On Monday, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon sent employees an email announcing an upcoming "performance-focused reduction" that will follow the company's annual review cycle, meant to build "a stronger performance culture" and address situations where the company "has consistently fallen short of expectations." Notifications of impacted team members won’t start until November and it doesn’t say how many positions will be affected. Reuters couldn't work it out either, and Qualcomm didn't respond to its request for comment. The company had about 52,000 employees as of last September.

A day later, and on the other side of the world, National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia's four big banks, told the market and its staff that it would cut up to 2,500 internal roles, about 6 percent of the bank, by next June. Fifteen hundred of those will go before the end of the year, the other thousand throughout the first half of 2027. The statement says the rationale is, “more challenging economic conditions, increasing customer expectations, competitive intensity and rapid technological change.” CEO Andrew Irvine is quoted saying “our ambition and strategy remain unchanged,” that the bank is “particularly focused on reducing the size of corporate functions,” and that “we will treat every person with dignity and respect.” It does not use the words “AI” or “artificial intelligence.” A ten-day consultation with staff and the union is already underway, managers are already meeting their teams, and people are being offered voluntary redundancy before they know whether they’d be picked anyway.

So in both cases, a cut is looming, it's been announced, but the people it will directly impact haven't been chosen yet. Qualcomm employee will have to wait until November and beyond. NAB’s runs through Christmas, into the new year, and on to June. These extended layoff patterns, where companies announce job cuts weeks or months before the individual decisions are announced, are fresh examples that reflect a trend originally reported on by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

Now some of the timing isn't entirely in leaders' control. NAB has obligations to disclose material information to the market, and consulting employees on thousands of potential cuts while keeping that information confidential would be pretty difficult. Qualcomm, meanwhile, is tying its decisions to an annual review process that hasn't finished. Neither company can necessarily announce every answer on day one but that doesn't mean employees should be left without a clear explanation of how these decisions will be made.

What the word choice tells us

Qualcomm’s note calls this a “performance-focused reduction” and right now, nobody objects to it, because nobody has been told it applies to them. But in November, people will start getting the call, and every one of them will walk out with the same explanation: Qualcomm let me go for performance. That’s the version their colleagues hear, and it’s the version they’ll have to explain in their next job interview.

You can watch this vacuum being filled in real time. On the Qualcomm subreddit, a thread titled “CA dropped a bomb” had more than 260 comments within two days. Does it apply to me if I joined in January and went through this year’s review? What if I joined in August and didn’t? Which business units, which levels, what percentage? Does last year’s rating count or this year’s? Do notices come in two weeks or in November? Is hiring frozen? One person had joined that day and opened the memo. Another had a theory that the company was timing the cut to recover unvested stock from people it had just hired. That theory is probably wrong but it exists because nobody gave them a better one.

And almost none of these questions need a number. Who’s in scope, which review cycle counts, when notices go out, what happens to pending offers, what severance has looked like before: the company knows all of that - or should have - today. The communications couldn’t say how many perhaps but it could have said when and how and it would have shortened the wait for thousands of people who are now asking strangers on Reddit instead. One commenter put the whole Q3 lane in a sentence: “Just do the layoff rather than having people worry for a few weeks.” Indeed.

What makes this odd is that the company’s own rationale, in Amon’s words, is about the company, not the people. “As we have expanded the business, so have the competencies and skills we require” is a different way of saying that we moved into new markets and we now need different skills than we hired for. That’s a valid reason to cut roles, and most layoff communications stop there, usually with a line like “this is not a reflection of your contributions.” But Qualcomm went the other way and put a label on it that points at the individual. Judging only by what Reuters quoted, the memo says one thing about the company and puts a different word on the people. Guess which one they’ll remember. And the people are already reading it that way: by the second day of the thread, the consensus had moved from “I hope it’s strictly performance based” to “it seems that it’s about politics not performance.” Which is the label doing its damage before a single name has even been announced.

NAB also gave a reason and the reason lasted about three hours.

NAB’s statement says the cuts are about tougher economic conditions, higher customer expectations, competition and “rapid technological change.” But by late morning two outside voices had shared a different perspective. Nicole McPherson of the Finance Sector Union, which represents bank staff, called the statement “full of nothing but corporate spin.” Helen Bird, who teaches corporate governance at Swinburne University, told media that the cuts “should prompt serious questions about how much work will be handed to AI and other technology,” and then said what she thought was really going on saying, “it does appear that the driving force for these changes is entirely financial.” She called much of the statement “PR speak.”

By the end of the day the Australian Financial Review had four bank analysts on record, each with a different hypothesis. Jarden’s Matt Wilson called it “reactionary” and said NAB is “two years behind ANZ.” Macquarie’s Victor German said the decision “may say as much about management’s revenue outlook as it does about its desire to improve returns.” JPMorgan’s Andrew Triggs said it had surprised the market and asked whether the dividend was safe. Atlas Funds Management’s Hugh Dive, on AI, said, “I’m sure it’s a factor.”

So we’ve got four professionals, four explanations, none of them the bank’s. That’s what happens when the stated reason doesn’t actually explain the decision, and this decision really needs explaining.

NAB added 2,640 roles in 2025. It’s now cutting 2,500, two weeks before it reports an expected $9.1 billion profit. Nobody at the bank has said why it hired that many people last year and is letting that many go this year. So the market said it for them. The shares closed down 1.75 percent, the worst of the big four banks that day. I won’t say the statement caused the drop because the whole Australian market had a rough day. But when a bank announces it’s cutting costs, its share price usually goes up, not down. Something in that statement didn’t land with investors either.

Professor Bird asked whether this was about AI, and according to the AFR, Irvine pushed back on the idea that AI was the motivation. The trouble is he has already answered that question in public more than once. NAB’s own website quotes him saying “AI isn’t going to take our jobs. Humans using AI are going to take the jobs of humans not using AI.” In the same piece he says he expects the bank to need fewer people running day-to-day operations and more people changing and growing the business.

He’s not contradicting himself exactly. “AI will change who works here over time” and “AI didn’t cause this particular cut” can both be true but investors didn’t accept the distinction, and once a fund manager says “I’m sure it’s a factor” on the record, the denial has stopped doing its job. The CEO has told two true stories about technology, but the announcement only picked up one of them.

I don’t think the problem is that AI was left out of a stock-exchange filing. The problem is that the statement and the CEO’s own interviews describe the bank differently. In the interviews, NAB is using AI to need fewer people. In the statement, technological change is something happening to the bank. Analysts, a union official and a professor all noticed the same morning, and each filled the space with their own version.

The two together

Put the two companies side by side and the same underlying mechanism happened at both. When you announce layoffs, people will always fill in the missing pieces of the story for you. At NAB, outsiders filled in the gaps within hours. At Qualcomm, there’s no number for an outsider to argue with, so the story is being completed inside the building by 52,000 employees, each trying to work out if they’ll be on the list.

That second version doesn’t make headlines, which is why it’s easy to miss, but it also costs more. The people who can leave fastest start looking now, and the people who stay spend the next six weeks telling themselves a story the company never wrote.

If I were sitting across from Amon or Irvine this week, the conversation would go something like this:

First, you get one sentence about why people are losing their jobs, and you’re going to have to say it to someone’s face at some point soon. Right now Qualcomm’s message is “you didn’t perform.” If that’s not what you mean, and your communications suggests it isn’t, let’s fix the framing now before the first notification, not after the first LinkedIn post from someone impacted.

Second, write down every question an employee would ask in the first hour, and answer the ones you can: who’s in scope, which review cycle counts, when notices go out, what happens to open offers, what severance looks like. If people are asking those on Reddit on day two, the comms was incomplete.

Third, read the announcement next to what the CEO has already said on record. Irvine has told media previously the bank is using AI to automate work and expects to need fewer people as a result. The layoff statement then describes technological change as a headwind the bank needs to respond to and when asked, he pushed back on AI as the reason. Both can be true, but four analysts and a professor spotted the gap the same morning, and one of them put “I’m sure it’s a factor”. If the CEO has already said “we’re doing this,” the announcement can’t say “this is happening to us.” You have to pick one story and tell it everywhere.

Lastly, the calendar. The announcement is the easy day. What’s going out on day 7, day 21 and day 45? Who’s confirmed safe, and when can we say so? If the honest answer is “nothing until the names are ready,” then the people who can leave will, and we should factor that in.

And one thing not to do given NAB is reporting full-year results on November 5: don’t send the “exciting quarter ahead” note just weeks after this one. They’ll read it as a joke, and they’ll be right.

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