#ai

Besides people in positions considered management are very clueless.I mean this is contractor type ,engineering type,Actual managers.First all you need to see on here is employees who barely go to office or interact with anyone asking if there’s gonna be a strike still.Then you go in asking actually direct managers at all levels questions but they cannot answer anything.Then there is the group that won’t answer or make any decisions at all because they are either clueless or scared.My God company is such a disaster.Bad cell coverage losing customers left and right in all lines of business.I am glad I am at the end of it all ,I am also glad that I was never management as bad as the Union contracts may get over the years at least I can say as associates we have a clue starting to think the people in field are only ones floating the company anymore.Just rif all nonunion employees at this point let AI be my managers

OPED in today's WSJ. I think Verizon will likely see another big round of layoffs in the fall. SMH.

Algi Febri Sugita/Zuma Press

Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.

We haven’t found another example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at more than 30% that laid off more than 20% of its workforce. Yet what we did is likely going to become the norm over the next year. This is a story about artificial intelligence, but executives and commentators are misunderstanding how it will disrupt business and who will be affected.

To understand the issue, I went back to a book published in 1954, 20 years before I was born: Peter Drucker’s “The Practice of Management.” Drucker explores the different roles inside every business, which I would categorize as builders, sellers and measurers.

Builders create products. Sellers sell those products. Measurers do everything else: internal audit, revenue recognition, finance, legal, compliance, middle management, operations and on and on.

Contrary to what some analysts predict, builders aren’t going anywhere. If an engineer on my team can now be 10 times as productive, I’m going to hire as many as I can find.

Sellers, too, are safe from extinction. Humans still control budgets, and they want to buy from people who take the time to understand their needs, build trust and fix whatever goes wrong.

Measurers are also critical to a business, but different from the other two. The best are hard to find. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, don’t seek the recognition of a front-of-house role, and ideally have a perspective independent from the rest of the organization. Drucker argues that measuring business is important, but customers are earned through building and selling. The best businesses would maximize investment in those two functions.

AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.

For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.

The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate.

But the layoff wasn’t about reducing headcount. In fact, we have a record number of open positions. In coming years I expect our number of employees will continue to grow. With fewer people needed for measuring, we can now invest more in people in the areas that drive growth.

We received almost a million applicants for 1,111 paid internships this summer. The interns we hired are extremely qualified and AI-native. They’re all builders or sellers, and we expect that the majority will get full-time offers.

They’re the next generation who will invent ways to drive our business. With AI we can now better measure their contributions and accurately identify those who will be tomorrow’s leaders. AI isn’t the harbinger of bleak youth unemployment—it is quite the opposite.

AI won’t ki-l all jobs. But it will change every business. Ultimately, it will prove Drucker right. AI will allow us to better measure our organizations so the humans on our teams can focus on where they create and capture value: building and selling.

Mr. Prince is CEO of Cloudflare.

WebLogic 26? Fusion Middleware 27? Who is left to build any of this? Will it all just be AI slop? https://blogs.oracle.com/fusionmiddlewaresupport/oracle-fusion-middleware-statement-of-direction-is-now-available

Call out your bad leaders

https://qz.com/meta-layoffs-8000-jobs-ai-restructuring-052026

6 in 10 workers say they have a toxic boss, study finds
Employees say poor leadership is driving stress, job changes, and even financial loss, while companies invest more in AI than in people.

Link: https://www.fastcompany.com/91534390/6-in-10-workers-say-they-have-a-toxic-boss-study-finds

BILL Holdings is cutting its workforce by up to 30%. This strategy aims to make the company leaner. The company also plans to leverage AI for increased efficiency. BILL Holdings faces headwinds from declining interest rates and SaaS sector pressures. Its stock has seen a roughly 20% decline year-to-date.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4906834-bill-holdings-ramping-profitability-with-new-layoffs

The cuts amount to about 10% of the company's workforce.
Singapore-based workers were the first to learn their fate, with layoff emails arriving at 4 a.m. local time, according to Bloomberg. Employees in the U.K. and the U.S. were slated to be informed as their own mornings began. Meta asked North American employees to work from home Wednesday

New just in
Ty announced a giant reorg/struct after the recent LR's via Vidcast
Of course, Cisco is going all in on AI

Significant changes to Collab
How many years do you think we have until everyone is replaced with AI ?

During the Q2 Town Hall, a question was asked about our strategy to replace commodity IT roles with external partners.

The answer was that we're moving to more of a factory model of labor, and we're going to reduce the need to have specialized 3M knowledge.

Between that and the other half of the town hall being about how we need to scale up our use of AI, it's clear that they're looking to reduce headcount.

As a meta mate I heard about the 7k employees being moved to MSL to work on AI initiatives.

Few questions:
How can I volunteer to be moved, or was that already randomly determined?

What are they actually doing there? Anything cutting edge?

Will they the most safe from the next few layoffs since they just got re orged?

Anything good coming from VBG products that will generate good sales? (Or any current products showing potential?)

Seems like AT&T and T-Mo are putting out products - what do we have that's got potential?

Hard to tell if the AI Connect stuff is real.

Why in the world is Gemini AI being pushed for everything...from scripting to positioning statements to call analysis to coaching. Just stop already.

• Meta to transfer 7,000 staff to AI initiatives, eliminate managers
• Layoffs and transfers affect about 20% of staff, Meta says
• Employee backlash includes petition against mouse-tracking tech, now over 1,000 signatures

https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lays-out-plans-may-20-layoffs-restructuring-internal-document-says-2026-05-18/

The New York Fed reports AI is not the main cause of the current hiring slowdown. Elevated interest rates and past overhiring play a major role. The Fed's analysis shows broad labor weakness, not automation, explains the trend. Most firms adopting AI are retraining workers, not initiating layoffs. Startups should focus on capital costs and macroeconomic pressures over AI fears.

https://startupfortune.com/new-york-fed-data-says-ai-is-not-driving-the-hiring-slowdown/

General Motors recently laid off 500 to 600 employees. These job cuts primarily affected information technology roles. Affected employees were largely located in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan. Artificial intelligence played a role in the company's decision. GM offered severance packages and career support to the impacted workers.

Austin

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/laid-off-gm-employees-tell-of-ominous-email-severance-and-role-of-ai/ar-AA231HLA?cvid=6a0466f468f947e78a1f45a3db8de24d&ocid=hpmsn

Innovaccer has laid off staff members. The healthcare technology company is increasing its artificial intelligence efforts. Innovaccer plans to apply its automation principles internally. The company recently allocated $250 million for AI development. This funding supports small language models on its Gravity platform.

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/health-tech/mh-innovaccer-layoffs-ai-tools/

Does anyone have a general idea when they think AI will start taking over work/employees jobs. the more and more they talk about I feel its around the corner...like in 2 years tops.

Mass layoffs continue to impact Silicon Valley tech workers. Artificial intelligence is driving these job cuts and reshaping the industry. Many displaced employees struggle to find new roles despite extensive experience. Companies are now highly selective, often demanding specific AI skills. Workers are adapting by upskilling, networking, or exploring new career paths.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-05-19/ai-layoffs-jobless-tech-workers-silicon-valley

https://youtu.be/TZmR2BuCY0Y

One IT department just announced last week it will be moving to AI SDLC. This means developers will basically just be 'reviewing' AI agentic code instead of writing.

What do you all think about this? Will Vanguard be doing layoffs/stealthy layoffs more often over the coming months?

In my opinion, the writing is on the wall and it has been getting more clear across the organization for a handful of years now.

The online gambling industry is experiencing widespread layoffs. Penn Entertainment recently cut over 70 jobs in its interactive division. Gambling.com Group also laid off approximately a quarter of its employees. These reductions reflect a shift towards efficiency and AI adoption. Industry growth is slowing, forcing companies to streamline operations.

https://www.gamblingnews.com/news/betting-firms-cut-jobs-as-industry-growth-stalls/

Crypto exchange Kraken recently laid off approximately 150 employees. The company cited increased efficiencies from deploying artificial intelligence. These staff reductions could delay its planned US initial public offering. Kraken now reportedly aims for a public debut in 2027. Other crypto firms also cut jobs this year, often citing AI use.

https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:b71f2d6f4094b:0-kraken-cuts-150-staff-amid-ai-efficiencies-potentially-delaying-ipo-report/

Healthtech unicorn Innovaccer laid off approximately 340 employees. These job cuts occurred across India and the United States. The company is restructuring operations to become "AI-native." This marks Innovaccer's third layoff round in four years. Affected staff will receive severance and transition support.

San Francisco

https://www.peoplematters.in/news/strategic-hr/indian-founded-unicorn-joins-ai-layoff-wave-with-340-job-cuts-across-india-and-us-49780

General Motors recently reduced its IT workforce. The company cut approximately 600 salaried positions. This move is part of a deliberate skills exchange. GM is now hiring for AI-focused IT roles. The automaker seeks professionals to build AI systems from the ground up.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/gm-and-automakers-reshape-workforces-with-ai-focused-hiring-and-layoffs/

Seems like with sending jobs out of our country and their all in approach to AI, I wonder just how many jobs will be left.

So we got told that AI will be doing some of our work, the “easy cases”. I know Tampa will be seeing layoffs this year, anyone got insight if AML will be affected? They’re upping our pace in June due to an uptick in workload

Because the company wants to keep up with all the other tech and telecom layoffs, and they will blame “AI” like the others did.

https://www.salesforceben.com/the-midlife-crisis-of-the-salesforce-professional/

Layoffs even in AF, smaller territories, higher targets, no raises, greater levels of micromanagement, offshoring....leading many to question is the hard pivot to AI really worth it it just leave the ecosystem? Or even leave the entire tech industry as misery increases for everyone.

Billionaire Jim Goodnight Built An Analytics Profit Machine. AI Is Forcing Its Reinvention.

ByPhoebe Liu,Reporter.

May 15, 2026, 06:30am EDT
Updated May 15, 2026, 10:36am EDT

Unlike most of today’s biggest AI companies, SAS—once America’s largest privately held software company—has always operated slowly, steadily and profitably. Competition from all sides and an upcoming leadership transition will test the company’s longstanding strategy.

Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.

SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83. And like the rocks on display, both are artifacts from an earlier time long before fast-growing, deeply-unprofitable AI shook the world. SAS analyzes large troves of data from its customers in real-time to help them make better business decisions.

“People like to dismiss us by saying, ‘well, that’s legacy software,’” says Goodnight, a statistics pioneer who helped define what analytics would be long before AI became an umbrella term for everything. “But it’s not. We’ve been improving it for 50 years.”

Now SAS has to prove that endurance isn’t the same thing as stagnation.

The company generates just over $3 billion in annual revenue from most of the Fortune 100—including 90% of the financial services companies and all of the health and life sciences firms, plus most every government department. It has stayed private, profitable and debt free.

The AI bo-m is stress-testing that posture. OpenAI, Anthropic and a swarm of newer data-and-analytics rivals are selling the future as a clean break from “legacy” incumbents. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon are bundling data and AI into cloud contracts. Public-sector competition is heating up. And inside SAS, the next chapter is no longer theoretical: Goodnight has been hinting for years at a leadership transition, including an IPO as a possible succession plan. “When we go public, we need a different CEO,” he says. “You don’t want an old fa-t like me going around trying to sell stock.”

For a company designed to outlast market volatility, an uncomfortable question is suddenly immediate: can SAS modernize fast enough to matter in the AI era—without abandoning the slow, profitable discipline that made it an outlier in the first place? And can it do it without Goodnight?

Goodnight is confident it can; he’s seen this cycle before: the dot-com bo-m, when he considered outside money and passed; the dot-com bust, which rewarded that restraint; failed investments, including an airline; and the 2022 market correction which may have forced SAS to delay its IPO plans. He’s unmoved by the idea that generative AI has rewritten the laws of business.

AI is “just picking the next word in a sentence based on probability,” Goodnight says, correctly, of large language models. “How’s that going to solve anything?” He thinks SAS’ decades of customer trust and “domain expertise,” particularly in finance, healthcare and government services, will help it retain its edge.

Yet Goodnight will likely leave SAS’ future in the age of AI to younger hands.

In recent years, he has ceded more of the daily operating work to a new generation of executives, especially chief technology officer Bryan Harris and chief operating officer Gavin Day. Goodnight says he’s training Harris and Day to take over, though he hasn’t yet decided which of the two he would like as CEO.

The plan they are inheriting is simple to describe and hard to execute: persuade customers that SAS is not the same company it was 50 years ago, sell them on AI that helps them make smarter business decisions instead of merely sounding like it might, and mold the products to meet every customer where it’s needed.

“Incumbency is our biggest headwind,” says Harris.

That incumbency can be seen in SAS’ sprawling North Carolina headquarters. Its 300-acre tree-lined property boasts a day care and doctor’s office, fields dotted with employees playing intramural soccer at lunchtime, one of the state’s few five-star hotels and dozens of docile sheep grazing underneath the company’s solar panels. Turn left from Analytics Drive onto Research Drive and walk down Binary Way, and you’ll be blinded by a shining silver sculpture of the mathematical constant pi. The company’s campus, as they call it, reflects Goodnight’s vision and SAS’ academic origins.

SAS, short for Statistical Analysis System, was born out of North Carolina State University where Goodnight—then a young faculty member fresh out of a statistics PhD—teamed up with Tony Barr in the late 1960s to create software that sifted through and analyzed N.C. State’s agriculture department data. After the tool attracted more than 100 outside customers, Goodnight, Barr, John Sall and Jane Helwig incorporated SAS Institute in 1976. Barr sold his 40% stake for $340,000 in 1979. Helwig, who died in 2021, left and sold her stake a couple of years later. Goodnight now owns two-thirds of SAS, making him worth $13.3 billion and the richest man in North Carolina; Sall owns the remaining third, a $6.5 billion stake.

From the beginning, the company was bootstrapped. Back when SAS software was sold as physical books, all staff—including the founders—would form an assembly line every time a new shipment of books arrived to unload the books into an employee’s basement, a tradition cofounder Sall recalls as “book brigades.”

When the phones from prospective customers stopped ringing, Sall says Goodnight—in keeping with his upbringing as a hardware shopkeeper’s son—forced the cofounders to split up SAS’ potential customers into four (grouped alphabetically) and do the marketing themselves.

The approach worked. SAS was cash-flow positive from day one and generated $600 million (revenue) on an estimated $300 million in operating income by 1996, Forbes previously reported. SAS grew steadily, always prioritizing profitability over the fastest possible growth, Sall says.

Along the way, as evidenced by its campus, SAS built up a reputation as a company that takes care of its employees. Extensive benefits—beginning with free M&Ms (11,000 pounds per week, company-wide) then expanding to on-site doctors and a pharmacy, subsidized on-site childcare and a hair salon—weren’t common in the ’80s and ’90s. It was Goodnight's retention strategy: keep employees happy, keep turnover low and avoid the expensive churn of bonuses and dilutive stock options.

He used to joke that 95% of SAS’ assets, its people, drove out the front gate every night. After the pandemic and a remote-work policy, the line no longer works quite the same way. “I can’t even get ’em to come in,” he says.

Three years ago, Harris brought Goodnight an idea he loved. SAS could use computer vision to analyze video feeds from farms and determine how illnesses spread among chickens. The tool would help farmers keep their flocks healthy. Goodnight ki-led it with a single question: “How much do the cameras cost? The farmers would never pay for that.”

From the perspectives of both customers like those farmers and SAS itself, Goodnight has been laser-focused on cost and profitability for decades. He criticized AI innovation for being 90% wasted dollars, and repeatedly emphasized SAS’ need to get further into the green.

The CEO credits SAS’ durability to that desire to stay profitable, even at the expense of rapid growth. While Anthropic has reportedly grown revenue at roughly 10 times year over year for three years, SAS’ revenue rose 9% last quarter, roughly in line with Morningstar's prediction that software companies will grow at around 10% per year through 2029.

Goodnight thinks the AI companies’ pace “needs to slow down.” But that doesn’t mean SAS has ignored the market. In 2023, the company announced a three-year, $1 billion investment to develop AI-powered products. “It looked like we were going to spend that much anyway, so we announced it,” Goodnight says flatly.

The problem is that SAS is hardly alone here. It is up against rivals that bet on AI first, and more heavily. On the mega-cap side, there’s Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Slightly newer entrants: Snowflake, Databricks, Alteryx and others. On the public sector side, Palantir has been siphoning U.S. government contracts from SAS and others. (Palantir’s U.S. government revenue grew by around double SAS’ total government revenue last year.)

SAS’ modus operandi is to meet customers wherever they are most anxious. The company works with nearly every major bank and the Big Four accounting firms, helping them use AI in ways that are secure, traceable and useful for fraud detection and financial risk. Healthcare, government, finance and other regulated industries are natural terrain for a company that has spent decades selling caution as a feature. Even there, the pressure is rising. Anthropic has been hiring industry experts and in May announced a suite of financial-services products that compete directly for the same customers.

“Everyone is in ‘coopetition,’” Harris says. Customers have asked SAS to integrate with its rivals, and the company has happily obliged.

That has made SAS uniquely malleable among its peers. If customers want their data analysis done in the cloud (Microsoft, Amazon, you name it), SAS can do it. If they want it done on premises, SAS will do that too—and in the programming language of your choice. That matters in hospitals and government agencies, especially when sensitive data and regulation collide here and abroad. In the executive building where customers are flown in for meetings, one screen recently read, “Welcome, U.A.E. Government Delegation.”

Harris thinks new revenue streams can come from digital twins—AI-rendered versions of complex physical facilities like manufacturing plants that are used to figure out a facility’s most efficient layout, predict safety incidents without putting workers at risk, and perform virtual testing—via a partnership with Epic Games. Paper products manufacturer Georgia Pacific, for example, uses them to test and train robots in its Savannah River Mill facility, keeping costs down and employees safe. Digital twins currently generate single-digit millions in revenue, but Harris believes the business can grow to $500 million within three or four years.

SAS is also experimenting with quantum computing for ultra-complex transactions, like in fraud detection for banks, that traditional computers can’t handle. Also in SAS’ plans: using data and AI to help sports teams. In December, SAS announced a partnership with Liverpool to use its products to market to the soccer team’s fans better. At SAS’ 50th anniversary conference, the company announced a smattering of new tools that incorporate AI agents.

“SAS has never met a problem they didn’t want to go after,” says IDC research director Kathy Lange, who previously worked at SAS and suggested that the company could benefit from more focus. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Believing it’s the best way to sell some of his stake without needing to sell SAS for parts, Goodnight still wants an IPO. But five years after SAS first said it was preparing to go public, the window has narrowed, shifted and occasionally looked like a regret chute.“We don't want to go when all the money has been already used for SpaceX,”

The numbers also need work. Before hitting the roadshow, Goodnight wants to meet the Rule of 40, a common software company benchmark in which revenue growth rate and profit margin sum to 40. That might help the company defend its share price in public markets, especially when pitted against fast-growing competition. But with both components sitting at around 10%, Goodnight says SAS isn’t even halfway there.

For CFO Matt Parson, it’s optionality that’s the key here. SAS has to be ready for the public markets, but they can’t be the only path to helping Goodnight and Sall sell some of their stake. Why sell? The founders’ children aren’t planning to take over, but Goodnight and Sall might still like to leave them with some cash. They’ve yet to take much out of SAS: the company pays out a small dividend, but has invested most profits—“many billions of dollars”—back into the business over its lifetime.

In case an IPO isn’t possible, Parson thus wants to prepare the firm for other solutions: an acquisition or outside investment. The company routinely gets acquisition offers, but Goodnight hasn’t entertained any of them. (The last publicly reported bid was Broadcom’s $15-20 billion offer in 2021; it was progressing until Goodnight changed his mind.) A minority investment could be in the cards, according to Parson, if the right partner came along. If SAS can remain profitable, it can also stay as-is for the foreseeable future: private and founder-owned.

Sipping a cup of black coffee, this time in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall he helped smash, Goodnight is risk-adverse as ever. He is ready to stop being the face of the story he created.

“I wish people knew nothing about me,” he says, with a wink

Turns out no one needs this much compute when everyone can just run quantized Chinese models on their iPhone. Elon the Dogefather had to give all his H100s to Anthropic just to make payroll... Such demand. Much wow.

Corporations are not necessarily pulling the plug on AI, but the initial, unbridled "gold rush" has definitely hit a wall of operational reality. The corporate approach has shifted from a frantic race to adopt any AI tool to a much more cautious, calculated, and sometimes frustrated effort to find actual business value.

The current landscape reveals why companies are reconsidering their initial "rush" strategy, pivoting toward a more structured approach:

1. The Productivity-to-ROI Disconnect

During the initial hype, the assumption was that massive individual productivity gains (like writing code or drafting copy five times faster) would automatically translate to corporate profitability. It hasn't. Recent data, including a 2026 enterprise study by Writer, shows that nearly half (48%) of C-suite executives now call their AI adoption a massive disappointment, and only about 29% are seeing a significant return on investment (ROI). Companies are realizing that adding expensive AI tools on top of messy, inefficient legacy processes just creates faster chaos, not better outcomes.

1. Strategy "For Show" vs. Reality

There is a growing, uncomfortable realization in boardrooms that early AI roadmaps were built more for investors and public relations than for actual internal execution. In fact, three-quarters of executives admit their company's AI strategy has been "more for show" than actual operational guidance. Leaders are hitting severe bottlenecks when trying to scale experimental pilot programs into production-ready enterprise workflows.

1. Culture Clashes and the "Two-Tiered" Workplace

The rush to implement AI has triggered significant internal friction.

The "AI Elite" vs. Non-Adopters:

Management is aggressively rewarding power users while planning to phase out employees who resist the technology.

Trust Deficits:

According to Cox Business research, nearly 50% of employees hide how much they rely on AI at work due to a lack of clear corporate policies, paired with a lingering fear (around 47%) that the technology will eventually eliminate their jobs.

Loss of Top Talent:

Gartner warned that companies focusing strictly on cutting payroll rather than training their people to use autonomous tools risk losing their best specialized AI talent to competitors.

1. Severe Security Gaps ("Shadow AI")

When corporate IT departments didn't move fast enough to provide official AI tools, employees took matters into their own hands. This explosion of "shadow AI"—workers dropping proprietary code, sensitive financial spreadsheets, or customer data into unapproved, public LLMs—has terrified risk officers. Two-thirds of executives believe their companies have already suffered data breaches or compliance risks due to these unmanaged tools, forcing a hard pause to establish strict governance frameworks.

The Shift to "Agentic" and People-Centric Models

Instead of backing away from AI entirely—corporate spending remains incredibly high—organizations are drastically rewriting their execution playbooks. The "rush" is being replaced by two specific trends:

Moving to Agentic Workflows:

Companies are moving away from simple prompt-and-response chatbots and focusing on specialized "AI agents" built to handle specific, cross-functional business workflows with centralized IT guardrails.

The 80/20 Rule:

Forward-thinking organizations are abandoning the idea of total human replacement. Instead, they are structuring roles around an 80/20 model:

80% of roles are "human-led, AI-augmented" (the Ironman approach, where human judgment is non-negotiable), and 20% are "AI-led, human-supervised" (for high-volume, low-risk, repetitive tasks).

Ultimately, corporate America is learning that while adopting AI technology takes weeks, successfully restructuring a workforce to actually benefit from it takes years. The current pause isn't a retreat; it's a strategic realignment.

_

It's all doom and gloom. Is this AI wave really going to affect people?

Multiple gambling companies announced layoffs this week. Penn Entertainment cut over 75 employees from its interactive division. Gambling.com Group reduced its workforce by 25%, impacting around 150 people. LSports, an Israeli data provider, also laid off 39 employees. AI adoption, slowing growth, and new competition drive these cuts. The online gambling industry faces a broader recalibration.

https://frontofficesports.com/gambling-layoffs-pile-up-as-sports-betting-industry-recalibrates/

Wells Fargo will lay off 29 employees in July. These job cuts will occur at its West Des Moines campus. This latest announcement follows previous reductions this year. The bank has cut 217 jobs from this campus in 2026. CEO Charlie Scharf cited AI use as a reason for ongoing layoffs.

West Des Moines, Iowa

https://www.businessrecord.com/wells-fargo-announces-additional-layoffs/

Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis reduced their American professional staff. More than twenty thousand individuals were affected by these cuts. General Motors made the deepest personnel cuts. Ford and Stellantis also decreased their employee totals. AI and other tech advancements contribute to these staff reductions.

Detroit, Michigan

https://www.bitget.com/amp/news/detail/12560605414080

Verizon CEO cuts to the chase on new layoffs and AI future:
As a new wave of job cuts hits Verizon, leadership delivers a blunt reality check on future plans and an AI deadline.

May 11, 2026 5:37 PM EDT
Dan Schulman, president and chief executive officer of PayPal Holdings Inc.
Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The leaner era of Verizon Communications has entered a new phase of targeted reductions. On May 7, the company confirmed a new round of workforce cuts that will affect hundreds of employees.

This move arrives less than six months after the company completed a massive 13,000-person reduction, the largest in the telecom provider’s history.

The heaviest impact of these new layoffs is expected to be concentrated at the company headquarters in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

According to Business Insider, the latest reduction represents approximately 1% of Verizon’s overall headcount.

And while the company has been conservative with specific headcounts, a recent State Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filing in May confirms that 121 employees at the Basking Ridge headquarters are scheduled to be laid off on August 7, 2026.

Behind these layoffs and the company’s shifting profits lies a larger story of finance and AI-driven infrastructure aimed at improving efficiency.

Verizon’s $5 billion efficiency mandate

The latest workforce reduction follows a transformative milestone for the company. Earlier this year, in January, Verizon finalized its acquisition of Frontier Communications. The $20 billion deal expanded Verizon’s fiber footprint to 31 states.

During the Q1 earnings call, CFO Tony Skiadas also revealed that Verizon is aggressively pursuing an operating expense (OpEx) savings target of $5 billion by the end of 2026.

The telecom provider has also set an ambitious target of $1 billion in operating cost synergies by 2028.

As Verizon absorbs Frontier’s merger and expands its fiber footprint to almost 30 million passings, the company is also prioritizing automation to manage the expanded network, albeit with a smaller human headcount.

“We have begun to see meaningful cost benefits from our transformation efforts as we take out legacy structural costs from the business,” said CEO Dan Schulman during the call.

Skiadas detailed a relentless strategy to permanently remove $5 billion from the company’s annual spend.

“We’re off to a great start on the $5 billion of cost transformation,” Skiadas told analysts.

The strategy is multi-layered:

Workforce reduction: The 13,000-plus layoffs since October 2025 are the primary driver of savings. Skiadas noted the company is “running leaner” and is cutting “third-party contractor and outsource spend” to keep savings in line.

Legacy decommissioning: Verizon is decommissioning old copper network elements, recycling and “monetizing” them by selling scrap metal.

Real estate rationalization: As the workforce shrinks, the company is also reducing its real estate footprint across administrative and network sites.

The most vital aspect of Shulman’s turnaround is the AI tech stack sprint, designed to address customer pain points by automating digital sales and service.

Verizon, through these AI-enabled channels, aims to lower the cost of retention while defending its customer base.

Schulman, who has usually been upfront about AI’s role in the future, told investors that the company is on a timeline that would have been impossible a year ago.

“We are going to be substantially complete with that entire AI tech stack by July, and we hope to be fully done by November,” he said on the call.

To hit this mark, the company has recruited several “AI-savvy individuals” over the last seven months, adding that “we’ve done more in the last three months than we’ve done in the last three to four years around this.”

Verizon’s stock is up 15% year to date.

The Frontier factor and Verizon’s record profits

The May layoffs coincide with Verizon’s most successful quarter in recent years. According to the company’s recent Q1 2026 financial release, Verizon achieved its first positive first quarter “postpaid phone net adds since 2013.”

Its adjusted EPS also rose to $1.28 per share, a 7.6% year-over-year increase.

By integrating Frontier’s fiber network, Verizon expects at least $1 billion in annual cost synergies by 2028. This merger allows Verizon to stop paying third-party access costs and automate its network management, albeit now with a significantly smaller headcount.

Analysts, meanwhile, remain divided. Morgan Stanley recently raised its price target on Verizon to $50 from $40, keeping an equal weight rating. Noting the improving subscriber growth and competitive intensity in wireless was “encouraging,” the firm said.

However, Este Group downgraded Verizon to hold from buy, saying the company’s earnings growth still lags behind the broader sector average, according to TheFly.

As Verizon works to complete its AI tech stack by July, the company’s message is clear that it intends to continue this cost transformation well beyond 2026.

https://www.thestreet.com/employment/verizon-ceo-cuts-to-the-chase-new-layoffs-ai-future

https://www.dailymail.com/yourmoney/article-15811519/rogue-ai-deletes-company-database.html

I verbally heard in a bunch of meetings where Q3 2027 is when contract renewals are going to happen with US and Canadian staffing agencies and given how the CEO and the executives have been rooting for "APAC" (India) and AI. There is a huge chance that they are not going to renew their US and Canada contracts.