a measure of economic strength can be really good, but other measures, like employment, could be really bad, or the gains in GDP could come at extreme cost to a small but growing number of individuals. Another term they coined was the intelligence displacement spiral, which is basically IDS. It’s just like a doom loop, a doom spiral. Employees get laid off because of AI gains, which results in a weaker consumer, and so forth. I found that fascinating, and whether it happens or not, it’s very believable. It’s the kind of narrative where I could see how we get to this world, and what that means for our economy and for AI usage. It’s always tricky, because at the same time, in the same week, you’re having stories that reaffirm that narrative. I don’t want to say that once you start believing a story, you’ll find all the data points that validate it, and I’m sure there are other data points that dispel it, like ongoing hiring in the economy. But you have this big company, Block, Jack Dorsey’s company. For those who don’t know, Jack Dorsey famously started Twitter. This is an older company; it used to be called Square. If you’ve ever been to a coffee shop or a food truck, you’ve probably used Square and gotten Square receipts by email. The company’s now called Block because of a pivot toward blockchain, but people know it in the common world as Square. They had over 10,000 employees and are laying off 40% of them, pretty rapidly. The one asterisk I’d give is that when you hear a company is reducing its workforce by 40%, you think it’s going to go back to headcount from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s not the case. There’s a whole narrative that they probably overhired during COVID, and this 40% reduction just takes them back to late 2020 for where their headcount was. So it’s not as drastic a reduction as it sounds. There are also changes tied to the fact that Block is tied to blockchain, and we’re in a bit of a crypto winter, which could have an impact too. Jack Dorsey’s long post about this, which is worth reading if you’re interested in this topic, goes through why. I think what’s important is, one, he openly acknowledges there’s risk to this decision. He’s not coming in saying this is clearly the 100% best path forward. I think he’s coming from the perspective that he has strong convictions about the future of AI, and those convictions leave him with two options. His convictions are that AI efficiencies are going to be very material, and from there he can either gradually reduce the workforce over the next two, three, four years, or rip the bandage off right now and adjust the workforce to match what he thinks the future of AI looks like, which puts pressure on employees to adopt AI and implement it more quickly. He chose option two, because with a gradual reduction, two things happen. One, it kills morale. Everyone sits there thinking, when’s the next quarterly layoff, how do I handle this? Even top performers start wondering, at a company of over 10,000 employees, how will they even know I’m a top performer? How do I not get displaced by a bot because of some political issue in the organization? A lot of top performers leave in that environment, which is a really challenging place for a company to be. At the same time, you’re not really accelerating AI adoption within the organization, because as an employee, the more I adopt AI and accelerate it within my organization, the sooner that workforce reduction happens, so why would I want to contribute to potentially laying myself off? He decided the best thing to do was rip the bandage off all at once and see how it turns out. I understand the argument. If you’re in HR today thinking about these challenges, what he’s doing doesn’t seem crazy, strictly from a morale perspective and in terms of trying to get AI adopted quickly.
Geoff: Yeah, when you think about the post Jack Dorsey put out, I completely agree with the read. A few things stood out, certainly the options he had in front of him and the risks you mentioned. One section where he talks about seeing the intelligence tools they’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, enabling a new way of working that fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company, that’s the nugget that stood out to me from an HR and team-structure standpoint. It’s probably a little column A, little column B. I’m sure some of it is true, that you’re able to run companies on a flatter, leaner, more efficient basis, but at the same time there was probably some overhiring that took place, and this is a workforce rationalization that was a long time coming, delivered through the lens of efficiency and use of intelligence tools, which obviously makes that medicine go down a lot easier for the market, because Block’s stock responded pretty favorably to this. Certainly not for those 4,000-plus workers who are now in the position, like a lot of others in the tech industry, of looking for their next opportunity. When it comes to interpreting this across other industries outside this narrow focus on tech, specifically for folks in HR thinking about performance review structures or ways to accelerate AI adoption within their company, do you have any parting words of wisdom for people in those roles?
Nick: Yeah, it’s interesting. Think about news stories that broke last week. I saw a headline around Accenture, the big consulting firm, considering AI usage in your promotion. The term they’re using is that people who aren’t on board with the AI train may risk their promotion. I’m sure there’s probably more detail internally that HR has distributed about what that actually means, because that’s a really big idea. Then, more famously, and this has been happening for months, Facebook, or Meta, and they’re a little unique in that they have their own LLM model, so they have an incentive to get people to use it, effectively telling employees that for the 2026 bonus year, your use of internal AI tools will be a factor in your performance review, which will be a factor in your bonus. So imagine a bunch of Meta employees upping their usage of these tools, which is beneficial to Meta for a lot of different reasons, but I find it interesting. If I were in HR, I’d say you’re probably going to want to comp based on performance, and in this world today, the top performer is likely using AI in some way. If not, they’re just a rock star who happens to be completely against it, or something like that. But if you have two people performing equally well, they should probably be compensated similarly, even if one is using AI more than the other. Now, if you have someone performing just as well as someone else who’s using AI more, that person has a really high ceiling, so you probably should do some coaching through the manager, saying, how can we make you incrementally or materially better in terms of your contribution by encouraging and supporting your AI usage, such that you’re now going to be way ahead of that other person in the same revenue or bonus tier as you. Likewise, if you want to accelerate AI adoption, the way you’d probably do it is educate, evangelize, and really promote success stories within your company for how people have done that. Those success stories could be something like: this individual was a content writer producing X pieces of content every month, but with AI they doubled that production, and as a result we were able to pay them more, they contributed more to the company, and they got promoted. If you share stories like that internally, I think that’s a way to, in a friendlier way, get employees to adopt AI the way you’d like them to.
Geoff: Yeah, that’s excellent guidance, and I think a great place to wrap for today. Thanks as always to those who tuned in. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the Wellable Weekly newsletter and this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks all.
-
Share
-
-
-
-
