Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
CNBC published a report this week that caught my attention. Companies that laid off workers and pointed to AI as the reason are already walking it back. Ford is reportedly rehiring hundreds of experienced engineers to deal with quality issues that its automated systems could not fix. Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM are also turning their attention back to people after making cuts while investing heavily in AI.
The IBM detail is the one that stands out. According to the CNBC report, IBM replaced parts of its human resources function with AI that handled around 94 percent of routine requests. That sounds like a success story until you look at the remaining 6 percent. Those were the requests the system could not manage, and they included ethical dilemmas, which are exactly the situations where someone needs a person with judgment on the other end.
The pipeline dries up
IBM has since announced plans to triple its entry-level hiring in the United States in 2026. Nickle LaMoreaux, the company's chief human resources officer, put it plainly when she warned that without entry-level hires, "there's no pipeline; the well simply dries up."
A report from Intuition Labs, also cited by CNBC, described the pattern behind these reversals. Companies budgeted for technology to replace people without investing in training, which left their teams unprepared, and many of them later regretted cutting the very people they needed to oversee the new systems.
Why this matters for a small business or startup
Here is why this matters if you run a small business or a startup.
The routine 94 percent of admin and operations work is real, and AI really does help with it. I use these tools every day and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Drafting standard replies, pulling reports, and formatting documents have all gotten faster and cheaper, and that is good news for everyone.
But your business does not lose clients over the routine 94 percent. It loses them over the 6 percent. I am talking about the frustrated customer email that needs tact rather than a template, the double-booked meeting where one of the two people is your biggest investor, and the vendor invoice that is technically correct but does not match what you agreed to on a call three weeks ago. Those moments require someone who knows your business, notices that something is off, and decides what to do about it.
IBM and Ford have the budgets to automate at scale, watch it fail at the edges, and then hire their way back. Most founders do not get that second chance. If your operations run entirely on tools, the judgment layer is you, which usually means it happens at eleven at night after everything else is done.
Pair the tools with a person who owns the exceptions
The lesson here is not to avoid AI. It is to have someone on your team who handles the parts the tools miss. That is how my monthly retainers work at Rellatech. Your assistant uses the same tools for the routine work and steps in when judgment is needed, so you are not the one catching those edge cases at the end of a long day. If that is what your setup needs, book a consultation and I will show you how it works.
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