A woman says her cousin’s boss replaced him with AI, then tracked her down demanding he come back after the AI’s reports got clients suing

A post on the BestofRedditorUpdates subreddit recently got people talking about the trend of replacing employees with AI. The post, written by u/MsRothArtist, was originally shared in the EntitledPeople community. In the title, she summarized her story: “Entitled boss fires my cousin to replace him with AI but now demands he come back so they can blame him for AI’s mistakes.”

The Redditor said her cousin, David, had moved to California and lived with her until a management change led to his team being “replaced with AI.” After he moved to another job, she said she started getting letters from his former company, and then a call from his old boss, Ryan, since she had been his emergency contact. The Redditor wrote that Ryan demanded to speak with David and was frustrated that David wasn’t answering his calls or emails.

When she called David, she claimed he told her that the company, which had been sold to a private equity firm, had started using AI to handle everything from legal advice to sales pitches. She wrote that clients began suing the firm because the AI-generated reports had a lot of inaccuracies. According to her post, one French team that flew into San Francisco expecting to meet a human analyst was introduced to an interactive AI figure, and Ryan allegedly argued it counted as a real employee.

The Redditor’s cousin believed the company was looking for a scapegoat

The Redditor wrote that David suspects the company is not just trying to fix its mistakes but to find someone to blame for legal and operational issues. In a later update, she said David and several colleagues were now suing the company. She alleged that the firm had been forging signatures on legal documents and passing off AI work as David’s own to keep clients from walking away.

According to The Globe and Mail, the talent assessment company SHL found that 16% of surveyed U.S. and U.K. workers had been replaced by AI only to be asked back by the same employer. Lucy Beaumont, an executive at SHL, says many companies are choosing to “automate first, understand the work second,” which she describes as backwards.

Per The Globe and Mail, Beaumont warns that this approach often ignores the human judgment and relationship-building that many roles require. A doctor raised a similar point after a major public hospital’s CEO claimed AI is better at diagnosis than humans.

Redditors were harsh in their evaluation of this trend. One user sarcastically called private equity the kind of innovation “you can only get with capitalism.” Another bluntly wrote, “Cyberpsychosis sweeping through the C-suites the way syphilis did the French nobility back in the day.” Others commented directly on the company’s alleged actions, with one user simply writing, “Holy fraudulent documents, Batman!”

Attack of the Fanboy was unable to independently verify the company’s side of the story, as this account originates solely from u/MsRothArtist’s Reddit posts.