#technology

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/foxconn-announces-strategic-collaboration-with-intel-next-gen-ai-infrastructure-2026-06-04/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBtUgWn-nHs

Wendys, Starbucks, Uber, The Big Mouth Mark Benioff, all quietly removing their foots from their mouths and backtracking on AI due to failures and no ROI. AI cant even handle drive though hamburger orders.

Tech CEOs spent the last two years promising AI would replace workers, cut costs, and transform everything. Now they're quietly cancelling data centers, rehiring humans and admitting the math doesn't work. From Microsoft pulling back on billions in infrastructure to Starbucks ki-ling its AI inventory system after it couldn't count milk, Uber burning through a year of AI budget in four months, and one company accidentally spending $500 million on AI tools in a single month the AI hype is hitting reality. Even Sam Altman now says he was wrong about AI replacing jobs.

So...anyone else connecting the dots on why we are now heavily pushing Copilot (and all of M365)? Check out Microsoft's smart badge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw0HBKJlX-w) introduced at the Build Conference 2026. Scary stuff coming!

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/5g/abdu-mudesir-to-become-verizon-s-top-tech-exec-55594

Heard something that made me laugh out loud. HR talking about not “buying” technology platforms as we can build everything ourselves via Citi Stylus. Citi Stylus is a good tool but is it to the level of building enterprise level AI platforms? Not a chance. Good luck to us all and dealing with these HR muppets who sit in their glass towers having no idea what’s actually going on. Delusional. Watch the layoffs start as a result of poorly built internal AI tools to only go on a hiring spree to try figure out how to fix it. Incompetence at its finest.

Anyone know when they’re getting rid of Harness? Terrible platform

There's growing chatter about people being cut due to less token usage.

If you weren't heavily using your copilot, it's being seen as "you're not growing" and "adapting" to new technology.

To me it's seems mo--nic,
It's another metric of punishing people who are efficient while people who used dev assist for simply changing a label on UI are being rewarded.

I heard some rumours coming out of CIS

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/press-releases/crowdstrike-named-a-leader-in-the-2026-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-endpoint-protection-for-seventh-consecutive-time/

Cisco, nowhere to be found? Who was in charge of SBG products, then and now (G2)

https://techrights.org/n/2026/06/02/Quantum_as_the_Next_Big_Bubble.shtml

Widespread layoff confirmed across technology, finance, modeling units.

Fidelity Investments announced job cuts at its Covington, Kentucky campus. A larger reorganization eliminated approximately 800 jobs globally. The firm will reinvest in technology and recruit early-career engineers. This restructuring follows a financially successful 2025 for the company. The Covington campus expects net growth, but with different job types.

Covington, Kentucky

https://unitewithpriti.co.uk/news/inside-the-fidelity-covington-campus-layoffs-and-why-the-story-is-more-complicated-than-it-looks/

According to this CNBC story, CVX is leading companies like Google and Microsoft in adopting AI. Really?

(https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-meta-walmart-among-top-companies-adopting-ai.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.microsoft.msedge.OpenExtension)

The Wikimedia Foundation disbanded its six-person Community Tech team. This team was responsible for developing moderation tools and bug fixes for Wikipedia. Hundreds of Wikipedia editors are now discussing strike action in response to the layoffs. Editors criticize the foundation's decision despite its nearly $300 million in assets. A strike could significantly increase vandalism and content issues on Wikipedia.

https://cybernews.com/news/wikipedia-editors-threaten-strike-action/

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

Existing software to be implemented to track technicians locations onsite. It is already in operation in some sites. Managers will be responsible to track and cross reference with PMs to weed out slackers and site leavers.

All the systems I use that Polaris has touched are worse now. Not user friendly. Takes me longer to complete simple tasks or is no longer possible.

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.

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?

AI adoption continues to drive layoffs across the technology sector. Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have publicly linked job cuts to AI. Meta reportedly eliminated 8,000 roles in an AI-focused restructuring. Meanwhile, demand for cybersecurity experts has surged significantly. Organizations are bolstering security teams due to AI vulnerability risks.

https://letsdatascience.com/news/cybersecurity-hiring-surges-amid-ai-driven-tech-layoffs-58b7acb5

https://www.ncrvoyix.com/newsroom/ncr-voyix-partners-with-u-s-bank-voyager-to-enable-fleet-card-acceptance-through-voyix-connect

"With Voyix Connect, the company is focused on simplifying payment enablement and supporting scalable integrations that help fuel retailers serve fleet customers efficiently."

This is the exact same playbook that Corpay had 15 years ago, when it was calling itself Fleetcor. And it worked! But someone should tell James Kelly and co. that the this is not an exit strategy will work for him or Voyix, because the payments industry is not what it was back when he was fleecing Global Payments. (For anyone not paying attention, the only two payment industry investments worth owning are Visa and Mastercard.) Better find another savior, James. And another playbook.

It might actually be good for truist when the llm circlej bubble pops, as they haven't been able to waste that much money on it yet.

Anyone that thinks ai is "good" for most of the tasks for which it is being proposed, fundamentally does not understand what it means to be human, nor do they understand ai beyond "I need to gobble and push this to keep my job." Dogsh!t code, lies constantly. If you are an expert in your field and quiz it, this becomes apparently immediately.

Join Truist Luddites Anonymous today.

The ORCL DP Dinosaur Bones and 22% a year support is being exposed.

Is this going to be a game changer for Voyix restaurants? Will Voyix finally be able to compete with Toast?

They spent 1000's of Dollars installing big screen TV's over all the departments in the Process Center to televise production information, but could never get it to work the way they wanted .... now the TV's are sitting idle and they have spent more money to hang dry erase boards in all departments and gone back to hand writing everything like we're back in the 80's!!

Get ready. The layoffs are happening.

Lead Software Engineer
LOB: Technology

Simple Google search
Yes, AI can actually cost significantly more than human labor. A major reason for this is that running advanced AI requires massive amounts of expensive hardware and energy, making human workers the cheaper and more economically viable option for about (77\%) of roles.Why AI Can Cost More Than HumansSky-High Compute Fees: The processing power—measured in tokens—required for complex, multi-step "agentic" AI systems can outpace the costs of human salaries. Companies like Uber have reported blowing through their entire yearly AI budgets in just a few months due to heavy infrastructure usage.Expensive Hardware and Energy: Nvidia's vice president of applied deep learning has noted that for his team, AI compute costs far exceed the salaries of the employees utilizing the tools.Required Human Oversight: AI still makes frequent errors, forcing companies to pay human workers to monitor the models, review outputs, and fix breakdowns.The Economic RealityA landmark MIT study found that it is only economically viable to automate about (23\%) of jobs. In the remaining (77\%) of cases, employing a human is cheaper, more accurate, and more efficient than relying on artificial intelligence.While research firm Gartner projects that the unit cost of running large language models will drop substantially by 2030, overall enterprise costs will likely remain high. This is because businesses are utilizing much more complex models that require significantly more processing power per task.You can read more about the challenges of AI replacing human labor in this MIT Study or learn about enterprise budget shifts on Forbes.

or at least, not directly.

it’s about 100s of billions in capital investment,.. foundries, process tech, supply chains, equipment, capacity, political leverage, u name it - all of it. intel obvously cannot run without good engineers. that part is true. but the reason the market value has exploded is that everything around the engineers suddenly became much more valuable because of the tech cycle and geopolitics.

think of it this way imagine somene from the outside could take over everything the company owns except the people then hire a new workforce from scratch. it would probably take them ten years to make it work. hmmm.... maybe longer. but once they got there, they would be sitting on a money-printing machine.

i’m an engineer too, and i have a pretty high opinion of what we do. no false modesty there.

but at this valuation, i don’t think they’re looking at you and me. they’re looking at the machine.

The Dutch government has blocked the sale of Solvinity, the company that manages its online services portal DigiD, to the US-based tech giant Kyndryl amid concerns that millions of citizens’ private data could be compromised.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/05/dutch-government-blocks-sale-of-digid-owner-to-us-tech-giant/

Nvidia executive: The cost of AI tools is ‘far beyond’ the cost of human workers | Fortune https://share.google/6dSQd3XuczlH5KXs1

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwp87j1llvo

https://l.smartnews.com/p-7N8S54w8/P2qeIM

Claude Code launched inside Microsoft's Experiences and Devices group in December 2025. Six months later, the experiment is ending. The tool was not cancelled because engineers disliked it. It was cancelled because they used it too much.

Have the people pushing this ever actually used AI for anything real? Yeah, you can automate some boring stuff, but you could do that with regular code, and you wouldn't have to babysit it. Plus, AI doesn't create anything new. It never will. Once we're gone, who's left to train it? Game over. Makes zero sense to me.

Acrisure is implementing significant layoffs across its operations. The company will reduce its workforce by 11%. This impacts approximately 2,250 employees. Technology advancements, AI, and digital platforms are cited as reasons. The layoffs will begin this week and continue through 2027.

https://coverager.com/acrisure-announces-layoffs/

My AVP took my file and ran it through Ask ATT to give me an action plan. You were already worthless Boomer- your use of technology is embarrassing. It’s the AVPs and up that need to go. I am selling to the customer- what value are you brining?????

Acrisure is laying off 2,250 employees. This reduction represents 11% of its total workforce. The layoffs will begin now and continue in phases into 2027. These changes primarily impact U.S.-based operations. The company cites advances in technology, AI, and digital platforms as reasons.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/source-acrisure-announces-2250-layoffs-totaling-11-of-workforce-citing-technology-al-digital-platforms/69-339a1b30-018e-4c2e-885a-c0a82e7583f7

How is Teamcenter working out for you guys?

Any idea which areas and how many?