TechPulse USA

Amex Axes 3,850 Jobs 'to Prepare for AI' in Record Quarter By Daniel Rao | 23 October 2026 American Express just posted the best quarter in its history — $20.1 billion in revenue, up 9%, net income of $3.7 billion, full-year guidance raised. And its reward for roughly 3,850 of its own people was a redundancy notice. The cuts, announced by chief executive Stephen Squeri on the company's third-quarter earnings call on Friday morning, will eliminate about 5% of Amex's global workforce. The official reason is organisational streamlining. The unofficial reason — the one the finance chief actually said out loud — is artificial intelligence. "You don't want to automate processes that are not optimally structured," chief financial officer Christophe Le Caillec told CNBC, "and so what we're doing here is to reduce layers and increase spans of controls, so that we can automate and take advantage of AI in the coming quarters and the coming years."...

For three years, corporate America has told the same story about artificial intelligence: it's a tool, a partner, a productivity miracle — never the reason your job disappeared. On Thursday, the country's most-watched layoff tracker quietly shredded that fiction. Through nine months of 2026, US employers have named AI in 120,136 job-cut announcements — 21 percent of every announced layoff in America, and, for the first time ever, the single leading stated reason. AI didn't just join the layoff conversation this year. It topped it. And yet — this is the part the alarmist headlines will skip — September itself was AI's quietest month of the year. The honest reading of the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report is more unsettling than a simple "robots took the jobs" story. AI won the year-to-date title not by surging, but by staying put while every other excuse for firing people fell away faster. An empty office in a coworking building — a scene Challenger...