Gartner predicts that by 2029, 30% of employees laid off because AI replaced their roles will need to be rehired, often at a significantly higher cost. In February 2026, Gartner had already predicted that by 2027, half of companies that attributed headcount reduction to AI would rehire staff to perform similar functions, under different job titles, in a forecast aimed at customer service and support leaders.
The reversal matters to marketing organizations because customer service is frequently the first AI deployment a company points to when justifying broader automation budgets, including the marketing and CX tooling that shares a vendor and a data layer with the support desk. Klarna is the visible example: it began hiring human customer service agents again in 2025, more than a year after saying its AI assistant was doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents.
In our reading, Gartner’s rehiring number also bears on tool selection elsewhere in the stack. Tori Paulman, VP analyst at Gartner, warned that executives who use AI mainly to cut costs risk “making reductions that are too deep and too soon,” and recommended using AI to reshape roles and redirect workers instead. Vendors selling AI customer service as a cost-reduction tool are marketing against the same cost dynamics Gartner is now flagging as miscalculated, and buyers evaluating AI-driven support deployments should treat a same-year headcount reduction as a warning sign rather than the proof of concept it is often sold as.
Source: Gartner
Source: Gartner
