The bill for February's supermarket job cuts has not been printed yet, and we know which page it lands on

Last Saturday I read one British grocer's accounts as a record of machines taking over human work, because Ocado publishes the ratio that makes it countable. This week I read the other two. When a company says artificial intelligence is changing how its work gets done, what does its own audited arithmetic show?

The reason to go back to February in August is that the arithmetic only exists now. In the last week of February, Tesco and Sainsbury's both announced changes to their office teams, and both were reported as AI reaching the back office. Days later, on 28 February, both companies closed their financial year. Tesco published its annual report on 15 April, Sainsbury's its preliminary results on 23 April.

So the accounts stop within days of the announcements. Whatever those two decisions cost is almost entirely a next-year number.

That matters, because Sainsbury's does publish the cost of restructures it has already done. In the year to 28 February it recorded £74 million of retail restructuring costs, of which £15 million was employee costs, against £43 million the year before. Those figures cover work already under way: closing food counters, converting cafes and bakeries, reorganising the Argos delivery hubs. They do not cover February's technology and data reduction. Read them as the price of that announcement and you would be reading the wrong year.

More interesting is what did not move. Sainsbury's underlying administrative expenses came to £1,328 million, against £1,302 million the year before, an increase of about two per cent, in a year spent describing a programme to create fewer, bigger roles at the centre. Administrative expenses are a wider bucket than head office salaries and should not be read as a headcount line. Even so, a central cost base rising while central roles fall is worth sitting with. The company delivered about £680 million of savings against a £1 billion target set in 2024. The savings are real. They are not showing up as a smaller centre.

Tesco points the same way from the other side. Its save to invest programme delivered around £535 million. Capital spending was £1,511 million, with more expected in the year ahead and technology among the reasons named. And its chief executive wrote that the tech team has doubled in six years.

The question underneath is the one this paper puts to every set of numbers it reads. If fewer people are needed to run a business, what happens to the money that used to pay them? Here it went to the shop floor. Tesco put more than £200 million into UK hourly pay and paid a £65 million special award to colleagues in stores, distribution centres and customer engagement centres. Sainsbury's raised colleague pay by five per cent, and says pay is up more than forty per cent over five years. In both companies the rise went to the people serving customers while the office was being reorganised. That is not the sentence most people would guess.

The exposure for a British household is not exotic. Both sit in the FTSE 100, so a workplace pension holding a standard UK equity fund almost certainly owns a slice of each. That is a statement about what you may already own, not a suggestion to do anything about it.

The evidence that would settle this has not been published, and unusually we can say when it will be. Sainsbury's reports its half year in the autumn and its full year around April 2027, Tesco on a similar cycle. If February's decisions turn into a materially larger restructuring charge, it appears there, in a line the company is obliged to disclose and audit.

That is why filings beat announcements. An announcement tells you what a company intends. An audited number, a year later, tells you what it did.

This piece is information and analysis, not financial advice.