The Two Americas of AI: One Is Cutting Jobs, the Other Can Finally Compete

Compiled by Scott Shields, Contributing Writer for Capitol Times Media, from conversations and material presented by Greg Writer, Founder and CEO of Launch Commerce Inc.

This week Oracle told Washington something it did not want to say out loud. In its annual filing, the company founded by Larry Ellison disclosed that it had cut roughly 21,000 jobs over the past year, close to 13 percent of its workforce, and it named the cause plainly: the deployment of AI across its operations. The company spent 1.84 billion dollars on severance to do it.

Oracle is not alone, and that is the part that should hold this town's attention. Nearly 200 technology companies have shed more than 119,000 jobs so far in 2026, and for the first time AI has passed every other reason as the leading stated cause. The headlines practically write themselves. The machines are coming for the jobs. The robots won. Be afraid.

That story is real. But it is only half of the country. There is a second America that almost no one in this conversation is talking about, and it happens to be the larger one.

The Subtraction Economy

What Oracle did follows a cold and rational logic. A company with 162,000 employees and

tens of billions of dollars in data center bills looks at AI and sees a way to do more with

fewer people. The savings help fund the buildout. The headcount comes down. Wall Street

nods.

Call this the subtraction economy. It is the version of AI that gets covered, because it

involves brand names, enormous numbers, and real human cost. It is also the version that

a certain political class is already preparing to ride straight into the midterms, telling

working Americans that this is what AI is and all it will ever be: a machine that takes.

They are wrong, and the proof is sitting in plain sight in the other America.

The America That Was Never Going to Hire 21,000 People Anyway

There are 36.2 million small businesses in the United States. They employ almost half of the entire private sector and create roughly nine of every ten net new jobs in the country. And here is the figure that changes the whole frame: about 84 percent of them have no employees at all beyond the owner. Thirty million Americans are running a business entirely by themselves.

These people are not laying anyone off. They never had anyone to lay off. The HVAC contractor, the roofer, the medical practice, the family wealth office, the woman running a med spa with one front desk and a waiting list she cannot get to, none of them are cutting 21,000 workers. They are the worker. They are the receptionist, the bookkeeper, the marketer, the closer, and the person who was supposed to be home for dinner three hours ago. For that America, AI is not a pink slip. It is the first time in history they can afford a workforce.

The Bottleneck Has a Name, and It Is the Owner

The hard truth about small business in this country is that the ceiling is almost always the

same one. The owner runs out of hours. You cannot answer the phone, run the job, send

the invoice, follow up the lead, and build the company all at once. Hiring is the traditional

answer, but a real employee costs real money, takes weeks to train, and may walk out the

door anyway. So most owners never scale. They top out at the limit of a single human

being.

AI changes that math, and it changes it for the small operator far more than it ever did for

Oracle. An AI assistant answers every call, books every appointment, follows up with every

lead at midnight, and never asks for a raise. The owner is not replacing a team of fifty. The

owner is finally getting the team they could never afford in the first place.

This is the distinction Washington keeps missing. In a 162,000 person company, AI

replaces people. In a one person company, AI becomes the people. The same technology

produces the opposite outcome.

The Gap Nobody Is Measuring

Here is the most telling number of all. In the most recent federal data, only 4.6 percent of

American businesses reported using AI at all. The giants are already deep in it, restructuring

around it, writing it into their filings. Main Street has barely touched it.

That gap is the whole ballgame. If only the Oracles of the world adopt AI, then the doom

story comes true. The big get bigger by getting smaller, capital wins, labor loses, and the

heartland economy falls further behind the coastal one. But if the 36 million get the same

tools, AI becomes the most powerful equalizer for small business since the internet, and

the gap starts closing the other way.

This was never really a technology question. It is a question of who gets the technology.

We Have Seen This Movie Before

I have stood at this exact spot once already. In 1997, when most of the country still thought

the internet was a toy, I built one of the first online angel investor networks and the world's

first kid safe browser. People told me the web was a novelty. I told them it was going to hand

the small operator the same reach the Fortune 500 enjoyed, and that the only real question

was whether the little guy would pick up the tool or sit and wait for permission.

The ones who picked it up built companies out of spare bedrooms. The ones who waited

got rolled over. The internet did not centralize power the way the skeptics feared. It

democratized it, because builders kept putting the tools in everyone's hands and refused to

leave them locked inside the enterprise.

AI is the same fork in the same road, only faster. The technology itself is neutral. It will

subtract or it will multiply depending entirely on whose hands it lands in. Right now it is

landing in the wrong ones first, and that is a choice we are making by default, not a fate we

are stuck with.

The Free Minds Are Already Debating This

This argument is not staying in the filings and the think tanks. From July 8 through 11, more

than 2,500 entrepreneurs, investors, and independent thinkers will gather at Caesars

Forum in Las Vegas for FreedomFest, which bills itself as the world's largest gathering of

free minds. The event this year also marks 250 years of American independence, and few

subjects are drawing more attention on that floor than artificial intelligence.

That is the right room for this debate, because the people in it are the builders, not the

bureaucrats. They are the ones who will decide, one business at a time, whether AI

becomes a tool of subtraction or a tool of multiplication. And the question they are

wrestling with is the same one our representatives should be asking: not whether to stop

AI, but how to get it, and the skill to use it, into the hands of the people who need it most.

What Washington Can Actually Do

This is where our representatives come in, and it is not where most of them are looking.

The instinct in this town is to treat AI as a threat to manage, a fear to soothe, or a club to

swing before an election. That is the small play. The real opportunity is to make sure the

same technology reaching the boardroom reaches the body shop, and that the owner

actually knows how to use it once it arrives. Small business owners do not need to be

protected from AI. They need help getting to it. They need encouragement. They need to

know where it is and how to put it to work.

A few things would move the needle right away:

Teach it. The country already has a small business education network in the SBA, the Small Business Development Centers, and SCORE. Fund them to deliver real, plain English AI training to owners, the same way they once taught a generation how to build a website. Most owners are not afraid of AI. They simply have no idea where to start.

Make it deductible, now. Let a small business write off the full cost of adopting AI tools in the year they buy them, the way we already treat other equipment. A roofer should be able to expense an AI assistant as easily as a new truck.

Do not regulate it into a luxury. The fastest way to guarantee that only the Oracles get AI is to bury it under compliance costs that only a company with 141,000 employees can absorb. Smart guardrails should protect people without pricing Main Street out of the very tool that finally lets it compete.

Reskill the owner, not just the laid off. Most federal workforce dollars chase displaced

corporate employees. Aim some of that money at the 30 million solo operators who are

about to become far more productive the moment someone shows them how.

None of this requires a new bureaucracy or a trillion dollar program. It requires our

representatives to decide that the small business owner deserves the same shot at this

technology that the Fortune 500 already has.

The country does not need to be protected from AI. It needs to be handed AI, specifically

the 36 million owners who carry the real economy on their backs and have never once had

enterprise grade help. Put the same intelligence Oracle used to cut 21,000 jobs into the

hands of the woman with the med spa and the man with the roofing crew, and you do not

get a layoff. You get a hire, a raise, a second location, and a family that finally gets the

owner home for dinner.

That is the America worth building for. It always has been.

Greg Writer is the Founder and CEO of Launch Commerce Inc., America's preferred commerce platform, built on faith, family, and freedom. A digital marketing pioneer since 1997 and a former investment banker, he now builds AI systems that let small business owners add capacity instead of cutting it. He will be exhibiting at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, July 8 through 11. Learn more at launchcommerce.ai.

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