On Wednesday morning, Groupon — the once-buzzy daily-deals company most of us last thought about when we bought a discounted yoga class in 2014 — quietly told 400 of its 1,700 employees they no longer had jobs. That's nearly one in four people gone before lunch. The official reason? Artificial intelligence. The company, like dozens of others this year, said it was "investing in AI" and streamlining the business around it.
By the closing bell, Groupon's stock had jumped roughly 10%.
Pause on that for a second. A company you'd be forgiven for forgetting still existed announced the most painful thing a business can announce — mass layoffs — and investors responded by making it more valuable. Not slightly more valuable. Ten percent more. That's the kind of move usually reserved for blockbuster product launches or surprise profit beats.
This isn't a one-off. It fits inside a much larger pattern: nearly 150,000 tech workers have lost their jobs so far in 2026, and a striking number of those layoff announcements share an almost identical script. Meta, Intuit, Cisco, and now Groupon have all used some version of the same line. "AI" has become the magic word — and the market is rewarding anyone who says it, whether or not the AI is actually doing anything yet.
