Blog · Research · 8 October 2026 · 12 min read

One Filing Names AI and Gives No Number. The Other Gives a Number and Says It Is Not AI.

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On 6 October 2026, two US software companies filed Form 8-Ks with the SEC disclosing workforce reductions decided on the same day, 1 October. Both filings are Item 2.05 disclosures, the part of the form a company is legally on the hook for. They sit about eight and a half hours apart in EDGAR's acceptance log.

Fair Isaac Corporation, the company behind the FICO score, names AI inside that filed text and publishes no headcount. HubSpot never uses the word AI in its filing at all, and the letter its CEO furnished alongside it says the cuts are not an AI story, while giving the only count of actual people either company published this week.

By the following morning, both were AI layoff stories. One of them had a specific number of people attached that nobody had disclosed. The other carried its own denial inside the article, several paragraphs below a headline that said AI.

What FICO filed

FICO'sItem 2.05 disclosureopens with one sentence that carries the whole rationale:

On October 1, 2026, management of Fair Isaac Corporation (the "Company") committed to a plan of workforce reduction by reducing the number of layers in the organization, simplifying the operating structure, optimizing processes and tools, and integrating AI-driven product development.

That is four methods in one list, and AI is the fourth. The filing does not say how many of the cuts come from flattening layers, how many from simplifying structure, how many from process and tooling, and how many from the AI item. It also describes a change in how FICO builds products, which is not the same claim as AI doing work that people used to do.

The scale: "This plan involves the elimination of approximately 15% of positions across the Company." Not people. Positions. The filing never converts that into a headcount, never gives a denominator, and never breaks it down by country or function. It adds that affected employees "were notified beginning the week of October 5, 2026", that the company expects pre-tax charges of "approximately $27.0 million", and that the plan should be "substantially completed by the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2027", which on FICO's 30 September year end means 30 June 2027.

We counted the words in the filing ourselves. "AI" appears exactly once, inside the sentence quoted above. "Artificial intelligence" appears zero times. "Automation" appears zero times. So does any form of the word "competition". There is no Item 7.01, no exhibit, and no attached press release or employee letter. What you see above is the entire public rationale.

Where the number 570 came from

By 7 October, coverage had a figure. Cryptopolitan, under the headline "FICO to cut 15% of its workforce in AI-driven restructuring", reported that FICO"plans to cut 15% of its workforce, potentially affecting around 570 employees".

GuruFocus printed the derivation openly, which is useful, because it shows the whole operation in one clause:"about 570 positions based on its 3,811 employees as of September 2025".

That is the right arithmetic on the wrong kind of input, and it is worth taking apart because the same move happens every week on this beat.

The 3,811 is real. FICO's last annual report states: "As of September 30, 2025, we employed 3,811 persons across 28 countries." Fifteen per cent of 3,811 is 571.65. So the number is not invented, and nobody is being dishonest.

But three things happen on the way to "570 employees". The baseline is a year old, taken before a fiscal year in which FICO both hired and, as its own annual report records, eliminated 226 positions in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 alone. The units change: the 8-K eliminates positions, the 10-K counts persons, and a position can be vacant. And "approximately 15%", read as a figure rounded to the nearest whole per cent, covers a real range of roughly 553 to 591 against that same baseline.

FICO employs people in 28 countries, with its largest group in India rather than the US, so "570 jobs" also tells you nothing about where those positions are. None of that makes 570 a bad estimate. It makes it an estimate, and it is printed as a fact.

What HubSpot filed, and what its CEO wrote

HubSpot's8-Kdiscloses a plan authorised by its board on the same 1 October, "that results in the elimination of certain roles, impacting approximately 7% of the Company's workforce", with estimated charges of "approximately $65 million to $75 million". Its stated reason is strategy and structure: the plan is "designed to create a flatter, faster organization aligned to that strategy".

On our count, that document contains the word "AI" zero times. Also zero occurrences of "artificial intelligence", "automation", and any form of "competition".

The headcount lives in a different document. HubSpot furnished a letter from CEO Yamini Rangan asExhibit 99.1, and it opens with the only real number anyone published this week: "We have decided to reduce the size of our team by ~7% and will be saying goodbye to nearly 660 HubSpotters."

The letter mentions AI four times, and two of those are the interesting ones. First it describes the strategy:

Over the past year, we have shifted our strategy from building software that helps customers grow to delivering outcomes for them with AI. That shift is transforming product, pricing and how we serve our customers.

Then it rules AI out as the driver of the cut:

This is not driven by AI-related efficiencies. We believe in a world where AI helps make us more productive and we will continue to invest to make that happen. This change is about aligning our organization with our strategy and how we need to operate going forward.

A denial deserves exactly as much scepticism as a claim. This is the decision-maker describing its own decision, with no auditor and no regulator testing it, and the letter is furnished rather than filed, which is thedistinction this site covered in August. Note also what the denial does not cover: the letter says AI is transforming product, pricing and how HubSpot serves customers, and the reorganisation is explicitly aligned to that strategy. Saying AI efficiency did not drive the cut is not the same as saying AI had nothing to do with the strategy the cut serves.

The denial and the headline in the same article

Here is the part worth sitting with. The HubSpot coverage did not miss the denial. It printed it, under a headline that said the opposite.

Quartz ran"HubSpot layoffs: 660 jobs cut in AI restructuring"on 6 October, and inside the piece reported that "Rangan also said the cuts were not driven by AI-related efficiencies or cost-cutting".

CBS News Boston ran"HubSpot layoffs to affect 660 employees at Cambridge-based company amid AI shift"the same day, and wrote that Rangan "did note that the layoff decision 'is not driven by AI-related efficiencies'".

Both outlets did the reporting. Neither buried the quote or got it wrong. The AI framing entered in the headline, which is where most people stop, and which is also what a search engine or an AI summariser is most likely to carry forward.

Why 7% and 660 do not quite line up

One more arithmetic note, because it cuts the other way and honesty requires it. HubSpot's last annual report says "we had 8,882 full-time employees as of December 31, 2025 and 8,246 as of December 31, 2024."

Seven per cent of 8,882 is about 622. The letter says nearly 660, which is about 7.4% of that same base. The two figures reconcile if HubSpot grew during 2026, or if "approximately 7%" is simply a rounded version of 7.4%, and nothing published this week says which. The company's most recent filed headcount is more than nine months old, which is the normal state of affairs for every company on this beat, and the reason a percentage and a people-count rarely agree to the decimal.

This is also why the 660 is worth more than the 570. One is a company counting its own people. The other is an outsider multiplying a company's percentage by a company's year-old headcount.

What this pair does and does not tell you

It does not tell you that AI is or is not taking software jobs. Two filings is not a dataset, and neither document contains the thing that would answer the question: a count of roles whose work is now done by a machine.

What the pair does show is how much distance there is between a filed sentence and a headline, in both directions at once. FICO put AI into the one paragraph it is legally accountable for, and the press correctly reported that, then added a headcount the company had not given. HubSpot kept AI out of that paragraph and had its CEO rule it out by name, and the press reported that too, underneath a headline that said AI anyway.

If you are trying to work out whether AI is coming for your own role, the practical lesson is narrow and useful: the AI content of a layoff story is frequently added after the document, and the document is two minutes away.

Two minutes, four checks

1. Find the 8-K on EDGAR and read Item 2.05. That is the filed disclosure of the reduction, and it is usually under 500 words.
2. Search the document for "AI" and "artificial intelligence". If neither appears, the AI framing came from somewhere outside the filing. Check where.
3. Look for a headcount. If the filing gives only a percentage and the article gives people, find out which headcount was multiplied and how old it is.
4. Check whether the number counts positions or persons. Those are different quantities, and the gap between them is vacancies.

Neither of these companies did anything improper. FICO disclosed what Item 2.05 asks for. HubSpot disclosed more than it had to and added a letter that answered the obvious question before anyone asked it. The distortion happened entirely in the retelling, which is the only part of this chain that nobody signs.