AI-Washing: The Corporate Trick That's Making Everyone More Afraid of AI Than They Should Be

An Op-Ed by Courtney Trevino | Mindful AI

#AIWashing #AILiteracy #FutureOfWork #MindfulAI #JobMarket #ArtificialIntelligence #WorkplaceInnovation #EthicalAI #AIEducation #Layoffs #ProfessionalDevelopment #AITools

Amazon laid off thousands of workers. They said AI did it.

Then Amazon quietly clarified — in an emailed statement — that AI was "not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions."

You didn't see that clarification trending.

You saw the headline.

And that's exactly the problem.

A New Word for an Old Trick

There is a term that economists, journalists, and now even the CEO of OpenAI are using to describe what's happening in corporate America right now: AI-washing.

AI-washing is when companies cite artificial intelligence as the reason for layoffs that were already planned — using it as a convenient, investor-friendly narrative to dress up financially motivated cuts in the language of innovation.

In 2025, AI was cited as the stated reason for more than 55,000 layoffs in the United States. Amazon, Pinterest, Block, Atlassian, Salesforce — the list of companies invoking AI as a restructuring rationale grew week by week. Headlines followed. Fear followed. And the public conversation about AI shifted, quietly but meaningfully, from "this is a tool" to "this is a threat."

But here's what a Forrester report published in January concluded: "Many companies announcing AI-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted AI applications ready to fill those roles."

In other words: the AI replacements they're describing often don't exist yet. The layoffs do. The narrative was chosen after the fact.

And people are eating it. Not because they're unintelligent — but because when you don't have quality information, you have no framework with which to question the story being handed to you. That's not a character flaw. That's what happens in an information vacuum. And right now, quality AI education is genuinely hard to find.

Even Sam Altman Is Saying It

When the CEO of OpenAI — the company that makes ChatGPT — publicly acknowledges that companies are blaming AI for layoffs they would have made anyway, that's worth pausing on.

At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, Sam Altman said: "I can't pinpoint the exact percentage, but there is some AI-washing involved where companies are holding AI responsible for layoffs they would have enacted anyway, alongside genuine job displacement caused by AI advancements."

He's not wrong. And the fact that he's saying it out loud — while simultaneously noting that genuine AI-related displacement is also real and will grow — suggests the situation is more nuanced than either the fear-mongers or the cheerleaders are making it.

The truth, as it usually does, lives somewhere in the complicated middle.

What the Data Actually Says

Here is what the actual economic research shows — not the headlines, not the earnings calls, but the data:

- AI was cited as a factor in approximately 4.5% of all job losses in 2025 — significant, but not the avalanche the headlines implied.

- Goldman Sachs estimated that even if AI were deployed across every sector where it's technically applicable, roughly 2.5% of U.S. employment would be at risk of job loss.

- The Washington Post's analysis of current economic data found "no measurable evidence so far that AI is putting Americans as a whole out of work".

- McKinsey's widely cited finding that AI could affect "40% of jobs" has been systematically misreported — what the report actually found was that 40% of jobs contain tasks that could be automated, not that 40% of jobs will disappear.

None of this means AI isn't changing the workforce. It absolutely is. CFOs surveyed in a Duke University/Federal Reserve study in March 2026 privately estimated AI-related layoffs could be 9 times higher this year than last. Middle management and specialized technical staff — not just entry-level workers — are now being affected in meaningful numbers. The IMF's managing director described AI's impact on the labor market as arriving "like a tsunami" at Davos in January.

The disruption is real. The timeline is accelerating. But the story being told about why specific people lost specific jobs at specific companies? That story is frequently being written for Wall Street, not for workers.

The Real Consequence of AI Misinformation

Here's what genuinely concerns me about the AI-washing narrative — and about the broader culture of misinformation surrounding AI right now.

There is a significant portion of the population that is AI-averse. And I understand why. The headlines are scary. The technology feels opaque. The pace of change is relentless. When you don't have a framework for understanding what AI actually is and how it actually works, it is entirely rational to feel threatened by it.

But what I've observed — both in my own professional life and in working with others — is that the people protesting AI the loudest are often the most at risk of being edged out of the workforce. Not by AI itself. By their own unwillingness or inability to develop new skills. By choosing the comfort of resistance over the discomfort of growth. That's a hard thing to say, and I say it with compassion — because the unwillingness usually isn't stubbornness. It's fear. And fear thrives in ignorance.

AI-averse individuals who are quick to blame AI for anything negative are operating from a position of reaction rather than information. And companies that haven't even built the proper AI ecosystems to replace the workers they're laying off are counting on exactly that — on people accepting the narrative rather than examining it.

That is a failure of education. Not intelligence.

What AI Is — And What It Isn't

Let me be direct about something, because I think it gets lost in both the fear and the hype.

AI is a tool. A powerful, rapidly evolving, genuinely transformative tool — but a tool. It does not have ambition. It does not have creativity. It does not have lived experience, values, perspective, or humanity. Those things still belong entirely to you.

What AI can do is amplify the work you bring to it. It can help you think more clearly, structure your ideas more effectively, research more thoroughly, and maintain consistency across your output. It can free up cognitive bandwidth for the kind of reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving that only human beings can do.

What it cannot do — or rather, what it will do poorly if you let it — is replace those things. Dropping a single sentence into a chat window and asking AI to "write me a blog post" and then copying whatever comes back isn't AI literacy. It's AI dependency. And the output reflects it: no voice, no perspective, no uniqueness, no humanity. Flat. Generic. Forgettable.

The people producing that kind of content and calling it AI use are not the ones I'm concerned about being replaced. They were already producing forgettable work.

The people I'm concerned about are the ones opting out entirely — refusing to engage with a tool that, used ethically and intentionally, could genuinely elevate everything they create.

AI Literacy Is the Real Competitive Edge

Here is where this becomes practical.

I use AI every day. Not to generate content I copy wholesale, but as a thinking partner — to stress-test ideas, organize complex information, maintain quality standards across my work, and free up time for the human work that matters. I've used it to plan a 100-person wedding meal, curate a wedding playlist, build courses, design workshops, analyze medical documents, and help structure a deeply personal speech for my daughter's wedding. My words. My heart. My ideas. AI provided the scaffolding.

That is what intentional AI use looks like. And it is a learnable skill.

The professionals coming out ahead in this moment are not the most technical. They are the most intentional — people who understand what AI can and can't do, who engage with it ethically, who bring their full voice and judgment to the work rather than outsourcing their thinking to it entirely.

Only 12% of employees are currently receiving sufficient AI training to use these tools meaningfully. Most companies are not going to close that gap for you. If you're waiting for a corporate training program, the data suggests you'll be waiting a long time.

This is why quality AI education matters — and why it's so frustrating that it's genuinely hard to find. Most AI content online falls into two camps: breathless hype that overpromises, or technical documentation that assumes you already know what you're doing. Neither serves the mid-career professional, the small business owner, or the coach who simply wants to use these tools well without becoming a programmer.

That gap is real. And it shouldn't exist.

Why I Offer My AI Literacy Webinar for Free

I offer my AI Literacy Webinar for free because I believe that access to quality AI education should not be a privilege.

The people most at risk right now — the ones most likely to be displaced not by AI but by the skills gap around it — are often the same people who can least afford $500 courses or corporate training budgets. They're the solopreneurs, the mid-career professionals navigating a shifting landscape, the coaches and consultants and small business owners building something real without a team behind them.

They deserve accurate information. They deserve practical tools. They deserve a framework for engaging with AI that is ethical, intentional, and genuinely empowering — not a shortcut, not a replacement for their thinking, but an amplifier of everything they already bring to their work.

That is exactly what this webinar delivers.

→ Register for the free AI Literacy Webinar: [courtneytrevino.podia.com/services](https://courtneytrevino.podia.com/services)

And if you're ready to go deeper — to build real, lasting AI fluency that protects your professional value and elevates the quality of everything you create — explore the full suite of Mindful AI courses and offerings.

→ Explore all Mindful AI offerings: https://courtneytrevino.podia.com/services

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This article reflects the author's professional perspective and is intended for informational and educational purposes. It does not constitute career, legal, or financial advice.