Treat freed capacity as an asset

Your team now knows how to work with AI inside your context: your data, clients, exceptions, and history. That is expensive to hire and slow to rebuild. Severance, recruiting, and ramp-up time eat much of any projected saving.

The trust cost is bigger still. One round of AI-attributed layoffs undoes four phases of trust, and your strongest people leave first. Redeploy capacity toward work that was always worth doing, and use attrition and internal moves to rebalance.