Your layoff letter undersells what you are actually owed. Your offer letter and your severance letter are two promises from the same employer, made years apart; comparing them in ten minutes turns a vague bad feeling into exact numbers you can put on the table before you sign anything.
1. Collect your paper trail
Find your original offer letter, any bonus or appraisal letters, your latest pay slip, and the severance letter you just received. A photo of a printed letter works fine, AI can read images too. Have all of it ready to paste or upload in one chat.
2. Ask AI to list every entitlement
Upload the offer letter and ask: ‘List every benefit, bonus, notice period, and clause here that involves money or time off.’ You will get a plain list: notice period, bonus eligibility, leave days, insurance cover, anything with a number attached.
3. Compare it against the severance letter
Share the severance letter next and ask: ‘Compare this against the list above. Tell me what is missing, reduced, or not mentioned at all.’ This is the step that catches what tired, upset reading misses, like a notice period that quietly shrank.
4. Turn every gap into a number
Give AI your last drawn salary and ask: ‘Calculate the rupee value of each gap you found.’ Clauses become actual money: one month’s notice pay, a pro-rata bonus, unused leave encashment, the cost of insurance that just stopped.
5. Pick your three biggest gaps
Ignore the small stuff. Write down the two or three gaps with the largest rupee value next to them. That short list, with numbers attached, is what you bring to the exit conversation instead of a feeling that something is off.
A worked example
A software engineer in Bengaluru is laid off after the company automates code review; his 2022 offer letter promised 60 days notice and an annual bonus.
Before
We regret to inform you that your position has been made redundant effective immediately. You will receive one month’s salary in lieu of notice and payment for accrued leave as per company policy.
After
Gap 1: Notice period. Offer letter promises 60 days, severance gives 30 days. One extra month of salary owed, about 1,40,000 rupees. Gap 2: Annual bonus. Offer letter guarantees bonus if employed on March 31; last year’s bonus was 2,00,000 rupees and is not mentioned in the severance letter. Gap 3: Health insurance. Offer letter covers family through year end; severance letter is silent, worth roughly 25,000 rupees if lost early.
Three ways to bend it
Content writer fearing a genAI replacement
Compare your freelance or retainer contract against the termination notice. Ask AI to flag any kill fee, notice period, or pending invoice clause from the contract that the termination letter skips.
Financial analyst facing automated forecasting
Compare your appointment letter’s bonus and clawback clauses against the severance offer. Ask AI whether a pro-rata or deferred bonus you earned has simply been dropped from the final number.
Customer support agent losing shifts to a chatbot
Compare your shift allowance and variable pay structure in the offer letter against what the severance math actually used. Ask AI to recalculate using your highest earning months, not your lowest.
When it goes wrong
I cannot find my original offer letter anymore
Search your email for the PDF, check the HR portal, or ask HR directly for a copy of your appointment letter, it is standard to request this.
The severance letter is full of legal language I do not follow
Ask AI to rewrite it in plain words first, clause by clause, before you run the comparison. Understand it before you compare it.
When not to use this
If your layoff involves a legal dispute, discrimination, or anything that could end up in court, treat this comparison as a starting point only. Take the gap list to an employment lawyer before you sign or say anything in writing, this technique finds the numbers, it does not replace legal advice.
What you can now do
You walk into the severance conversation with exact figures from your own paperwork, not a feeling that something is missing.
Part of Making Life Easier With AI, a weekly walk-through of one small thing AI can take off your plate.
Take this further
Act as a blunt hiring manager who has read ten thousand resumes, not a career coach. I will paste my full resume and the job description I want. Rewrite the whole resume for that role, section by section, in this order: summary, experience, skills, education. Rules: every experience line leads with impact, not duty. Use bracketed placeholders like [8 percent] for any number I did not give you, and list at the end every placeholder I need to replace with a real figure. Keep it to one page of text. Plain formatting only, no tables or columns, so screening software can parse it. After the rewrite, tell me the three weakest claims that need evidence before I send this anywhere. My resume: [paste resume]. The role: [paste job description].
