Answers

I was laid off because of AI. What should I do now?

Do not start by applying. Start by working out what you were actually being paid for, because the job title you lost is not the thing you were selling. The most common mistake is re-applying into the same category that just automated, which is the one place the displacement is worst and the competition is thickest.

Why the first thirty days usually get spent badly

The instinct after a layoff is to restore the previous state as fast as possible. Same title, same industry, same kind of company, ideally same pay. It feels like the responsible move, and it is emotionally the cheapest one, because it requires no new story about yourself.

The problem is that a role eliminated for structural reasons has usually been eliminated across the category, not just at your company. Applying into it puts you in the largest possible applicant pool, competing on the most comparable possible terms, for the smallest remaining number of seats.

Volume makes this worse rather than better. Two hundred applications into a shrinking category is not persistence, it is the same bet placed repeatedly.

Your title was the packaging, not the product

You were hired under a title. You were kept, promoted and trusted for something narrower and more specific than that title, and it is usually a particular kind of judgment your team stopped checking.

A useful way in: think of the last time a decision waited for you. Not a task that waited, a decision. What did people believe you would see that they would not? That is closer to what you were actually being paid for than anything printed on your offer letter.

This matters commercially, not just emotionally. The title describes a category that is contracting. The underlying judgment may be scarce in a category that is expanding, and those two facts can be true at the same time.

Two doors, and they need different preparation

There are genuinely two routes out, and the reason to name both is that they demand different work. Picking one early saves weeks; drifting between them costs them.

The first is reattaching to a role, ideally in a room where what you supply is scarcer than it was where you left. Same kind of work, repriced by a different audience.

The second is selling the judgment directly, as a consultant, a fractional operator, or your own product. This route trades security for control over pricing, and it suits a specific pattern of experience rather than being a universal fallback.

Neither is the brave choice or the safe choice. They are different businesses with different first ninety days, and the honest question is which one your actual history supports.

Do the runway math before the strategy

Before choosing a route, calculate how many months you can cover at your real monthly expenses, not your imagined lean-budget ones. Include the things that do not pause: insurance, minimum debt service, anything with a contract.

This number determines which route is available to you, and it is the single input most people avoid computing. A long runway makes the build-your-own route viable. A short one makes a focused search the responsible move, and that is a legitimate answer rather than a failure.

Doing this early converts a background dread into a date. A date can be planned against.

What to actually do this week

A sequence, in order, that does not require knowing your answer yet.

  1. 01Compute the runway number. One hour with a bank statement, not an estimate from memory.
  2. 02Write down five decisions from your last two years that waited for you specifically, and what you saw in each that others did not.
  3. 03Look for the through-line across those five. It is usually a single kind of judgment applied in different contexts, and it is usually not what your title says.
  4. 04Name three rooms, as specifically as you can, where that judgment is currently scarce. Industries under pressure that your experience happens to speak to are a good place to look.
  5. 05Have one conversation, not one application. Someone already in one of those three rooms, asked what they are short of rather than whether they are hiring.

Where this stops being enough

This sequence assumes the layoff was structural rather than performance-related, and that you have at least a few weeks of runway to think with. If the runway is measured in days, the correct order changes: secure income first on any terms, then run this afterwards. That is not a compromise, it is the right sequence under that constraint.