American Express beat the Street, raised its own guidance, and then told analysts it is removing 5% of its global workforce to get ready for artificial intelligence. About 3,800 people are being bought out of their jobs with money from a profitable quarter, to make room for software the company has not finished deploying.
The number did not arrive in a memo leaked at midnight. Chief executive Stephen Squeri put it on the third-quarter earnings call on Friday afternoon, attaching it to a $336 million pre-tax restructuring charge, as CNBC reported from the call. American Express closed 2025 with roughly 76,800 people on payroll, and 5% of that is about 3,840 jobs. Coverage of the call confirms the reduction runs across the global workforce. The Reuters count, carried by Quartz, put the total nearer 3,500 — a gap of a few hundred people that nobody at the company has bothered to close. Whichever figure you hold, it is a mid-sized American town’s worth of employment, spent in a single quarter, on a plan.
That the quarter was strong is the part that should stay in your teeth. Revenue rose 9% to $20.06 billion. Adjusted earnings of $4.68 a share cleared the $4.48 analysts expected. Full-year guidance went up rather than down, and the company told the market it now expects $18.30 to $18.60 a share unadjusted instead of the $17.30 to $17.90 it had guided three months earlier, per the quarterly earnings release the company published. Layoffs usually follow a warning. This one followed an upgrade.
Stephen Squeri — The Severance Was Paid Out of a Sale, Not Out of Trouble
The restructuring did not come out of operating distress, because there wasn’t any. It came, in part, out of a $982 million pre-tax gain on the sale of the company’s stake in Global Business Travel Group, with a slice of that gain routed into funding the charge, the chief financial officer said on the call. Read that twice. American Express found a pile of money, and immediately spent part of it making several thousand employees redundant.
Squeri’s own framing was momentum, not survival: strong numbers, but a need to be leaner to accelerate innovation over the next few years. Shares fell about 4% anyway. Investors, apparently, can count.
A company that pays for severance out of asset-sale proceeds is not a company in trouble. It is a company making a choice, and dressing the choice in the language of necessity.
Christophe Le Caillec — Automate Later, Empty the Seats Now
CFO Christophe Le Caillec gave CNBC the sequence, and the sequence is the story. The aim, he said, was an organisation that is leaner, more agile, and prepared for AI. You should not, in his words, automate processes that are badly structured. So the company is reducing layers of management and widening how many people report to each individual manager first — and the automating gets to happen in the quarters and years that follow.
That is not a description of AI taking work. It is a description of work being taken before the AI is ready to take it. The seats are being cleared in advance of the software that allegedly needs the room, which means the tens of millions of dollars in severance buy a reorganisation, and the AI arrives afterwards as a promise the reorganisation can be blamed on.
Firing the people who run a process is the easy half of automating it. The hard half is the part with the invoice still open.
3,840 People — $87,500 a Head, And Nobody Has Said Which Heads
Divide the charge by the headcount: roughly $87,500 per eliminated position, which is what severance, notice periods, continued benefits and outplacement cost when a white-collar employer does this at scale. It is a generous number by American standards. It is also a number that ends.
American Express has not published a breakdown by function, so the people filling in the blanks are the ones whose job titles match the word “repeatable”: the servicing queues, the fraud and disputes desks, the travel and dining lines, the back-office reconciliation teams, the analysts who compile the reports that a model will eventually compile. These are not the jobs of the future, and everyone knew that. They are also the first rung of the ladder for people who had not yet climbed to the second.
Somewhere in those 3,800 is a person who answers the phone when your card is declined in a Lisbon hotel at two in the morning, and who will spend the next several months explaining a gap in her employment history to a hiring manager who has 400 other applications from people doing exactly the same thing. The charge is named. She is not.
Cardholders — The Assistants Get an API. The Staff Got a Date.
Squeri gave AI about ten minutes of his prepared remarks, and most of that was about cardholders: personalising offers, and letting customers’ own assistants transact on their behalf. He also drew a hard boundary, promising outside assistants would not be let loose inside American Express systems and that access would run only through vetted API or MCP connections, because customers and merchants have to be protected. That is a sound engineering position and a defensible commercial one.
Notice, though, who appears in the sentence about protection and who does not. The customer gets a roadmap. The merchant gets a gate. The employee gets a charge date and an $87,500 average and a manager who found out the same morning as the analysts.
Barclays and AmEx — Two Banks, One Week, the Same 5%
Barclays confirmed on Thursday that it will remove 5,000 roles, also about 5% of its staff, on the same reasoning. American Express followed within a day. Both are profitable. Both described the cut as preparation rather than repair. Two institutions landing on the identical percentage inside 24 hours is not a coincidence and not a coincidence twice; it is a template being passed around the industry, with the same slide and the same word on it.
AI-mekna has become the standard explanation for a payroll cut, which is convenient, because it cannot be checked against a quarterly report and the savings are visible immediately.
The Test — Watch the Expense Line, Not the Announcement
Here is the accounting trick that will hide the answer from you for at least two quarters. The charge is booked now, so the cost of the decision is already in the numbers. The benefit is promised later, so any improvement in the next few reporting periods can be presented as vindication, when a portion of it is simply 3,800 salaries that stopped being paid and a restructuring charge that will not repeat.
By the second quarter of next year the question becomes answerable, and it has one form: is revenue per employee climbing because the systems got better, or because the denominator got smaller? The income statement cannot tell the difference. The servicing queue can. So can the call you make at two in the morning, and how long it rings before somebody picks up.
American Express raised its guidance and cut 5% of its people in the same afternoon, and called both of them confidence. One of those claims is auditable. The other one is a promise, and the people who are keeping it have already been let go.
Sources: CNBC, Quartz, Yahoo Finance, American Express.