I think this is common across most large corporations right now. The stock price effects of the stock buybacks have faded and most companies have decoded against innovation since they don't have small, innovative companies to compete against (or they gobble them up if one does appear). So without growth, other than mergers and acquisitions, the only way to increase profit is cutting costs. They were sold on "AI", but it hasn't delivered, and never will but they still won't accept that, so the only option is downsize and force everyone to do more work while pretending they don't have more work because "AI" will do it for them...someday...

I'm a software architect that designs solutions often built around some proprietary software. There is no chance an "AI" could possibly have enough information to design or write code in this space. I mean it will pretend it does and give nonsense, but nothing useful.

So it's killing us that all of the knowledgeable people that had been with the company for decades and so were higher paid were all given "early retirement" packages and most full time staff were laid off. Now we have inexperienced, temporary contractors from an agency, a few long-term contractors, and a mandate to use "AI" in at least 60% of our work.

I'm the lead architect for a couple of years, but I haven't been there long, just rose up quickly, so I didn't qualify for early retirement and I don't make anywhere near what I should, so I am sort of safe. But I'm supporting productions support, doing all of the devops work, dealing with networking issues, and lots of other things, plus more than 50% of my day is meetings, and still have to plan for 10 "points" (basically they consider a point an 8 hr day worth of work) of my actual work every 2 week sprint since everyone has to have a full sprint plan and no time is allocated for analysis, meetings, emergencies, etc. So I have basically 3 full time jobs worth of work to do. And the contractors are useless because there's no one to train them.