When Acrisure began cutting thousands of Michigan jobs, it blamed a fashionable villain, artificial intelligence. Journalist Chris Brunet tested that claim, and his investigation points somewhere far less futuristic. He reports that the $32 billion broker is quietly shifting American work to cheaper operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia, then selling it as automation.
Brunet calls the trick AI washing. Admitting you sent jobs overseas sounds like cost-cutting. Claiming artificial intelligence reshaped your workforce sounds like the entity is adjusting to new market realities, and it invites IPO investors to price you as a software platform rather than one more insurance broker.
The timing fits. Bloomberg reported in 2023 that Acrisure was courting banks for a public offering. It later hired a former New York Stock Exchange listings chief as president and raised $2.1 billion at a $32 billion valuation, all aimed at an IPO. As that runway cleared, the layoffs came.
The company’s own job listings give it away, naming offshore delivery teams over and over and asking American hires to provide knowledge sharing to overseas staff, the polite phrase for training your own replacement. Workers said as much online.
“Stop laying people off because of ‘AI’ when you’re just offshoring the work.”
“Told we’re being laid off due to AI. Being forced to train our own replacements from India before we’re fired.”
Brunet traces much of the work to Tata Consultancy Services, which ran repeated hiring drives in Nagpur, India for staff who knew the exact insurance software Acrisure uses and worked American hours. Tata has form here. Last week the Supreme Court declined to disturb a $168 million judgment against the firm for funneling a client’s source code offshore.
A second wave followed. In May 2026 Acrisure announced 2,250 cuts, the largest single employer layoff of the year in its sector. Many workers were too frightened to talk, citing threats over non disparagement clauses. Michigan Representative Josh Schriver was not.
“One American worker sold out for cheap foreign labor is one too many.”
The point is money. On April 1 S&P cut Acrisure’s outlook to negative as leverage hit 9.6 times earnings and growth stalled. The firm grew by buying hundreds of small agencies, not by inventing technology, and much of its investors’ wealth sits as illiquid private paper that only an IPO can release. An offering forces one question. Is Acrisure a plain broker stitched together through acquisitions, or an automated fintech worth a software premium? The AI story exists to make Wall Street pick the second answer, a gap worth billions.
Which is exactly why the robot had to exist. As long as visa channels like the H-1B stay open, corporations will keep swapping loyal Americans for cheaper foreign labor, and an America First future means shutting those pipelines down for good.
