Three weeks ago, a Grand Rapids company named Acrisure opened a $184 million amphitheater in the city it calls home.
Five days later, 2,250 employees got an email.
That is just the week that happened.
A Company Worth Understanding First
Acrisure is genuinely impressive. Most people outside of insurance and fintech have never heard of them, which is part of what makes them interesting. They grew from $38 million in annual revenue to nearly $5 billion in roughly eight years. Their CEO Greg Williams made a deliberate bet on AI as far back as 2020 and built an entire technology narrative around what the company was becoming.
So when Williams sent a memo on May 20th explaining that Acrisure would be eliminating about 11% of its global workforce in phases through 2027, the business logic was not hard to follow. AI and automation were reducing the need for manual work. The company was entering what he called a new phase of execution.
You could disagree with the timing. You could wish the communication had come differently. But the decision itself was the logical conclusion of a strategy that had been telegraphed for years. Anyone paying attention could see it coming.
The Inventory
Here is what Acrisure has put its name on in recent years. I want to be clear that I am listing these as context, not as criticism.
The naming rights to Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh, home of the Steelers, a 15 year deal worth a reported $150 million. The $184 million amphitheater in Grand Rapids that opened five days before the memo went out. $15 million to Helen DeVos Children's Hospital. A major donation to Michigan State University.
These are real investments in real communities. Greg Williams clearly cares about the places his company operates in. None of this is performance.
And still. 2,250 people got that email.
The company puts its name on buildings that last 15 years. Your career has to outlast all of them.
What the Buildings Cannot Tell You
Naming rights and civic philanthropy are investments in permanence. A stadium carries your name for 15 years regardless of what the economy does. A hospital wing outlasts any org chart. These decisions get made at the level of legacy, of what a company wants to mean to a place over decades.
The workforce operates on a completely different clock.
I am not saying this is sinister. I am saying it is structural. The conversation about which buildings to put your name on and the conversation about which roles AI can now perform faster happen in completely separate rooms. The people in the first room are not wrong. But if you have been building your career on the assumption that doing good work for a good company in a good community means the company will take care of you in return, the Acrisure story is worth sitting with.
Not because they are villains. They are not. But because the logic that produced those layoffs is not unique to Acrisure. It is the logic of every organization navigating AI right now.
Williams' memo was actually more honest than most. He did not hide behind "right sizing" or "organizational optimization." He said directly that AI was reducing the need for manual work. You can respect the directness even while feeling the weight of what it means for 2,250 people who, in his own words, contributed meaningfully to building something now worth $32 billion.
The same week Acrisure sent that email, Meta announced it was cutting 8,000 jobs for the same reasons.
This is not a trend anymore. It is the operating environment.
Building Something That Travels With You
The professionals navigating this era well are not the ones who work harder or stay more loyal. They are the ones who stopped treating the company as the asset and started treating themselves as the asset.
Here is what that actually looks like in practice.
A title describes your place in someone else's structure. It is useful inside the building and surprisingly fragile outside of it. The question worth sitting with right now is whether your value is tied to knowing how your specific company's specific systems work, or whether you can solve a category of problem that exists across industries and organizations. The first is useful today. The second goes with you everywhere. Most people do not know the answer to that question until they suddenly need to.
I will be honest about this one because I think a lot of high performers make the same mistake I did. The logic goes: if I am exceptional inside this organization, if I deliver results and earn the trust of the people above me and become someone they cannot afford to lose, I will not need an outside network. That logic holds right up until the day it does not. And the day it stops holding is exactly the day you realize how thin your external relationships actually are. The network worth building is not a list of LinkedIn connections. It is a smaller number of real people who know what you do, respect how you think, and will pick up the phone. Build that now. Not when you need it.
Most people check their market value when they are already under pressure. A search starts and suddenly they are trying to figure out what they are worth, what the market looks like, and whether their skills are still current, all at the same time. The people who land well tend to have been paying attention to this continuously. Not obsessively. Just consistently. Know what roles exist for someone with your background. Know what they pay. Know which of your skills are growing in value and which ones are quietly becoming commodities because AI is doing that work faster and cheaper.
Over two years ago I was looking at the numbers for a B2B2C platform I was responsible for.
The technology worked. I had changed the sales leadership and brought in someone who had actually sold that model before. And I still knew the assumptions underneath the business case were more optimistic than the market was prepared to reward.
So I made the call. Outsourced a portion of the business to our distributor network. Over a million dollars in annual savings. A cleaner operating model. Six out of seven impacted employees landed somewhere solid, either inside the organization or with the distributor we transitioned the work to.
By every measure that matters in a business, it was the right call.
The seventh person affected was me.
I did not see that coming the way I should have. And the reason I did not is because I applied rigorous P&L thinking to the business and almost none of it to myself.
Most leaders I have worked with know how to read a business. Very few have applied that same lens to themselves. Here is what it looks like when you do.
I know this because it got forced on me.
The P&L does not lie. It just requires the courage to actually look at it.
The Amphitheater Will Be There in 20 Years
Acrisure did not do anything that every other large organization is not doing or planning to do. That is not a defense of the decision. It is just the honest read. The memo that went out on May 20th could have come from any number of companies in any number of industries. The names change. The logic does not.
The amphitheater will host concerts for decades. The hospital wing will treat children long after the people who funded it are gone. The stadium in Pittsburgh will carry that name through playoff runs and rebuilding seasons alike — and as a Lions fan I say that with full awareness that both of those things can last a very long time.
These are real contributions to real places and they matter.
The 2,250 people who got that email are also real. They built the revenue that made all of it possible. And now they are doing what everyone in that situation does, updating their resume, calling their network, and figuring out what comes next.
Some of them will land quickly. Some will take longer. The ones who land well will almost certainly be the ones who had been treating their career like a business before the decision was made for them.
That is the only real lesson here. Not that companies are cold or that loyalty is dead or that you should spend your career looking over your shoulder. Just that the institution is optimizing for the institution. It always was. The sooner you accept that as a structural reality rather than a betrayal, the sooner you can start building something that actually belongs to you.
Your name is not on any building. That is not a disadvantage. It means everything you build is portable.
Build the thing that travels with you anyway.
The companies making AI driven workforce reductions right now are not struggling organizations. Acrisure is worth $32 billion. Meta is one of the most profitable companies on the planet. These are not emergency decisions. They are strategic ones made from positions of strength, which is precisely what makes them harder to argue with and more important to understand clearly. When a company cuts from strength it is not a crisis. It is a signal about where things are headed.
I am also seeing more senior professionals in the market than at any point in recent memory, not because they underperformed, but because they optimized for the institution rather than for themselves. They delivered. The institution moved on. The ones landing fastest are the ones who had something to show that existed outside their last employer's walls.
A lot of the professionals affected by these reductions are discovering their network was almost entirely internal. Same company. Same industry. Same building, sometimes literally. That is a concentration problem and it compounds quickly in a market moving this fast. Nobody talks about professional network diversification the way investors talk about portfolio diversification.
Give it two years. Someone will start teaching it.
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