#ai

My neighbors ask me all the time when did Dell become so toxic? I tell them it's been this way for many years. But lately, it's accelerated because our inept, incompetent, inexperienced, nepotistic leadership clowns started thinking it could replace employees with AI chatbots. All driven by greed. Dell leadership or HR absolutely DOES NOT CARE about employees.

Laying off skilled employees just because of AI may become one of the biggest mistakes made by many CEOs. AI is a tool, not a complete replacement for human expertise. Companies that remove experienced workers too quickly risk losing knowledge, innovation, quality, and customer trust while facing growing AI costs and mistakes. The smartest strategy is to use AI to support employees, not replace them entirely.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs

American Express employed 76,800 people globally as of December 31, 2025. This included approximately 29,500 workers in the US and 50,900 internationally. The company added 1,700 employees in 2025, a 2.3% increase. American Express did not announce major company-wide layoffs in 2024, 2025, or early 2026. The company focused hiring on growth areas like technology and operations.

New York City, New York

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/american-express-employees

Wisconsin's job market is experiencing a cooling trend. This mirrors a national deceleration in economic growth. New graduates face challenges finding work, though openings exist. AI's long-term impact on job substitution remains unclear. Healthcare and construction show growth, and retirements create many opportunities.

Wisconsin

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/scott-hodek-on-wisconsins-job-market-layoffs-and-ais-role/

How will Cisco present its AI work? Those getting laid off were not allowed to represent CL even if their speaker sessions were approved. Anyone LRed able to go?

AI is making many mistakes, especially in testing and validation. In many organizations, employees are becoming overly dependent on AI and are gradually losing fundamental problem-solving skills. AI is a tool, not a complete solution. Without strong domain knowledge and fundamentals, AI-generated results can be inaccurate and sometimes create bigger issues than they solve.

Many companies are rushing to automate everything with AI, but blindly trusting AI outputs can lead to costly mistakes, rework, and quality problems. In addition, the increasing use of AI models results in higher token consumption, growing infrastructure costs, and expensive subscription fees.

The most effective approach is to use AI as an assistant while keeping experienced employees involved in critical thinking, verification, testing, and decision-making. Human expertise combined with AI is far more valuable than relying entirely on AI.

Many companies rushed to replace employees with AI, but the reality is that advanced AI tools like Claude and others can become expensive at scale and still require human oversight. It wouldn't be surprising if organizations start correcting course and increase hiring again. The best results often come from AI assisting employees, not completely replacing them. The next few years may see many companies finding a better balance between technology and human talent.

JP Morgan amd BOA have started cutting middle managers/regional presidents/retail area execs. Is thisbhappening at Fifth Third? Ai spend is really ramping up now!!!

And the whole pushing AI up our throats , our customers are better at AI than us.

I have a feeling that there will be another round of layoffs in next few months

Standard Chartered plans to cut more than 15% of its corporate function workforce by 2030 as it expands the use of AI and automation across the bank. The restructuring could eliminate more than 7K jobs globally, affecting back-office and support functions. Standard Chartered currently employs around 80K people worldwide and operates extensively across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

CEO Bill Winters said the reductions will be driven by automation and wider adoption of artificial intelligence. The bank expects some employees to be reskilled, but the overall direction is clear: fewer human workers will be needed as AI takes over routine operational tasks. The announcement comes as Standard Chartered raises its long-term profitability targets, aiming for returns above 15% by 2028 and 18% by 2030. Investors appear to support the strategy, with shares moving higher following the announcement.

This is another example of a growing trend across large corporations. AI is no longer being positioned solely as a productivity tool. It is increasingly being used to reduce headcount and streamline operations.

For employees in banking, finance, operations, compliance, risk support, HR, and other corporate functions, the question is becoming harder to ignore:

If a global bank can eliminate 7,000 jobs through automation, how many similar roles across the industry could disappear over the next decade?

Thoughts from current or former Standard Chartered employees?

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters is facing backlash after telling reporters the bank plans to replace "lower value human capital" with AI.

The phrase immediately sparked criticism, with many interpreting it as a reference to employees whose jobs may be automated. While Winters later apologized and said he was referring to workplace transformation rather than the value of workers, the comment has continued to circulate widely on social media.

The controversy highlights a growing tension across industries as companies accelerate AI adoption. Workers are increasingly concerned that executives view AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool, while leaders argue that automation will improve efficiency and reshape job responsibilities.

Regardless of intent, the phrase "lower value human capital" struck a nerve. For many employees already worried about AI-driven job displacement, hearing senior leadership discuss workforce changes in those terms reinforces concerns about how companies view their people.

As banks and other large employers continue investing heavily in AI, expect greater scrutiny of both workforce reduction plans and the language executives use when discussing them.

Was this simply a poor choice of words, or an honest glimpse into how some executives view employees in the AI era?

Dont by the BS... There’s a tiny bit of truth to it, though "tiny bit" is doing a lot of work... It gives companies as well as Amdocs a shareholderfriendly reason to cut headcount - it sounds strategic, smart, rather than alarming.

Why trim... Gestures broadly at everything... Economic uncertainty, geopolitical sh-tshow, weak consumer and customer sentiment. Also... volatile markets, copycat costcutting... the growing sense that when things eventually break (whenever that is??) companies would rather have a larger cash cushion than a smaller one (or none at all.)

I have been thinking a lot about ai and sw eng. work.... been doing it now for almost 3 decades... the productvity gains are real. code moves faster - test cases are easier, documenting takes less effort... and research that used to take hrs happens more quickly.

at the same time, engineering has never been just about producing code. at least for me and folks around me... a lot of the value comes from debugging, arch discussions, mistakes, tradeoffs. learning the system deeply enough to shape it yourself. if ai starts solving too much of that for us, we will lose some of the judgment and ownership that made work meaningful.

Anyhow I do not think the answer is to reject ai. It is way too useful for that... the question is how we use it without replacing the curiosity... craftsmanship... collaboration and mentoring that make good engineers, and good teams even better...

At the same time I do that my wishes will come true, the economics are against it. So, yea times have changed...

To make the most effective use of AI, you pretty much have to be an expert in the domain you are working so you can write effective prompts AND AI must have enough relevant information in order to provide quality output. There is a lot of info in telecom that cannot reasonably be put into AI (confidential info, or spread across many emails, and across many documents (each containing PPI), etc.). For example, take a cell site design: To use AI you would need to upload many plots from Atoll, upload traffic usage and drive data (if available), upload maps, upload ongoing surrounding project info and their status', etc.. You would also need to tell AI what you want as far as standard equipment (and that is always changing and has dependencies), and on and on it goes. The list of things AI needs in order to provide quality output goes on and on, depending on the domain and the intricacies of the required output. The end user also must be knowledgeable enough to recognize garbage.

If you are a non-tech type (not intending an insult here), and you took some of the AI courses available from Google (and probably other AI vendors), you have seen some pretty powerful stuff. AI can do some amazing things. Yes, AI can summarize data. AI can create graphics, videos and audio output. AI can tie together data and create powerful dashboards. AI can write code. AI does all of this much faster than humans. Those AI courses leave the user thinking AI can do most anything. Those AI courses also inspire users to want to buy the creator's product (AI subscriptions). That is intentional! Google, and other AI vendors want to make money on their products. They are not going to talk much about the pitfalls of their products.

Taking those courses is like watching a very long, well produced commercial. If you are a tech type, you may be familiar with at least some of the inner workings of AI and understand it really is a probability machine (really A LOT of little probability machines). It takes in data, creates relationships amongst that data based on probabilities it "learned" from training data. Some of the magic is taken way, but it is a good thing to understand in order to make better use of the tool.

Dan Schulman's educational background is in economics and he has an MBA. Guessing other C-suiters' educational backgrounds are similar. AI works well for economics. You can upload many disparate spreadsheets and as long as there is some semblance that the data in each sheet can be correlated with data in the other sheets, AI will handle it like the Harlem Globetrotters handle a basketball. I am sure Dan was drooling at the mouth when AI vendors showed him what they could do for VZ. But, give AI a bunch of data without concrete direction, and design requests that could have many tradeoffs that are not seen until design time, it will provide output that is not concrete. There will be a lot of garbage output.

To best use AI, yes, you can use conversational prompts, but, you must be very precise. Think of training your dog or you child:). Dogs and children do not understand the concept of "sometimes." You must think like a programmer and tell AI exactly what you want. The issue with more complex problems is that exactly what we want is not known until we get deeper into the design. We have not seen all of the dependencies and tradeoffs until we get deeper into the analysis. By the time we get that far into it, it is faster to just do the task ourselves rather than try to put all of that info into AI.

Time of year I get my checkups done. Of the 3, 2 went straight to AI schedule the appointment. Mentioned it to the receptionists when I arrived. 2 of the 3 had no idea it was implemented at their business. Just noticed the call volume seemed to be down. Wondering how many businesses are using this without making everyone aware that it was taking some of the work from them?

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/was-amazons-tokenmaxxing-fiasco-behind-claudes-500m-mystery-bill

That's great. That's great.

Seems like the sort of thing that could happen at MetLife as they try to measure who is "doing" AI.

Cracks are starting to appear in the AI will save us so much money narrative.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-cost-tokens-gemini-flash-openai-anthropic-gemini-search-2026-5

I left Dell but retained the stock.I see the Trump admin gave a big DoD contract to Dell that should have gone to Microsoft. The result is a 30% increase in the stock price.

I have no inside knowledge, but with most of the earnings coming from AI servers and services - how long before they spin off the PC and accessories business like IBM did some decades back?”

After reading another headline article on a big media website, it got me thinking about AI use here at COP. I wanted to take a poll of how or if AI has changed your job in any way. Who is and isn't using AI tools? What is the roadmap for implementing tools to make your day more efficient? Do you foresee any jobs at COP in O&G being lost due to upcoming AI tech?

As we spent the last decade offshoring and laying off our vteam family, I was energized and excited to learn how AI unlocked is how we scale our most important investment - our people! This is such impactful work. Because when the Vteam thrives, Verizon thrives - together!

There is no question AI is changing how we work, but emotional intelligence will always shape the why. The future belongs to organizations that value both. AI is the how. EI is the why. And nobody cares about people like Verizon. I am very grateful to be part of this best in class culture OS! Let’s go team!

Box CEO Aaron Levie highlights a growing disconnect in Silicon Valley regarding AI. He states many tech executives misunderstand AI's full scope and practical challenges. CEOs often see only the "happy path" of AI, ignoring the extensive work required for sustainable results. This limited view contributes to widespread tech industry layoffs. Companies like Meta and Wix have recently reduced their workforces, partly attributing cuts to AI efficiencies.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/29/box-ceo-aaron-levie-ai-psychosis-jobs-layoffs/

Fintech unicorn Rapyd is undergoing a major restructuring. It is laying off employees as part of this process. CEO Arik Shtilman announced a shift to an AI-driven business model. This change aims to make the company faster and more efficient. Dozens, potentially over a hundred, workers are affected by the cuts.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/h1r00jfrgzl

Alright now that I have your attention, what are the odds that we can use the pope’s recent encyclical about ai to have a religious exemption for using Eliza? While most of us already oppose Eliza and don’t use the sh--e, why couldn’t we put in a religious exemption against their tyrannical master plan and put a stop to all of it? If they want to challenge us on it, I’m sure there would be a juicy settlement headed our way right? Just some thoughts

If Career Connect, AI, outsourcing, rankings, and reorgs are all wildly successful, what does the ideal Exxon employee of 2035 actually look like?

https://www.bankingdive.com/news/wells-fargo-ceo-scharf-ai-employment-banking-jobs/821368/

What would happen to the quarterly earnings if a company rack up $500 million in AI token fees telling their employees to use AI and AI tokens?

Cengage implemented a restructuring plan known as "Project Foundry," cutting approximately (24\%) of its workforce. The strategy focuses on restructuring the company into an "AI-native" organization, transitioning merchant outreach roles to AI voice agents, and coinciding with the resignation of the Chief Operating Officer.

Rawul made appearance, got a hour of his sports franchise to work at DXC.

He wants everyone to AI up for no pay.

Whilst his racking in the money everywhere, how does that work?

….mid March. Seriously, Dan be like ‘AI efficiency” and ‘we must tighten our belt and layoff’ and we’re still sh---y. Pay me Danny boy. You made a sh-t deal with the unions but have always paid us. All that moolah you got saved should be coming back to us. Sh-t, even throw the union some type of bonus for bending over on a bad contract.

Also that voice changer stuff is racist as he-l.

Fear of AI is at an all-time high. Not fear of a Skynet-style superintelligent singularity seizing power, generally speaking, but of something perhaps just as horrifying: that life under capitalism continues much as it always has, with one key difference — AI has made human labor obsolete.

A new survey by consulting firm Mercer polled nearly 1,000 executives across the United States. A jaw-dropped 98 percent of them said they have major organization design changes in the works around AI, while 99 percent expect AI will lead to layoffs over the next two years.

The Mercer report, first covered by TechSpot, also found a collapse in worker wellbeing as talk of AI dominates break rooms. In 2024, Mercer worker’s sentiment found 66 percent of employees surveyed said they are “thriving” in the workplace. By 2026, that number had fallen to just 44 percent.

At the same time, the number of workers who report being “unsatisfied” has skyrocketed, with over 20 percent of workers surveyed admitting they’re “unsatisfied but… don’t have a choice at this point and will be staying for the next 12 months​.”

How human resources managers plan to combat this workplace fatigue — symptomatic of a rapidly decaying labor market, not to mention stagnant wages across the board — is equally alarming. In the next two years, 49 percent of HR professionals say incorporating worker sentiments with behavioral data will become “critical” to managing labor on the job. A further 44 and 43 percent said the same of always-on surveillance platforms and AI chatbots, respectively.

To the business owners and corporatists of the world, this is the point of AI: to discipline human labor. That’s the large-scale economic process by which capitalists undermine workers’ bargaining power, through systemic mechanisms like debt, the so-called gig economy, unemployment, deskilling — and, according to some theorists, even the nuclear family.

In the workplace and outside of it, AI boosts these mechanisms, eroding workers’ power to demand change or even hold onto basic concessions like healthcare and pensions — labor rights begrudgingly pried from corporations after decades of workplace struggle.

The technology doesn’t even need to be particularly effective to achieve any of this. Business leaders like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke are already using AI to squeeze more value from their workers, while venture capitalists use it to pry equity back from theirs. In some cases, managers are even using AI chatbots to decide who to fire.

In all, the picture is pretty grim. The richest men and women in the world have made it abundantly clear why they want AI. The tech may not be living up to their wild expectations quite yet, but they’re still unleashing it without hesitation. The only question is how workers respond now, before that hellish dystopia we all fear becomes our reality.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/99-percent-ceos-workers-ai-survey

You may now understand why employees' dissatisfaction at Dell sunk and will keep sinking.

Clown show continues! How that bozo got anyone to hire him is beyond comprehension.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sol-consulting-launches-solassist-expanding-ai-acceleration-practice-with-former-xerox-executives-302782293.html

IBM's targeted version of Mythos.
Once again riding coattails and scavenging scraps.

https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/ibm-open-source-security-ai-project-lightwell/821348/

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/05/28/ibm-to-spend-5b-on-new-cybersecurity-platform-for-enterprise-customers.html

That Dhivya has updated her email signature to be Dhivya(i) to hammer home the theme of AI prioritization.

San Francisco-based Webflow announced layoffs on Wednesday. Employees were abruptly locked out of company accounts without warning. CEO Linda Tong stated AI tools transformed website development. This prompted a difficult decision to restructure the team. The exact number of affected workers remains unclear.

San Francisco, California

https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/webflow-layoffs-tech-san-francisco-22279561.php

ton let it slip that the company is exploring the idea of squeezing engineering teams down to 4, with the rest of the team being suplimented with ai

if you are in a team of size 5 or more, your head is likely on the block

On Monday, June 1st, Copilot moves to token-based billing with major adjustments to token-cost multipliers. Some models will cost 60x more per token than others. Most of what users would call the "useful" models will become exceedingly expensive in comparison to the others.

Guess I’m finally going to start using AI as much as Sandeep has begged for.

Get ready to open your wallets, you d-mb fu--ing ghouls.

Whenever we find a new way to be more efficient or prodctive the benefit never goes to the employee doing the work.

Mgmt will use it to increase output, cut heads, or dump more work on whoever is left. Nobody in leadership is sitting around saying great, now employees can work less… They are asking how much MORE $$$$ they can squeeze out of it.

Workers only get a share of the gains when they have leverage.

Usually, that means, bargaining collectively.

Now let the downvotes come.

We are doing it to ourselves…

So five years from now when AI is a huge failure what will corporate America do? Will all the leaders pushing it try to gaslight us into thinking they weren’t 100% behind it? Will they tell us it was just an experiment and they didn’t push it? Will companies start rehiring all the people they laid off? I want to see people claim they knew it wouldn’t work and they fought to keep people employed.