RationalFX

RationalFX is a United Kingdom-based financial data aggregator specialising in tech sector workforce metrics. Founded as a currency and payments data firm, it expanded into labour market analytics, compiling redundancy announcements from company filings, regulatory disclosures, and press releases to produce datasets used by investors, journalists, and policymakers.

The firm became a key source in the AI-jobs debate when it put total confirmed global tech layoffs in Q1 2026 at 45,363, of which 9,238 (20.4%) explicitly cited AI and automation as a cause, up from under 8% in 2025 announcements . This 20% figure was widely cited alongside data from Gartner and Harvard Business Review, which challenged whether those AI-attributed cuts were actually justified by real AI deployments .

The tension at the centre of RationalFX’s role is methodological: its figures capture what companies say, not what is true. When roughly 80% of tech redundancies do not name AI as a cause, the firm’s 20% threshold still leaves open whether that minority reflects genuine automation displacement or corporate narrative management in a year of aggressive AI posturing.