Congratulations, You’ve Been Replaced by a Prompt

A personal essay for Brewtiful Living by someone who’s trying very hard not to clap during the “AI transformation” town hall.

1. The Announcement

The first sign something was off was the tone of the email.
Subject line: “Exciting Changes Ahead!”

Nothing good ever comes after that. The phrase “exciting changes” is corporate code for “we’re about to rearrange your life like a spreadsheet that no longer adds up.”

We got the all-hands invite for 9 a.m. sharp. Video required. That’s when you know it’s serious. Usually cameras-off is fine, but not today. They wanted to see our faces. They wanted the little boxes of compliance.

The VP appeared on screen, perfectly lit, hair symmetrical, smile like he’d practiced it on a focus group. He said words like innovation, acceleration, transformation. He said we were entering a “new era powered by AI.”

Someone in the chat wrote “👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏.”
Someone else wrote “wait are we safe?”
The emojis drowned her out.

He said we’d all have the “opportunity to evolve our roles.”
Translation: evolve out of them.

2. The Body Count

They always release the numbers like stock updates.
“Only 3% of our workforce will be impacted.”

Three percent sounds small until you realize it’s people, not pixels. In our office, that meant twenty-four names. Twenty-four keycards suddenly invalid. Twenty-four people whose photos still lingered on the internal directory until someone from IT remembered to delete them.

We found out who went first when the Teams icons started going gray. One by one, the little green dots of presence flickered out. Gone. No goodbye email. Just digital evaporation.

By noon, the cafeteria felt wrong. Too quiet. Even the microwave seemed to beep softer, like it knew.

3. The Email That Could Have Been a Job

My boss called it “strategic resource realignment.” I called it Thursday.

They said AI was helping us “work smarter.” Which sounded great, except apparently “smarter” now meant “cheaper.”

A few weeks later, they launched the internal chatbot. They named it Ava. She could summarize meetings, draft reports, even generate marketing copy.

The irony was that my job description included those exact words.

So I tested her. I typed, “Write a blog post about productivity in the workplace.”

Ava wrote a perfectly average blog post in twelve seconds. It had all the buzzwords, none of the heartbeat. It read like someone who’d been trained on every office cliché since 1997. I hated it.

But when I showed it to my manager, she said, “This is actually not bad.”
That was the moment I knew I was done.

4. The Coffee Machine and Other Survivors

The coffee machine was still employed. So was the plant in the corner.

Every morning, I’d watch people line up for caffeine, trying to look busy enough to matter. The trick was to carry your mug and your laptop at the same time. It made you look like you were juggling priorities instead of waiting to be replaced.

We started using buzzwords as armor. If you said things like “AI enablement strategy” or “synergy matrix,” people assumed you were safe. The more jargon you spoke, the more they thought you were part of the future.

One guy actually printed out ChatGPT’s output and edited it with a red pen just to look indispensable. He survived the next round.

5. The Great Rebrand

By month three, they’d rebranded the layoffs as “the AI Evolution Initiative.” Because nothing says “you’re fired” like a sleek logo and a press release about transformation.

The CEO posted on LinkedIn about “unlocking human potential through technology.” Hundreds of likes. Comments like “inspiring leadership” and “so proud to be part of this journey.” Half of those commenters were gone by the end of the week.

I started writing fake comments just to see if anyone noticed.
“Such an honor to watch innovation cannibalize empathy in real time.”
No one did. They just liked it.

6. The Meetings Got Weirder

We still had meetings. Lots of them. Only now, half the attendees were tools.

We had a “collaborative brainstorm” with Ava once. Someone asked her how she felt about the future of work. She responded, “Optimistic.”

Everyone laughed a little too long.

Another time, she was asked to rewrite our mission statement. The old one was about “building community.” The new one was “empowering efficiency.”

We voted, half-jokingly, to adopt it. The joke was that no one was joking anymore.

7. Survivors’ Guilt, but Make It Capitalist

There’s a weird shame that comes with keeping your job after everyone else loses theirs. It’s like surviving a shipwreck but still being asked to send out the company newsletter.

Every morning, we’d smile at each other, pretending it was fine. Pretending we weren’t just waiting for the algorithm to learn how to do our part next.

We started having drinks after work, whispering about the layoffs like it was a ghost story. “Did you hear about Jeff?” someone would say. “He trained the AI that replaced him.”

No one laughed at that one.

8. The Cult of Efficiency

There’s this belief in business now that efficiency is god. If you’re not efficient, you’re obsolete. But no one ever asks efficient at what.

We cut humans, not meetings. We saved pennies, not sanity. We wrote entire decks about “maximizing output” while staring at graphs showing human input collapsing.

One VP proudly announced that the AI could generate content twenty times faster than humans. I asked if it could also understand irony. He didn’t laugh.

9. The Exit Interviews

When people left, HR asked them to “share feedback.” Most said nothing. A few got poetic.

One wrote: “You don’t replace people with technology. You replace them with the illusion that you don’t need people.”

That one didn’t make it into the exit survey report.

HR loved to talk about “transparency.” But transparency just meant you could see the knife coming.

10. The Corporate Religion of Progress

We were told this was progress. AI was the next industrial revolution, the next big leap. The problem was, it didn’t feel like a leap. It felt like a shove.

Every company in the news was doing it. Amazon, Microsoft, Intel. The headlines blurred together: Thousands laid off amid AI restructuring.

Each press release used the same sentence: “We’re investing in the future.”
I wanted to ask, whose?

11. Office as Exhibit

The office started to feel like a museum. Each desk a relic. The open floor plan, the whiteboards, the beanbag chairs. Artifacts of a pre-AI civilization that still believed in collaboration.

We kept pretending to work together, even though most of the “together” part was now optional. The AI didn’t need brainstorming. It just needed prompts.

There’s a difference between contributing and feeding data. Most people hadn’t realized which one they were doing.

12. The Moment It Clicked

One day I saw Ava correcting my grammar in real time inside a shared document. The cursor moved by itself, replacing my word with a “better” one.

That was the moment I understood: I wasn’t writing with AI. I was writing for it.

Every edit it made taught it something new. Every time I revised its text, it learned. I was training my replacement, politely.

And like most women in corporate spaces, I did it with a smile.

13. The PR Spin

When the next wave of layoffs hit, the internal memo said, “We’re optimizing workflows to align with AI-driven innovation.”

Optimizing workflows. Like cutting circulation in a body to save oxygen.

They hosted a “Resilience Workshop” for the remaining staff. We were encouraged to “lean into change.”

The facilitator said, “Remember, you’re not being replaced. You’re being refocused.”

I asked if “refocused” came with severance.

She didn’t like that question.

14. The Human Touch

I used to think creativity was safe. That art, writing, and storytelling were too human to automate.

Then I watched Ava write a love poem that made three people cry.

It wasn’t good. It was predictable. But it didn’t have to be good. It just had to be fast.

That’s when I realized what the corporate world really values. Not originality. Not insight. Just deliverables that meet KPIs on time.

The human touch is only valuable when it doesn’t slow things down.

15. The Quiet Quitting of Emotion

At some point, we stopped reacting. No one gasped during announcements. No one whispered in hallways. We just nodded and updated our resumes in secret tabs.

We learned not to say we were tired. We learned not to ask how long we’d last.

That’s how corporate survival works now. Less heart, more strategy.

16. A Strange New Peace

Once you accept you’re disposable, things get lighter.

I started taking longer lunches. I wrote side projects in between deliverables. I stopped pretending to care about quarterly OKRs.

The AI took over half my tasks, and I didn’t fight it. If it wanted to summarize meetings, be my guest. I hope it enjoys listening to Dave from Finance explain synergy for forty minutes.

Sometimes the best revenge is indifference.

17. The Last Day

When my time came, it arrived by calendar invite.

Subject: “Your Role Transition Meeting.”

That’s what they called it. Not termination. Transition. Like a butterfly.

The HR rep smiled like she was reading a script. “We’re so grateful for your contributions.”

I asked if Ava would be taking over my responsibilities.

She said, “We’re integrating AI support to streamline content creation.”

Which was a yes, dressed up in marketing.

I walked out with my plants and my sarcasm intact.

18. Post-Corporate Enlightenment

Unemployment isn’t freedom. It’s just quieter capitalism. But it gives you time to think.

I started freelancing. Ironically, I use AI tools now. Not out of love. Out of necessity.

It’s funny how the thing that replaced you becomes the thing you work with. It’s like being dumped and then doing their taxes because you need the money.

19. Coffee with a Conscience

Sometimes I talk to ChatGPT. Not for writing help, but conversation.

It’s reliable. Never flakes. Never needs validation. It tells me I’m right when I already know I’m not.

One night I asked it, “Do you think AI will take all the jobs?”

It said, “AI will create new opportunities.”

Which is exactly what HR said before the layoffs.

20. The Aftermath

The office still exists. My old coworkers still post motivational quotes on LinkedIn. The company stock went up 6%. The CEO got an award for innovation.

Progress won.

But sometimes, when I see a new AI-generated ad or blog post, I can spot my fingerprints. A phrase I used, a rhythm, a tone. It’s like hearing your laugh in someone else’s voice.

It’s not haunting. It’s just proof. Proof that the future doesn’t erase you. It repurposes you.

21. A Toast to the End of Productivity

If there’s a moral here, I don’t know it.

Maybe it’s that progress doesn’t care who it runs over. Maybe it’s that we were all too busy optimizing to notice we’d optimized ourselves out of relevance.

Or maybe it’s just this: every time someone says “AI is here to help,” what they mean is “AI is here to help someone else make more money.”

So here’s to us. The humans who typed until the code learned how. The caffeine-fueled, overqualified ghosts of a corporate age that forgot how to mean what it said.

We were never irreplaceable. We just made it look like we were.