Layoffs are down. U.S. employers announced 443,604 job cuts in the first half of 2026, a 40% drop from the 744,308 cuts announced in the first half of 2025. But that’s still the second-highest January-to-June total since 2020, trailing only last year’s government-driven surge.
That said, for the past four straight months, artificial intelligence has been the number one reason companies gave for the cuts. And that’s a dynamic too big to ignore. Coaching clients through AI layoffs is a different business than coaching clients through a downturn, and that difference is something most practices haven’t considered yet.
What the June numbers actually show
The June 2026 job cut report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas came out on July 1. Employers announced 45,849 cuts for the month, down 53% from May. Of those, 14,029 were attributed to AI, roughly a third of everything announced in June, and the fourth month running that AI outranked every other stated reason. Year to date, AI accounts for 101,743 announced cuts.
Tech is carrying most of it. That sector logged 139,156 cuts through the first half of the year, up 83% from the same period in 2025, which works out to nearly a third of all U.S. layoffs.
“Tech remains the epicenter of this year’s cuts. AI is the dominant force as companies are restructuring around it, automating roles, and reallocating budgets toward new capabilities.”
Challenger, Gray & Christmas chief revenue officer Andy Challenger
Notice the shape of that. Fewer people are losing jobs this year than last. But more of the ones who do are losing them to a decision that has nothing to do with normal business cycles.
Why an AI-attributed cut is not a downturn cut
In a downturn, the story a displaced professional tells themselves is about waiting. The market softened. The company overcorrected. The role comes back when things pick up. That story is often true, and it makes coaching during this time a hard sell. Nobody hires a coach to help them wait.
But an AI-attributed cut breaks that story. The work didn’t get postponed. It got absorbed. When a company says out loud that it eliminated a role because software now handles the task, it’s telling that person their old job description isn’t coming back at any point. What’s left is a question about what they do next, and that question is coaching work rather than job-search work.
We’ve already covered how to support someone through job loss. This is the other half of it. Not how you run the session. Who’s about to need one, and whether they can find you.
The people being cut and the people who buy coaching aren’t the same group
This is where a lot of practices are about to get it wrong. One read of an AI layoff wave is a flood of displaced senior professionals hitting the market at once. But the research doesn’t support that as the headline.
Economists at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab tracking the most AI-exposed occupations found that workers aged 22 to 25 are losing ground fastest, with employment in those roles shrinking about 3.8% a year. Entry-level software engineering and customer support jobs are down close to 20% from their late-2022 peak. Workers over 30 in the very same occupations gained 6 to 12% over that window.
So the volume skews younger than the headlines suggest. Meanwhile, the people who buy coaching don’t. Mid-career and senior professionals get cut in real numbers too, and when they do they arrive with two things a 24-year-old usually doesn’t have… A severance package. And a professional identity that no longer matches the market.
Build your ideal client profile around that combination instead of a layoff headline. Money to spend plus an identity to rebuild creates a buyer. Recently unemployed is just a status.
Where these clients actually surface:
Displaced professionals don’t gather anywhere obvious. They scatter fast, and they scatter quietly. Three channels put you closer to them than another post on your own feed will.
1. Outplacement firms
Outplacement is the coaching that’s already funded. It’s a severance benefit the former employer pays for, and one-to-one coaching sits at the center of what those firms deliver, alongside assessments and interview prep. Challenger reports that 97% of its own outplacement clients land equal or better roles, averaging 2.64 months to placement.
Those firms staff that work with coaches, and a good share of those coaches are contractors. Pricing surveys put outplacement programs anywhere from a few hundred dollars for digital-only tiers to five figures for executive engagements. That’s a rate card your prospective clients’ employers are already comfortable paying.
2. HR consultants and fractional people leaders
The person who designs a reduction in force is often an outside consultant. They’re in the room months before anything is announced, and they get asked what support the company should offer on the way out. They have no reason to say your name unless they already know it. This is ordinary partnership work, done earlier in the timeline than most coaches attempt it.
3. Alumni networks and industry communities
Company alumni groups and professional associations are where displaced people go first for a warm introduction, because those rooms are full of people who already know their work. Showing up there as a member who happens to coach beats showing up as a coach who wants members.
Most of them aren’t looking for a coach
This month Forbes ran a piece aimed squarely at laid-off professionals on what to do next. The advice was LinkedIn and personal branding. Coaching wasn’t mentioned once. Not dismissed. Simply absent from the frame.
Which is the honest condition of this market. The demand is real, but the category awareness is close to zero. Someone who just got cut is looking for a job, and coaching reads to them like another expense while they’re on their way to that job… instead of the thing that decides which one they take.
So your marketing can’t assume the buyer is already shopping. It has to name the problem in their words before it names your service. “My role got automated and I have no idea what I’m worth now” is a sentence they would actually say out loud. “Career transition coaching” is not.
How to position when the buyer doesn’t know the category exists
The coaches doing this well aren’t selling recovery. They’re selling the decision that’s waiting on the other side of it.
“Instead of asking, ‘How do I hold on?’ ask, ‘What could I become?’”
Jodie Charlop of Exceleration Partners
That line comes from a Forbes Coaches Council roundup published in July, where sixteen coaches described how they’re handling career uncertainty work right now. Kenneth Mitchell of Blue Ink, in the same piece, put the offer even more plainly. “The best career transitions move toward alignment, not just another job.”
That’s the whole positioning. Not placement. Alignment. A professional whose role was absorbed by software has an unusual opening to ask what actually fits them, and most of them will spend it applying to twenty versions of the job they just lost. Work that surfaces what genuinely energizes a person, whether that’s a motivational assessment like MCode or just an inventory of the projects they’d gladly do again, is what separates this from résumé help.
If senior clients are already your lane, the mechanics here are close to what you already do in executive career coaching. If you want to build a whole practice around the shift, the adjacent niche is coaching people through AI change inside jobs they still hold, which reaches the same person about six months earlier.
The window is open right now
Challenger’s July report lands in the first week of August. AI has topped every other stated reason for four months running, and the tech sector is still cutting at nearly double last year’s pace. Not much in that suggests month five will break the pattern.
The advantage in this won’t go to the coach with the best framework. It’ll go to the one whose name is already top of mind with an HR consultant, an outplacement director, or an alumni group organizer when the next announcement goes out.
That’s slow, unglamorous relationship-building work, and it only pays off if you start it now… before you need it. Which makes a quiet month the best month to start!
