The Perfect Storm

Have you ever noticed how a phrase can suddenly be everywhere? "Perfect storm." I've been hearing it in earnings calls, reading it in trade press, even picking it up in conversations with clients watching their teams shrink. The thing is, it gets tossed around so casually that I started wondering... does anyone actually know where it comes from?

I stumbled upon the answer in a story from 1991. A meteorologist named Bob Case was watching a storm build off the New England coast when he noticed something unusual. Three weather systems were converging on the same patch of ocean. One pulling warm air north, another dragging cold air south, and Hurricane Grace pumping tropical moisture right into the middle. Any one of them would've been a bad day at sea. Together, they built the storm that killed six fishermen. Years later, Sebastian Junger gave it a book title.¹

Three systems. One forecast nobody issued.

What struck me wasn't the storm itself. It was the convergence. Three systems, each survivable on its own, and nobody tracking the spot where they all meet.

The labor market data from the past year reminds me of that weather chart. U.S. companies announced 1.2 million job cuts in 2025, the highest since the pandemic. The fascinating part? AI was cited in just 4.5 percent of them.²

So what about the other 95 percent? Economy. Federal cuts. Companies closing. The familiar cold fronts. But this got me thinking. Harvard Business Review talked to a thousand executives around the world, and sixty percent said they'd already cut people because of what AI might do. Only two percent cut because of what it actually did.³

Imagine that for a second. Companies already under pressure to cut. That's the cold front. Then AI shows up, and suddenly there's a reason to do it now instead of next year. That's the warm air. In a better economy, those layoffs probably sit in a drawer somewhere. Instead, years of workforce changes got crammed into a few short months.

It wasn't just an American story, either. ASML in the Netherlands had record profits and still dropped 1,700 people. Bosch and the German automakers cut tens of thousands. Halfway around the world, Tata in India let go of 12,000 and Nissan in Japan, 11,000.⁴ Nobody planned this together. They didn't have to. The same weather was forming everywhere.

Different cities. Different industries. Same weather.

Britain was the canary. Morgan Stanley found that UK companies lost eight percent of their jobs to AI in just one year. Twice the global average.⁵ British companies got roughly the same productivity boost from AI as American ones. But everything else was worse. Wages going up, taxes going up, growth going nowhere. Same technology, completely different outcome. It's like the same storm hitting two coastlines. It tears up the one where the seawall's already cracked.

I keep coming back to Bob Case and those six fishermen off Gloucester. They weren't killed by warm air or cold air or a hurricane. They were killed by the compound. All three arriving in the same water at the same time. Could it be that we're watching the same kind of convergence right now? Everyone's tracking AI as if it's the whole story. It's 4.5 percent of the story. The rest is everything else, arriving at once.

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References

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia. "Perfect storm." Describes meteorologist Bob Case's analysis of the 1991 Halloween Nor'easter and Sebastian Junger's adoption of the phrase. Wikipedia ↩

2. CNBC. "AI was behind over 50,000 layoffs in 2025." Challenger, Gray & Christmas data on 1.17 million total U.S. job cuts and 55,000 attributed to AI. CNBC ↩

3. Davenport, T.H. and Mittal, N. (2026). "Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI's Potential—Not Its Performance." Survey of 1,006 global executives on anticipatory vs. actual AI-driven headcount reductions. Harvard Business Review ↩

4. Global Finance Magazine. "AI, Tariffs Fuel Big Tech Layoffs." International layoff data including European manufacturers and Asia-Pacific firms. Global Finance ↩

5. Morgan Stanley research via Staffing Industry Analysts. "AI job cuts are landing hardest in Britain." UK net job losses, productivity comparisons, and labor market conditions. SIA ↩