American Express confirmed on 23 October that it will cut roughly 5 per cent of its global workforce, alongside a $336 million pretax restructuring charge taken against third quarter results that beat expectations on both revenue and profit. Chairman and chief executive Stephen Squeri told American Banker the move was about speed and agility: “To accelerate innovation and win we need to become a more agile and efficient organization,” he said, adding that he had “asked the senior leadership team to streamline organization and reduce layers to speed decision making.” Nothing in that account named AI as a cause.
Hours later, on the same day, chief financial officer Christophe Le Caillec gave CNBC a different account of the identical restructuring: “So what we’re doing here is to reduce layers and increase spans of control, so that we can automate,” he said, tying the cuts explicitly to preparing the company to use AI “in the coming quarters and the coming years.” He added a caution worth sitting with on its own terms: “You don’t want to automate processes that are not optimally structured.”
Same Structural Change, Two Different Reasons Offered
Both executives described the identical mechanical change: fewer management layers, wider spans of control. What differs is which cause each man was willing to name in public, on the same day, about the same decision. Squeri’s version is one every board has heard before and rarely interrogates: agility, speed, efficiency. Le Caillec’s version names the one word Squeri’s own public remarks left out.
Neither man was lying. A restructuring can genuinely serve both purposes at once, and reducing layers to speed decisions is a real and defensible reason on its own terms. reporting on the cuts puts the reduction at around 5 per cent of a workforce numbered near 77,000, a scale that affects real people regardless of which executive’s framing a reader prefers. The interesting fact is not that the two accounts contradict each other outright. It is that they did not have to match, and nobody inside American Express seems to have thought they needed to.
The Test This Creates for Every Other Organisation
Most organisations making workforce cuts this year have picked one story and held it, usually the version without AI in it, since that framing invites fewer uncomfortable questions from employees, journalists and regulators alike. American Express’s two executives did not coordinate on a single line, and the gap between their answers is now public and permanent, sitting in two separate transcripts that anyone can compare.
That gap is a useful diagnostic for any PMO or governance function reviewing a workforce change tied to a technology programme. If a chief executive and a chief financial officer were each asked, separately, why a specific restructuring happened, would their answers converge on the same cause, or would the gap between them only become visible once someone bothered to check both transcripts. Most organisations have never actually tested this. They assume alignment because nobody has gone looking for the places it might not hold.
What a Governance Function Can Actually Check
A supportive PMO does not own the decision to restructure, and it should not try to. What it can own is making sure the organisation’s own public account of why a change happened is consistent before more than one senior leader is asked to give it. That is a cheap check, usually a single conversation before a results call or a town hall, and American Express’s own week shows what happens when nobody runs it: two true, defensible, individually reasonable answers that nonetheless read, side by side, like two different companies explaining two different decisions.
The deeper lesson sits past the embarrassment of a mismatched quote. If an organisation cannot agree internally on why it is cutting several thousand roles, the odds that it has agreed on how AI will actually be used inside the roles that remain are lower still.
Pick the last significant change your own organisation announced publicly. Ask two people who were in the room, separately, why it happened. Then compare the two answers you get.