What Actually Happened in AI In March (And Why It Matters for Your Business)

March 2026 was the month AI stopped being experimental. Four things happened in the span of 30 days that, taken together, signal a permanent shift in how this technology affects your business and your daily life.

The Layoffs Are Real and They’re Explicitly About AI

In late February, Block (founded by Jack Dorsey, the guy who created Twitter) cut roughly 4,000 employees, nearly 40% of its workforce. Dorsey was blunt about why. He said the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks made the cuts necessary. That’s a CEO saying AI can do what these people were doing and he doesn’t need them anymore.

On March 11, Atlassian (the company behind Jira and Confluence, project management tools used across the tech industry) cut 1,600 employees in a single morning. Over 900 of those cuts came from research and development. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the layoffs were necessary to “self-fund further investment in AI.” Self-fund. That means they’re firing people to pay for the GPUs (the specialized chips that power AI) and data centers required to compete.

Meta cut hundreds more around the same time. Same story. Redirect the money into AI.

Companies explicitly cited AI and automation as the reason for over 9,200 tech layoffs in Q1 2026. That number jumped from less than 8% in 2025 to over 20% this quarter. The stock prices of these companies went UP after the announcements. The market is REWARDING companies for cutting humans and investing in AI.

I’m living this right now. I run my entire business with one VA working 20 hours a week and AI systems handling the rest. The workload I carry today would have required a full team two years ago, and now it runs on systems, clear thinking, and AI that I’ve trained to work the way I need it to.

OpenAI Killed Sora and a $1 Billion Disney Deal Died With It

On March 24, OpenAI shut down Sora, its AI video generation tool. Six months after launching it to the public, they pulled the plug.

The Wall Street Journal investigation told the real story. Sora was burning through roughly $1 million every day in compute costs (some analysts estimated the peak was significantly higher). Total lifetime revenue from the app was $2.1 million. The math was never going to work. User counts peaked at about a million and then collapsed to under 500,000. Downloads dropped 66% between November and February.

Disney had committed $1 billion to a partnership built around Sora. They found out it was being shut down less than an hour before the public announcement. One hour. The deal died immediately. No money had changed hands. (Imagine being Disney and finding out your billion-dollar AI partnership is dead via a press release you didn’t know was coming.)

I’d already moved away from Sora months ago because the output was inconsistent and there are much better tools available. I use Veo 3.1 and Grok Imagine for my video content now. So the shutdown didn’t affect my workflow at all. I think it was actually a smart move by OpenAI. Their applications chief told employees they “cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” and she was right. OpenAI was pouring resources into a video toy that couldn’t pay for itself while Anthropic was quietly winning enterprise customers and developers with Claude.

But most creators and businesses weren’t paying that kind of attention. They were planning workflows, content strategies, and even business models around Sora. And it vanished overnight.

I’ve seen this pattern before in online business. The platform you build on is the platform that controls your future. The lesson from Sora is the same lesson I learned years ago: if a tool can’t sustain itself financially, it will disappear. Build on tools that have actual revenue models and staying power, because the ones that can’t pay for themselves won’t be here next year.

Social Media Addiction Just Became a Legal Liability

Two verdicts landed in the same week in March, and they may reshape how every content creator and business owner uses social media.

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