Some Canadian companies that replaced workers with AI are already hiring them back. In a recent Robert Half survey of 1,365 Canadian hiring managers, more than a third of those who laid off staff due to AI say they’ve since added the same or similar positions back. In another survey of 600 hiring managers conducted by global workforce company Careerminds, 91 per cent of those who cut staff believed AI didn’t deliver what it had promised. Many said AI required more oversight than expected, critical skills and expertise were lost, and the tools simply underperformed. More than half rehired staff within just six months as they realized the value of the roles they’d replaced. 

There’s also little evidence showing how much AI-related layoffs collectively improve bottom lines. Cutting payroll can create immediate savings. But according to the Careerminds survey, when companies laid off workers, 75 per cent of the time they either lost money or cancelled out their savings when they had to rehire because they paid for additional recruitment costs and lost institutional knowledge. Workers’ trust can also break in the long term.

These layoff reversals suggest that the race to replace people has mostly been driven by excitement around AI, rather than a clear understanding of which parts of a job it could realistically replace. Employers have this new shiny tool, but they don’t know what it’s useful for, so they just integrate it everywhere.

This is a common mistake. The right way to introduce any new tool in the workplace is by identifying the business problem, which is often social in nature because it involves people. In sales, for example, it’s crucial to build rapport and trust with potential new customers. Using AI to write the sales rep’s emails can be counterproductive to building that connection. A better way to solve the problem while maintaining the social aspect of the job could be to use AI to support the employee—transcribing conversations with customers or setting reminders about when to follow up—rather than replacing that employee entirely.

I believe many rash decisions have been made partly due to a fear, often instilled by those selling AI, that unless you move quickly, you’ll be left behind. But technological change rarely happens overnight: computers and the internet transformed workplaces gradually, giving companies and workers time to adapt. So far, AI’s impact on productivity and employment in Canada remains modest—nowhere near the cataclysmic labour-market disruption many have predicted. Its broader effects will likely take up to 10 years to become clear. Companies have time to be deliberate.

Many leaders evaluate AI by asking how often it comes up with the right answer. But the more important question is what happens when it gets something wrong. An error in routine meeting notes may be harmless; an error involving a mortgage application, legal advice or cancer diagnosis carries serious financial, legal or human consequences. In those settings, the employee is not merely completing a task but providing judgment and assuming a type of liability machines never should. When organizations replace these workers, AI adoption will likely fail. 

Even when AI performs some tasks cheaply and well, it doesn’t mean it can do an entire job. In areas like customer service, AI may be helpful in routine processes like recovering lost passwords or requesting updated flight information, but it’s less effective when it comes to managing complicated issues like tracking fraudulent credit card activity or making changes to a complicated year-long travel itinerary. It’s good at calculations, coding or programming-related tasks, especially in finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but AI-written code tends to be longer than human-written code, so it runs a little slower and less efficiently.

Ultimately, we have to take company announcements about AI-related layoffs with a grain of salt. The reality is that many businesses are experiencing other negative shocks, like trade disruptions and post-pandemic corrections. Rather than telling investors they’re laying people off because the economy is bad, they can create a more positive spin by attributing redundancies to AI. 

For businesses looking to adopt AI, I’d urge caution. It’s okay to dream big, but companies require trust from their employees, and there’s no faster way to burn that trust by replacing them en masse with AI tools—especially if they haven’t been properly tested.

—As told to Sanam Islam

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Viet Vu is the manager of economic research at The Dais, a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University.

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What did you think of this story? Send a comment for publication to letters@macleans.ca, and supply your name and address. Comments should be fewer than 200 words, and may be edited for length and clarity.

Over 15 years living in Whistler, road conditions on the Sea to Sky Highway have had an outsized impact on Brittia Thompson's life. From a missed birthday party when a crash brought traffic to a standstill, and times she has had to work from home during heavy snow, to cancelled visits with family reluctant to drive the road at night. Read More

When I was a kid in the ’90s, my grandma and I sent each other letters in the mail, even though we both lived in the same small Ontario town, just a few minutes apart. We were close—she taught me how to paint with watercolours, press flowers, make paper dolls and play the piano. Writing letters was just another way for us to be creative together. She wrote to me about which flowers were blooming and her cat Musette. She asked me questions, like if I’d ever been on a waterbed. I wrote back about my friends and the crafts I was making. In our letters, we could share and reflect on small moments in our days that felt special. It added a layer of connection that might not have existed otherwise.

Back then, I wasn’t only writing to my grandma. My friends and I were constantly sending each other letters. We used brightly coloured pens and often finished our dispatches with cheesy, inspirational quotes like, “If it’s meant to be, it will be.” I mailed notes to relatives in New Zealand and a few pen pals I made as a teenager. When I backpacked across Europe in my twenties, I made collaged postcards and sent them to everyone who’d let me stay with them. 

But like most things analogue, my letter-writing practice didn’t last. Over the past two decades, as my photography career got busier and so much of our communication moved online, I almost completely gave up the habit. The same thing happened with my photography. Back when I shot film, I was always in the darkroom developing negatives or making prints. Once I started working mostly in digital, the tactile part of the process largely disappeared. I also felt increasingly distracted by my phone. I missed working with my hands, and decided that snail mail would be a great way to get crafty again. Receiving letters made with care had always changed the tone of my day. I wanted to offer that small feeling of connection to others, too.

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In the summer of 2025, I shared a photo of one of my grandma’s letters on Instagram and asked if anyone missed receiving mail. Hundreds of people liked it and left comments, wanting to participate. A few weeks later, I did a trial run, sending 36 letters to friends and Instagram followers for $5 each to help cover postage and supplies. I handwrote one letter about my love for mail and the changing seasons, scanned and printed it, then added a P.S. note tailored to each recipient. I wanted the experience of opening mail to be fun, so each one involved layers of unwrapping, with leaves and stickers covered in tissue paper, folded into tiny envelopes and sealed by hand. The whole process—decorating each package, writing addresses, making and signing photo prints, cutting out stickers and collecting and pressing leaves—took around 25 hours in total, spread over weeks. By the end I had hand cramps and paper cuts, but I was already thinking about the next one.

People messaged me within days. Some told me they opened their letters with their kids. Others who’d moved away from Ontario signed up for a small slice of home, and a few even sent letters back. The response led me to officially launch Bloom Strolling, my seasonal snail mail project. People sign up through my personal website to receive letters by season or as an annual subscription. Four times a year, I send out a handwritten note about what I notice on my daily walks, observations about the changing seasons and photographs I take along the way. 

I try to be vulnerable in my letters. In my latest, I wrote about passing an older man who reminded me of my late grandpa—he wore the same kind of navy bomber jacket and button-up shirt. When I said hello, he paused before greeting me back, as though he had to think about it. The moment caught me off guard. As we walked away from each other, I teared up. I somehow felt seen, or understood, and I wondered if I reminded him of someone, too. A few readers told me that story made them cry.

Others have written to say that small details from my letters stayed with them: one person told me the warm light in a photograph from my winter letter was so calming that she hung it beside her bed. When I sent out red bows with one of my batches, several women said they’d worn them in their hair that week. One reader recently wrote, “I live rurally and have a community mailbox. My eight-month-old son and I take daily walks to the mailbox. Anticipating your seasonal snail mail will make our journey that much more exciting.” It was so rewarding to see that my letters brought others meaning and joy. It was exactly what I’d hoped.

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Today, I occasionally spread the word about the mail club through Instagram. Mostly, I go old-school: I put up flyers around town where people can rip off a tag to join. Currently, I have more than 60 members, most of them women in their mid-twenties to mid-forties. I think younger people yearn for physical media, while millennials crave the nostalgia of slower forms of connection. I have subscribers from across Canada and the U.S., as well as a few in Germany, Ireland, France and Australia. Many have bought subscriptions for friends, siblings and grandparents, too. One woman told me she’d even signed up her pen pal.

Of course, the project is not without its challenges. The biggest is my own perfectionism. I put a lot of care into each mailout, because I want every person to feel like they matter. But that takes time. I may eventually need to print labels instead of writing each one by hand. The project also costs a lot more than I expected. I try to source everything locally—the envelopes, stickers and paper all come from craft stores near my house. I’m adamant about not supporting big corporations, but that makes things more expensive. 

Lately, I’ve noticed more snail mail clubs popping up, built around a monthly subscription model and standardized so everyone receives the same thing. Sometimes I feel pressured to approach mine in a similar way, so I can scale my project quickly. But for me, snail mail is intentionally slow. I never want it to feel like a factory line. I’m enjoying the DIY process of decorating each envelope, choosing the colour palette and photographs, determining which stamps best fit the season and deciding which flowers to press.

When I post my professional photography on social media, I instinctively monitor how well it performs and watch people respond in real time. It makes me question the work I care about. Social media is distracting, addictive and overwhelming. But snail mail offers the opposite: I don’t know how well my work will be received, or even if it will arrive, which feels freeing. I trust my instincts with what I’ve made, and let it go. 

Many of my friends also want to log off and return to more analogue ways of being. It’s a natural rebellion against digital overload, when so much online is fast and disposable. Receiving a letter forms a tangible connection to another person, while writing one is a way to connect with yourself. In a loud and chaotic world, letters are peaceful. Whenever I receive mail, its content stays with me longer than anything I read in an email or newsletter on my computer.

That feeling is part of what keeps drawing me back to letters, and back to my grandma. She died when she was only 65, when I was 12, and I miss her. I kept all of her letters, covered in butterfly stickers, written on floral stationery, with beautiful vintage stamps. When I read them now, I’m struck by how often she thought of me in the small details of her day. I still can’t get through a single one without crying. There’s so much love in them. Starting this project of my own has made me realize how much of her still lives in me.

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HURRAAAAAAAAAY!!! We’ve been waiting a looooong time to share this news: the United States Postal Service is issuing some shiny new Postcrossing stamps! Woohoo!

It’s been a long road to get here: many of you have written to the USPS Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee over the years to ask for a Postcrossing stamp, and we’ve also been working with USPS behind the scenes for quite a while to make this happen. It’s finally happening, and what a huge honor it is for the community. A proper celebration of the joy, generosity, and curiosity that postcrossers put into the world every day.

Anyway, let’s talk about the stamps themselves… because: TRIANGLES! 😍

The new Postcrossing stamps are triangular, which is a pretty rare format for USPS. And yes — that means you can place one right on the corner of a postcard for an especially cool look. Since there are four different stamps to choose from, you won’t always be sending (or receiving) the same ones. These are global forever stamps, which means they are the international postcard (or letter) rate, and you need one single stamp to send a postcard abroad.

Visually, they’re a lot of fun: bold colors and playful scenes with lots of tiny details. They were designed by Antonio Alcalá and illustrated by Jackson Gibbs, and the result is energetic, bright, and unmistakably Postcrossing.

The launch day is May 26, 2026, and there will be a commemorative ceremony at the the Boston 2026 World Expo — and everyone’s invited! Even better: there will be Postcrossing meetups every day of the show (which is free!), so bring postcards, say hi, and let’s celebrate together. No worries if you can't make it to Boston — like any other USPS stamps, these will be available online and at post offices around the country.

We’ll share more details (including meetup info and other products that will be available along with the stamps) as we get closer to the date. But for now, we’re just going to sit here grinning at these gorgeous triangles for a while.

USA postcrossers: are you ready? And everyone else: who’s hoping to receive one of these on a postcard very soon?

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