Original propaganda AI costs reduction, don’t forget people are still in the workshop

Revenue will be 5.4 billion in 2025 after AI goes online! Lao Gan Ma is involved in layoffs, netizens call for removal

“If you lay off the workers, we will take you off the shelves.” – A harsh and smoky remark that pushed Lao Gan Ma into the limelight of public opinion.

The cause was “positive publicity.” At the 2026 Guizhou Provincial Quality Development Conference, Li Xin, executive vice president and chief quality officer of Laoganma, revealed that after the AI ​​visual quality inspection went online, the product defect rate dropped significantly, and revenue in 2025 reached 5.4 billion yuan; there were previously more than 600 pepper picking workers on the assembly line, but only 48 were retained after the system went online. According to China Business Daily, this report card of cost reduction and efficiency improvement was intercepted and interpreted by self-media and soon evolved into “Lao Gan Ma used AI to lay off more than 500 workers.” On October 26, Laoganma’s human resources department staff responded to the media: This is false news.

Whether it is fake news or not, what the public needs is a sincere and credible explanation, not a hasty denial. What everyone really cares about is not whether the company is willing to admit it, but a simple subtraction: 600 minus 48. Where did the remaining 552 people go? Are they okay?

Behind this subtraction is simple empathy. Intelligent transformation to improve quality and efficiency is an inevitable trend in the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, and no one objects to this. But the intuition of ordinary people is very straightforward: when machines replace people, where do the people who work go?

Unfortunately, when many companies currently promote AI, they generally focus on efficiency and neglect humanities: production capacity has been increased, costs have been reduced, and the data is beautiful, but they rarely take the initiative to talk about labor placement, job transformation, and skill guarantee. In the technical narrative, people are quietly speechless.

This cannot simply be blamed on one company. The General Office of the State Council recently issued the “Opinions on Adapting to the Development of Artificial Intelligence Technology to Help Build an Employment-Friendly Development Model”, which clearly states that it is necessary to adhere to the priority orientation of employment, effectively mitigate the employment substitution impact of artificial intelligence applications, and achieve inclusive development that coordinates technological progress, industrial upgrading, employment promotion, and improvement of people’s livelihood. The policy direction is clear: while technology advances, employment cannot be sacrificed.

For Lao Gan Ma, “human touch” is the foundation of the brand. The founder, Tao Huabi, was a laid-off worker. In his early years, he started from scratch by setting up a stall and selling cold skin. The entrepreneurial background of working hard from the bottom and showing concern for the livelihood of ordinary people is the deepest foundation of this national brand. They often claim to replace humans with AI, and the public will only feel stabbed in the back.

AI-led industrial upgrading cannot be left with cold data iterations. The ultimate goal of technological upgrading is to liberate people, not simply replace them; the answer to efficiency can never skip the question of people’s livelihood. Hot sauce cannot be sold to robots. People eat hot sauce after all.