Methodology and corrections
Every row aggregates public statements. This page explains how those statements were sourced, tiered, and refreshed, and how to submit a correction. Hand this URL to anyone who challenges a number.
Methodology and corrections
Every row in this dataset aggregates public statements. This page explains how those statements were sourced, tiered, and refreshed, and how to submit a correction.
A company enters the dataset when an executive, an SEC filing, an official press release, or a Tier 1 news outlet publicly attributes a layoff, hiring freeze, restructure, or headcount plan to AI, automation, or productivity gains from AI tools. Generic "restructuring" without AI attribution is excluded.
Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, TechCrunch, The Information, Business Insider, Financial Times, plus SEC filings and company press releases. Challenger Gray & Christmas is treated as Tier 1 for aggregate US layoff totals. Trade press and analyst notes are treated as supporting sources, not primary.
Verified means a named AI tool, a measurable workflow or headcount change, and an executive on the record in a Tier 1 outlet or filing. Reported means credible Tier 1 press attribution, but one of those three elements is missing or paraphrased. Inferred means the AI attribution is partial or directional, supported by public disclosure but not fully confirmed. Two cases, HP Inc. and Cloudflare, are graded Verified without a named tool because their SEC filings causally join AI to the workforce reduction; those exceptions are set out in full under How we grade credibility and on the rows themselves.
Every row records whether a specific AI vendor or product was named in the public statement. Several companies attribute headcount decisions to AI without naming a tool. That absence is preserved in the dataset and surfaced in the vendor block. It is not an accusation. It is a fact about disclosure.
Automated tasks run every Friday morning ET. An overnight sourcing sweep collects filings, earnings language, WARN notices, and news leads. Tier 1 collects new AI-attributed cases from Tier 1 outlets. Tier 3 tracks soft signals (analyst notes, rumors, labor pushback, 10-Q language) that are not yet Verified. A separate task refreshes the Challenger Gray & Christmas run-rate KPI. The changelog logs every change with a run date.
If a company named here believes a row misrepresents their situation, or a number is out of date, email info@futurefluenthr.ai with the row, the correction, and a public source. Verified corrections are published in the next weekly refresh and logged in the changelog with the original value, the corrected value, and the source. The correction record is public. Requests to remove a row without a factual dispute are declined; the dataset aggregates statements that are already public.
The download, column by column
Every case is in the CSV export, one row per case, in the order below. Numbers are numbers: the columns marked as such are safe to sum, sort and divide without parsing prose. Blank means the record does not carry the value, never zero.
- Company
- The employer named in the announcement. A company appears more than once when it announced separate waves carrying different evidence, so this is not a unique key.
- Industry
- The company's industry as the source describes it.
- Country
- Where the workforce action was announced, as free text. Use Countries (ISO) to group.
- Announcement Date
- The date as the source expresses it, which is sometimes a year or a range. Use Announced Month for anything computed.
- Total Headcount Reduction
- The reduction in the company's own words, including any qualifier it attached. Prose, not a number.
- Reduction Percentage
- The percentage in the company's own words.
- HR Function Impacted
- The HR work the company named, when it named one.
- AI Tool / Platform
- The AI system named in the statement, or a note that none was named.
- Post-Automation Role Shifts
- What the company said happened to the work and the people afterwards.
- Credibility Tier
- Verified, Reported or Inferred. The definitions are above on this page.
- HR Scope
- A row-level note on how close the change sits to the HR function. Retired as a headline axis in September 2026; kept because Tier 1 still sets it.
- HR Scope Note
- The workflow the change touched, in a sentence.
- Strategic Pivot
- Whether the company also announced a strategic shift, in its own words.
- What This Means For Your Role
- Our brief for an HR reader. Editorial, and labelled as such.
- Source URL
- The primary source for the row.
- Source Citation
- The full citation, including any secondary sources named in prose.
- Source Publisher
- The publisher of the primary source.
- Announced Month
- The announcement month as YYYY-MM, or YYYY where the source names only a year. This is the field to bin by.
- Announced Precision
- month or year, saying which of the two shapes Announced Month holds.
- Countries (ISO)
- ISO 3166 alpha-2 codes, space separated. Two rows name two countries.
- Metric Status
- disclosed where the row carries a headcount or a percentage, none where it carries neither. Seven cases are none.
- Headcount Reduction (number)
- The announced reduction as an integer, where one was disclosed. Announced, not realised: it includes reductions delivered through attrition and multi-year plans.
- Reduction Percentage (number)
- The disclosed percentage as a number.
- Company Headcount
- Approximate total employees at the company, for the denominator.
- Share Of Workforce (percent)
- Headcount Reduction divided by Company Headcount, as a percentage. Computed on export, never stored, and blank where either side is missing.
- Company Size Bucket
- SMB, Mid-market or Enterprise.
- Industry Parent
- The industry rolled up to the group the charts use.
- Source Type
- What kind of document the primary source is: filing, company, wire, outlet, transcript, analyst and so on.
- Source Tier
- primary for a filing or company document, tier1 for the outlets the methodology names, then regional, trade or other.
- Archived Copy
- A Wayback Machine capture of the primary source, where one exists. 24 of the record's sources have none yet.
- Last Reviewed
- When the row was last checked by the weekly pass.
Accessibility
This site aims at WCAG 2.2 AA, and the parts that can be checked automatically are checked on every change rather than audited once a year.
- Contrast. Every colour pair in the stylesheet is computed against its real background in CI, and the weekly Playwright audit re-measures the text as rendered. A pair below 4.5:1 fails the build.
- Keyboard. Every control is a real button or link: the case rows, the seat pills, the chart filters, the reversal timeline and the shelf toggles are all reachable and operable without a mouse, and each carries its state in
aria-expandedoraria-pressed. - Structure. One
h1per page, headings in order, tables with real header cells and captions, and a skip link to the main content. - Motion. Everything that animates is inside
prefers-reduced-motion, including the seat swap and the rail. - Without JavaScript. The whole record is pre-rendered into the explorer and the library, and every case has a static page of its own, so the dataset is readable with scripting off.
Known gaps: the charts are canvas, and while each carries a text description and the underlying numbers are in the tables and the CSV, they are not navigable point by point. The heatmap is dense on a small screen. If something here does not work for you, email info@futurefluenthr.ai and say what you were trying to do; that goes in the same queue as a data correction.