The AI&Work Chronicle

Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs to fund the AI that replaced them; Ford quietly rehires the engineers AI couldn't; A judge says Workday can't hide behind its clients; Brussels delays AI hiring rules to 2027

Microsoft opens its fiscal year with nearly 5,000 layoffsMicrosoft kicked off its new fiscal year July 1st by cutting about 4,800 jobs, roughly 2 percent of its workforce. Xbox took the biggest hit, losing 1,600 people. Sales and consulting absorbed most of the rest. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman told staff the company is changing because “the world around it is changing.” That is a gentle way to describe a pattern you have seen from Microsoft before.The company cut jobs in May of last year too, and again in July. This time the cuts are smaller than last year’s, partly because a voluntary retirement program thinned the ranks earlier in the year. Microsoft says it has redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles over the past year. It is spending close to $190 billion on AI infrastructure this year, so the money is clearly going somewhere. It is just not going toward keeping these particular jobs.When the humans come backThree companies just showed you what happens when AI takes over a job it cannot actually do. Ford rehired, hired, or promoted 350 experienced engineers after its automated quality checks missed defects that human judgment would have caught. Ford then topped J.D. Power’s quality rankings for the first time since 2010. In Australia, Commonwealth Bank laid off more than 40 customer service workers and replaced them with an AI voice bot. Call volumes rose and the bank reversed the cuts.The union involved called it “a massive win.” IBM’s AI system handled 94 percent of routine HR requests just fine. The remaining 6 percent involved ethical judgment calls the system could not make, so IBM is now tripling its entry-level hiring. New survey data backs up the pattern.Robert Half found that 32 percent of U.S. hiring managers who cut a role for AI have already rehired for it. I would treat any figure above that as approximate until you check it against the original survey, since I found it reported secondhand.Cognizant bets on a shorter pyramidCognizant is preparing to cut somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 jobs worldwide under a plan called Project Leap, with India expected to feel most of it. CEO Ravi Kumar S has described the goal as a “broader and shorter pyramid,” meaning fewer layers of junior staff supporting senior people. The company has not confirmed a specific number of cuts. What it has confirmed is $230 million to $320 million in expected severance costs, which is how outside analysts backed into the 12,000 to 15,000 estimate in the first place.India’s entry-level door keeps closingThe freshers who once filled India’s IT industry are finding fewer seats. Staffing firm Xpheno reports entry-level tech postings fell 44 percent year over year. Reliance may have hired around 90,000 fewer new employees this fiscal year than last. TCS ended the year with 23,460 fewer people on staff.An analyst told Mint, a business magazine, that firms are shifting toward workers in their 30s who already know the client relationships, rather than training newcomers from scratch. That is the same story you have heard about entry-level coding jobs in the U.S., just told in a different country with different numbers.Unions from four continents compare notes in BerlinFifty union representatives from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America met in Berlin recently to talk about AI at work. Jacob Plat of the Dutch union FNV put the goal plainly: “digitalisation should be negotiated, not imposed.” The numbers they are working against are large. Roughly 83 million jobs are considered at risk from robotics by 2027. This was not a protest. It was closer to a planning session for how workers might get a seat at the table before the decisions get made instead of after.A court signals that AI vendors might share the legal exposure tooSHRM reported in its article “The Workday AI Lawsuit Is a Wake-Up Call for HR”A federal judge in California let key parts of a discrimination lawsuit against Workday move forward this year, and the reasoning behind that decision could reshape how HR technology companies see their legal risk.Judge Rita F. Lin ruled on June 22 that Workday’s screening tools can be treated as functioning on behalf of the companies that use them. That distinction matters because it means the software company itself, not just its clients, could face responsibility for outcomes the tools produce.That responsibility applies at least under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. Age, disability, and California-specific race discrimination claims can all proceed to the next stage.This ruling grew out of Mobley v. Workday, a case Derek Mobley filed after he says he was rejected from more than 100 jobs, often within minutes of applying. He argued the speed and pattern of rejections pointed to an automated system, not a human reviewer, making the calls. Workday has said its tools do not weigh age, race, or disability. A company spokesperson stated the technology looks only at job qualifications.A related case against a different company, Eightfold AI, raises a separate legal question. Plaintiffs there argue Eightfold’s tools should fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the law that normally governs background checks. The two cases differ, but together they point toward the same shift.Employers used to assume the software vendor absorbed most of the legal exposure for automated hiring decisions. Judges increasingly treat that assumption as wrong.This stage of the case means the claims can continue. It does not mean Workday has been found liable for anything. The next phase involves discovery and eventually a trial or settlement, so the final outcome remains open.Europe just gave itself more timeThe European Union had planned to require AI transparency and human oversight in hiring, firing, and promotion decisions starting August 2. The Council of the EU gave final approval on June 29 to push that deadline back to December 2, 2027. The measure still requires formal publication in the EU’s Official Journal, expected sometime in July 2026, before it takes legal effect. Once published, the protections European workers were expecting this summer will remain on hold for another year and a half. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Meta's spy tool leaks the secrets it pilfered from workers; Oracle fires 21,000, spends $70 billion on machines; firms slash hardest, gain nothing; AI shuts the door to opportunity before you knock

4w ago00:05:49Tap to summarize

A pattern keeps showing up this year, and yesterday it got harder to argue with. A profitable company sheds thousands of workers, names AI as a reason in its own paperwork, then turns around and pours billions into AI hardware. Oracle just did exactly that.Oracle puts AI in writingOracle cut about 21,000 jobs over the past year. The number matters, and so does where it came from. The company admitted in its own annual regulatory filing that AI played a part. The filing says AI deployment “may continue to result in reductions to our workforce.”The cuts brought Oracle’s headcount down to roughly 141,000 from about 162,000 a year earlier. Some teams felt it far more than others.Revenue and Health Sciences saw reductions near 30%, while cloud and AI teams were mostly spared. Oracle plans to spend around $70 billion this year building AI data centers for customers like OpenAI. The company is cutting people and building machines in the same breath.Meta’s tracking program springs a leakWe told you yesterday about Meta’s program that records employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train its AI. It seems, though, Meta paused the program after a data leak exposed sensitive worker information to the entire company.So, Meta did not stop surveilling workers because they objected to being watched. It stopped because the watching went wrong.Private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions became visible across the company. The program, launched in April, recorded keystrokes, mouse activity, and occasional screen content from US staff. A company that wants to read every click could not keep those clicks private. Workers noticed.Narrower On-rampsHere is a story about jobs that vanish before anyone gets laid off. A new report from Opportunity@Work warns that AI could wall off millions of “gateway jobs” for workers without a four-year degree.Gateway jobs are the entry and mid-skill roles people, typically without college degrees, use to climb into better pay. The report counts up to 11 million of them exposed to AI losses. Read that as the group’s own estimate, since they advocate for these workers.The report notes that 33 states have agreed to drop degree requirements from public jobs. So, AI could open these doors wider or shut them, depending on how employers choose to use it.A lot of cuts, not much payoffConcurrently, tech layoffs are running at roughly 1,100 a day in 2026, close to double last year’s pace. Meta, Oracle, and Block all point to AI.A Gartner study of 350 firms found that the companies cutting the most showed no improvement in financial returns. So the layoffs are not obviously paying off.That gap is why some economists use the term “AI washing.” It describes firms blaming AI for cuts they wanted to make anyway. Treat the daily-rate figures as estimates from layoff trackers, not exact counts.The silent killer is slow hiringLayoffs grab headlines. The bigger shift for young workers isn’t making the front page of the news. Some economists argue that AI is hurting hiring more than it is driving firings, impacting junior staff the most.Goldman Sachs research found AI trimmed monthly payroll growth by around 16,000 jobs over the past year. Companies are not always cutting people. They are choosing not to add them.One organizational psychologist put the trap plainly. “The people who get laid off don’t necessarily get the next set of jobs, because the roles are different.”India’s AI experiment on steroidsFor a wider view, look at India. Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have each rolled Microsoft Copilot out to more than 100,000 workers, over 300,000 seats combined. Wipro says its performance AI review agent cut performance-review effort by nearly 70%.At the same time, these firms are thinning out without big announcements. They lean on delayed hiring and attrition instead.The Microsoft rollout reads like a press release, so take it with a grain of sale. Nevertheless, workers get AI tools dropped onto their desks, and the company gets to do more with fewer staff. To their credit, the firms are paying for retraining.Average learning hours at TCS rose past 120 per employee this year, with Infosys up 58%.Where this leaves usSo, Oracle wrote AI into the official reason it cut 21,000 people, and a respected study found that the firms cutting hardest got nothing to show for it on the balance sheet. Companies are forming around a bet on AI, and the bet has not paid off yet for many of them.Workers, meanwhile, are mere lab rats in a grand experiment of capitalism. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Meta retreats on worker surveillance; Gen Z told resistance is futile, yet still pushes back; the promotion ladder losing its middle rung; software engineers do AI's homework nightly, unpaid

4w ago00:05:21Tap to summarize

Cognizant trims as India’s IT engine coolsIndia’s Cognizant rolled out an AI program it calls Project Leap. It blends worker re-skilling with job cuts. Indian newspaper Mint reported that up to 4,000 roles could go.This reaches far past one company. India’s IT and outsourcing sector runs much of the world’s customer support, clerical, and back-office work. When firms there move away from volume hiring toward productivity, the people who answer your support tickets feel it first.Net hiring across India’s top five IT firms already dropped by around 7,000 in the year ending March 2026. The volume model that built India’s white-collar middle class is winding down, and nobody has built the replacement yet.The unpaid homework problemMeanwhile, tech workers around the world are spending nights and weekends teaching themselves AI tools because they feel they cannot afford to fall behind. One engineer in Dublin built an AI agent that called US hotels and negotiated room rates for him after work. None of it was part of his job.This is the corporate overhead of the AI shift that does not appear on the ledger. The pressure to keep current moves into personal time. It lands hardest on the people who already worry most about their jobs.The skills race is real, and right now workers are paying for it with their own evenings. The Displacement Audit on Substack has an insightful article that provides an inside look on the stress this is causing IT engineers.Meta backs off its tracking toolMeta scaled back a program that recorded employee keystrokes and clicks to train its AI. More than 1,600 workers signed a petition against it. Staff in one office nicknamed it the “Employee Data Extraction Factory.” After the backlash, Meta began letting employees pause the tracking for 30 minutes at a time.The strange part is that the business is thriving even as morale sinks. Meta posted $56.3 billion in first-quarter revenue, up 33 percent. So the surveillance push was a choice made from a position of strength, not desperation, and certainly not cooperation.Middle managers in the crosshairsThe career ladder is losing a rung in the middle, too. Bloomberg reported on a widening corporate move to thin out middle management, anchored on a management manifesto from Jack Dorsey. Dorsey wants a company where an AI “intelligence layer” coordinates the work in place of managers, and individual experts decide and act on their own. The same pattern shows up across Block, GitLab, and Citigroup.For service workers, the sting is in what gets cut. The team-lead or shift-manager job was the usual step up from frontline work. That step is exactly the one companies are now pulling. Typical stories have seen the bottom of the ladder dissolved. This a chunk taken from the middle.Quiet resistance on the insideSome workers are pushing back in their own way. Fortune reported that a portion of younger employees refuse to use mandated AI tools. A few admitted to nudging their performance reviews to make the AI look less effective than it is.Surveys keep finding that workers do not reject AI itself.They reject top-down mandates, unclear rollouts, and tools that add busywork instead of saving time.Force the tools on people without training or trust, and you get resignations and quiet sabotage. The friction is a management problem dressed up as a technology problem.The other side of the ledgerScaler’s India AI Workforce Report, drawn from 11,444 professionals, found that workers who built AI skills saw real pay gains. Women who moved into AI-enabled roles reported an average salary jump of 145%. One caution here, though.Scaler sells AI training courses, so it has a stake in telling an upbeat story. Read the number as a vendor’s propaganda, not a repeatable phenomenon.Meanwhile, PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built on more than a billion job ads, found wages growing faster at the most AI-exposed companies. It also found a divide.Jobs that AI “professionalizes,” where it handles the routine work so human judgment matters more, are growing twice as fast as jobs it simply makes easier for anyone to do. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Robinhood cuts 10% but won't say "AI"; half your day is now spent babysitting AI; put AI on the org chart and people stop checking its work; Colorado's AI law kicks off in 7 days and nobody's ready

Jun 1900:06:55Tap to summarize

Robinhood had a strange week. On June 16, the company announced it would cut about 290 workers, roughly 10% of its full-time staff. The odd part is that the company is doing well. CEO Vlad Tenev told employees in a memo that “Robinhood’s business has never been stronger.” The company reported record trading volumes in June.He framed the cuts as a way to flatten the organization and raise what he called “talent density.”Here is a detail worth noticing, though: Tenev never mentioned AI anywhere in the memo, Tech Crunch noted. He did say the company would use “frontier technologies” to push its execution further.That sounds a lot like AI without saying so.For most of this year, companies rushed to credit AI for their layoffs because investors liked the efficiency story. Now the sentiment has shifted.Blaming AI for job cuts has started to generate worker backlash. Cleverly, Robinhood appears to have read the room.Listen on Apple PodcastsA Carmaker Launches a Product, Then Cuts the People Who Support ItRivian followed a similar path with different wording. On June 16, CNBC reported the electric vehicle maker laid off hundreds of workers in its service and customer organization. The sales and marketing teams were hardest hit.Notice the timing: the cuts came one week after Rivian began delivering its new R2 SUV, the lower-priced vehicle meant to take the company mainstream. Rivian described the move as restructuring to “profitably scale our business.”An analyst at Edmunds said out loud what a lot of people were thinking. “You have to wonder to what degree they do plan on replacing those people with some level of AI and automation,” he told reporters.Rivian is pouring money into autonomous vehicle technology, including a robotaxi partnership with Uber. A company launching a product while cutting the human workforce built to support that product is a pattern service workers recognize immediately.Most of Us Now Spend More Time Managing AI Than Doing Our JobsIf you have felt lately like your job has quietly turned into babysitting AI, the data backs you up. BCG’s fourth annual AI at Work survey found that 47% of workers now spend more time managing and directing AI than doing their actual work. The June 3rd survey covered 11,749 workers across 14 markets.Frontline AI adoption hit 74%, up 23 points from last year. Among regular users, 42% report saving a full workday every week through AI. The catch is that almost no organization has figured out what workers should do with that reclaimed time.The report describes a “joy paradox”: 67% of regular AI users say the technology has improved their job satisfaction. Forty-one percent report increased mental strain at the same time. AI is making work both better and worse, often for the same person on the same day.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time.Putting AI on the Org Chart Makes Humans SloppierResearchers at Boston Consulting Group ran a controlled study of 1,261 managers across the U.S., Canada, and the EU.They gave participants the same document full of errors, then told different groups it had been produced by a human, by an AI tool, or by a named-AI “employee.”The group that thought a named-AI employee wrote it caught 18% fewer errors. Individual accountability for the mistakes dropped by 9 percentage points. Accountability assigned to the AI rose by 8 points.In other words, the moment a company treats an AI agent like a coworker, people stop checking its work and start blaming it when something goes wrong. Oddly, more than 20% of surveyed companies have already put AI agents on their official org charts.The errors do not disappear, though. They just slip past the humans who used to catch them.BUY NOW! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time.What Workers at Big AI Companies Are Actually SeeingGallup surveyed 23,717 U.S. employees and found a clear split.At organizations adopting AI, 27% of workers say their workplace changed in disruptive ways over the past year. At organizations that have not adopted AI, only 17% say the same. The sharpest finding involves the largest employers.At companies of 10,000 or more that use AI, 33% of workers report their workforce shrinking versus 30% reporting growth.At large companies that have NOT adopted AI, the numbers flip: 36% report hiring more workers versus 23% reporting cuts.Half of Companies Have No Working AI Policy for HRMeanwhile, SHRM’s State of AI in HR 2026 report found that 54% of organizations either have no AI policy for HR or describe the one they have as too rigid to be useful.Only 46% plan to use AI in HR at all this year. Of the companies that do have a policy, just 25% call it clear and built to last.The AI & Work Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Laws Are Coming, and Most Employers Are Not ReadyThat gap matters more every week, because the regulations are arriving. States are building a patchwork of AI hiring laws covering bias audits, impact assessments, and worker notice requirements.Colorado’s AI Act takes effect June 30. California’s SB 951, requiring 90 days notice before AI-driven layoffs affecting 25 or more workers, is still pending.No federal law requires any employer to disclose whether AI drove a job cut. Companies are deploying AI faster than they are writing the rules to govern it, and faster still than the government is writing the rules to govern them. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Klarna rehires the staff it fired, as gig workers; skip AI and triple your layoff odds; Wix cuts 1,000 to fund AI; bosses call AI replacement "redesign"; Paytm hires 4,000 who speak AI

Jun 1900:05:51Tap to summarize

Steady jobs are quietly turning into gig workLet me start with the story that should worry the most people. The Guardian looked at how AI is reshaping work, and the pattern is sometimes subtler than a clean layoff. The job survives, but it gets chopped into gig work. The example is Klarna.The company cut hundreds of customer service jobs in 2024 for an AI chatbot, then brought humans back a year later. The catch is how.It rehired them as contractors in what its CEO calls an “Uber type of set-up”, where the bot handles the easy questions and gig workers take the hard ones. Researchers in the piece argue that companies often keep the work but dismantle the full-time role around it, mostly to save money.Listen on Apple PodcastsThe benefits go first, and desk workers like customer service agents, copywriters, and analysts feel it soonest. The Guardian article illustrates the scale of the issue in numbers:A recent survey from Upwork found that about 60 million Americans, or 39% of the workforce, already perform freelance or gig work either full-or part-time. That number is expected to jump to 86 million – about half of the workforce – by 2027, according to Statista, a global data intelligence platform.The largest and fastest-growing segment is not rideshare drivers or delivery couriers, but knowledge workers: customer service agents, copywriters, financial analysts, paralegals, writers and coders.Once workers are classified as contractors, rather than employees, “you have the rolling back of generations of hard-won workplace protections,” says Alexandrea Ravenelle, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. “Literally stuff that our great-grandparents died for, all of those protections are gone.”I write about this trend in my Future Forwarded Substack series of articles: “The Jenga Job: How AI Will Dismantle Work One Task at a Time,” “I Know Why the Caged Contractor Sings: How Contractor Job Loss Is the First Warning of an AI Labor Crisis,” and “The AI Tipping Point: How Mass Contractor Income Loss Ushers Recession.”Skipping AI now carries a real costHere is a number that lands close to home. New Gallup research finds that tech workers who use AI at least monthly face about a 6% chance of being laid off, while those who use it less face about 18%. That is triple the risk.The estimate comes from a February survey of more than 23,000 U.S. workers, and the gap held even after accounting for age, education, and industry. The same pattern shows up outside tech, though smaller. One detail stands out. Only about 1% of laid-off workers blamed AI directly, so the shift is happening quietly. Using these tools regularly is starting to look like job insurance.Wix trims about a fifth of its staffNow a quick one that fits the trend. The web-platform company Wix plans to cut roughly 1,000 jobs, about 20% of its workforce, after a weak quarter and rising AI costs. The company points to efficiency. The workers see the bill landing on them.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time.Paytm cuts 400 jobs and opens 4,000 moreOver in India, two things are happening at once. The fintech company Paytm is cutting about 400 roles while opening around 4,000 new ones tied to AI and merchant growth. So the work here is shifting rather than vanishing. The roles are being swapped for AI-fluent ones. If you can work alongside the tools, the door stays open.India’s offices race to write AI rulesHere is the quieter side of all this. Across India, companies are scrambling to write rules for how workers use AI. The worry is that an employee might paste customer data or a contract into a public chatbot. Under India’s data-protection law, that can carry steep penalties. So inside many offices there is now a second worry beyond layoffs. It is how employees are allowed to use AI without creating a legal problem for the company.BUY NOW! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time.A more sanguine view from the topI will end with the other side of the table. The World Economic Forum gathered six business leaders to talk through AI and talent. Their message leans toward redesign rather than cuts, with skills aging fast and roles shifting instead of disappearing. Take it for what it is, the view from the executive chair. Put it all together and the through-line holds. AI is reshaping who keeps steady work, and the people who learn the tools are landing on the safer side of the line.The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Meta spies on staff as morale craters; Walmart swears 2M jobs safe while thinning office; Microsoft warns AI to hollow communities, then ships Copilot; Nvidia boss poo-poos AI job replacement fears

Jun 1700:04:58Tap to summarize

Meta’s AI team is close to a revoltLet me start with the one everybody is talking about. Meta moved several thousand workers into a new Applied AI unit, and a lot of them are unhappy. Many describe repetitive data-labeling and forced reassignments, and a large group signed a petition against software that tracks their keystrokes and mouse movements.The company’s own technology chief, Andrew Bosworth, did something rare. He admitted the rollout went badly. He told staff that morale is near its worst in 20 years and that leadership did an “atrocious” job. He also noted that median pay slipped from about $417,400 to $388,200.His advice to nervous employees was blunt, if not a bit banal. AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows AI might.Walmart tells its workers not to worryNow to the company that touches the most lives. Walmart employs around 2 million people, and it is telling them their jobs are safe. The reassurance comes with fine print.The company is trimming corporate and middle-management roles, and its leadership has talked about centralizing its platforms as AI reshapes retail. At the same time, Walmart keeps hiring cashiers, stockers, and warehouse staff. Stores still need people on the floor every day.So the message to frontline workers is steady employment, while the message to the office is leaner teams.Microsoft’s CEO compares AI to outsourcingSatya Nadella, who runs Microsoft, warned that AI could “hollow out” whole industries the same way outsourcing once gutted manufacturing. He argued that if the value piles up in a few giant models, the politics will not hold.He pointed back to the first wave of globalization, when the GDP numbers looked fine while the damage to workers and towns ran deep.Meanwhile, Microsoft puts its Copilot assistant inside Word, Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Those are the tools millions of people open every morning.The man warning about the potential harms of AI is also the one pushing the product.State Farm agents feel betrayedState Farm licensed an AI product for all of its agent offices and raised the limit on how many offices one agent can run, from three to six. It also ended a deferred-compensation program that agents were counting on for retirement.Agents are furious, calling it a “false promise”. One mid-career agent figures the change will cost him about $1 million over ten years. The company says its agents stay central to how it serves customers.The agents hear something different. They hear a lifetime contract getting quietly rewritten.Uber cut its HR team while overspending on AIHere is a smaller story with an outsized point. Uber eliminated about 23% of its People and Places division. The group handles human resources and workplace culture. The timing raised eyebrows.The cut came days after the company admitted it burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in just four months. Uber says the two are unrelated and that the reorganization was about simplifying overlapping teams. Maybe so.Still, a company that spent its AI money fast and then cut the people who look after its people is going to invite questions.One loud voice says relaxAmidst the realities of companies replacing staff because of AI-related decisions, Jensen Huang, who runs Nvidia, thinks the panic is overblown.Speaking on Bloomberg on June 1, he called the idea that AI is destroying jobs “complete nonsense”. His argument is that AI makes each engineer more productive, so companies want more of them, not fewer.He is probably right that new jobs come eventually. The catch is timing. Early data shows employment for the youngest software developers falling while their older colleagues hold on.New jobs may arrive. The real question for workers is whether they arrive before the rent is due. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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The layoffs don't pay off, but they keep coming; India's call centers hire 17 in nine months; Anthropic funds research into smoothing its own labor disruption; "AI-first world" is code for a layoff

Jun 1700:04:23Tap to summarize

Start with a question that workers ask and executives avoid. If a company replaces people with AI, does the company actually make more money?A new analysis this week says the answer is often no. Gartner studied 350 firms and found that the companies cutting the most jobs showed no improvement in their financial returns. The cuts looked decisive. The payoff did not arrive.Listen on Apple PodcastsNevertheless, the cutting keeps going. Tech layoffs are running at about 1,115 a day in 2026, and more than half of those events name AI as a reason. The damage falls hardest on the youngest workers. The junior share of tech hiring has dropped from about 15% of jobs to 7% since 2023. Recent computer science graduates now face an unemployment rate near 6.1%. The first rung of the career ladder is the rung companies are sawing off.So who catches these workers when they fall? One of the companies building the tools just put money toward answering that question. Anthropic announced a $200 million Economic Futures Research Fund on June 10, paired with a $150 million fellowship program for early-career workers. The combined pledge reaches $350 million.Its CEO, Dario Amodei, went further in a personal essay. He argued that government should promise economic support to people displaced by AI. He floated universal basic income funded by taxes on AI companies or higher capital-gains rates.However, the clearest picture of the disruption comes from India. The country’s business-process-outsourcing (BPO) industry, the call centers and back offices that the world hires to handle routine work, added only 17 net employees in the first nine months of fiscal 2026. Not 17,000. Seventeen.For an industry that once absorbed hundreds of thousands of young graduates a year, that number marks a near-total stop. The entry door into India’s service economy is closing, and AI is holding it shut.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time.Now the countervailing evidence, because this story runs in more than one direction. A survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs found that 67% expect AI to increase their entry-level hiring this year, and 58% plan to add senior leaders too.These executives describe AI as reshaping work rather than erasing it. Treat this as a feeling, not a result. The survey was taken late last year, and intentions and outcomes often part ways. Still, it signals that some leaders plan to hire more.BUY NOW! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time.The cuts that did land this week fit the familiar pattern. The crypto-data firm Dune eliminated a quarter of its staff on June 15. The marketing company Gambling.com is cutting a quarter of its workforce, and its incoming chief executive framed the move as building for an “AI-first world.” The phrase has become the standard caption for a layoff.So, the job cuts often fail to pay off, yet they continue. The young get hit first. One AI maker is funding the search for answers while asking the public to help foot the bill. The honest reading is that nobody, not the CEOs cutting jobs and not the ones promising to hire, knows yet where this AI makeover is heading.The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Wanting a human no longer protects customer service jobs; AI pays directors 62% more; India sheds 3,400 engineers off the books, senior roles down two in three; 1,115 fired daily, the AI-fluent stay

Jun 1500:05:53Tap to summarize

PwC released its 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer this morning, after studying more than one billion job ads across 27 countries. The finding is that the labor market is splitting into two tracks.One track holds what PwC calls “professionalised” roles, where AI handles the routine work and people get paid for judgment, creativity, and leadership. The other holds “democratised” roles, where AI makes the job simple enough that almost anyone can step in. The first track is growing faster in both hiring and pay. The second is falling behind.PwC found that the wage premium for AI skills climbed to 62%, up from 57% a year ago. In consumer-facing industries it now tops 100%. Stated plainly, a worker who can direct AI earns far more than a worker who competes against it. (A “wage premium” is the extra pay one group earns over another for the same kind of work.)Listen on Apple PodcastsCompanies that use AI well are hiring more people, not fewer. But the same report shows entry-level jobs dividing along the same line. AI-exposed entry roles now demand skills that used to belong to senior staff. Those roles grew 35% since 2019. Ordinary entry-level roles fell 10%. Newly-minted college grads are experiencing the reduction in entry-level jobs the hard way.Meanwhile, SHRM published its 2026 job-displacement report on June 12, and its surprising finding is that the share of American jobs at high risk of automation dropped from 6% to 5.1%. That is roughly 7.9 million jobs that look safer than they did a year ago. Task automation rose over the same stretch, yet the displacement risk fell.SHRM found that the “client preferences” barrier is weakening. That barrier is the simple fact that many customers want a human, not a machine.For years the preference protected call-center staff, receptionists, and support agents. The report points to Klarna, the company that replaced about 700 service workers with AI, then rehired humans after customers complained. SHRM’s data suggests customer tolerance for AI is now rising fast.PwC says AI rewards the workers who command it. SHRM says the customer resistance that once protected everyone else is thinning. Both point the same way. Protection is moving away from the job and toward the skill the worker brings to it.We see a similar trend in India. Active tech job openings there fell to a 28-month low of about 93,000 in early June, down from 119,000 in March. Senior-level openings dropped 67% from a year earlier.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time.Analysts now describe Indian tech hiring as “hyper-elastic,” meaning firms expand and shrink their workforces faster and harder than before. A worker who once counted on steady demand now faces a market that swings with every quarter.Indian tech powerhouses TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Tech Mahindra released an estimated 3,400 mid-tier engineers in May and June, through performance-improvement exits and bench reductions. None of it showed up in formal layoff filings.Salesforce sent cuts into its India delivery teams under its “AI-first” reorganization. Intel ran a second round through its Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices. The shape matters more than the size. Mid-level engineers on non-AI teams are leaving. AI-fluent engineers are staying.BUY NOW! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time.Trackers of firings in America now count roughly 184,000 tech layoffs in 2026, about 1,115 a day across 247 events. New names this week include Amdocs, which cut 2,900 jobs, many of them in Israel.Salesforce trimmed its Agentforce and Marketing Cloud teams. Google kept paring its Cloud division. These cuts pile onto a known trend rather than break a new one. They confirm what the bigger reports describe.The question is no longer whether AI takes jobs. The question is which workers it pays and which it passes over. PwC measured the reward. SHRM measured the fading protection. India shows the sorting between AI-savvy and non-AI oriented workers in real time.The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The salaries of workers learning to direct these tools are pulling ahead. The workers waiting for the old protections to hold are running short on time. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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The AI/Labor Report — Friday, 12 June 2026

Jun 1200:06:52Tap to summarize

Customer service is the largest single employment category in the American economy. It is also the one AI is targeting most directly, most publicly, and soonest. Forrester’s 2026 CX Outsourcing Report projects that 49% of current customer service jobs will be gone by 2030.High-volume consumer contact centers face 80% AI containment within five years. Lower-volume B2B environments face roughly 70% containment because their cases require more judgment and less repetition. If AI handles eight or nine out of every ten contacts, the workforce required to handle the remainder looks very different from what exists today.Listen on Apple PodcastsVerizon illustrates how that process unfolds on the ground. Before CEO Dan Schulman announced the largest round of layoffs in Verizon’s history, the company required customer service staff to participate in mandatory AI role-playing exercises. Sales representatives spent weeks interacting with an AI system the company described as a tool for improving customer service skills.A former employee reported that the sessions began six weeks before Schulman announced 13,000 job cuts and grew more intensive as the layoff date approached. Verizon said the training was not designed to gather replacement data. The timing made that statement difficult to accept at face value.The company has since confirmed a second round of cuts scheduled for August 7 at its New Jersey headquarters, with no retraining programs announced for affected workers.Gartner has identified the pattern clearly enough to project its next phase. A survey of 321 customer service leaders found that only 20% of companies actually reduced staffing because of AI, with most 2025 layoffs tied to federal policy changes and post-pandemic right-sizing instead.Gartner projects that half the companies that did cut workers for AI will rehire them by 2027, but under new job titles. The returning workers will manage and coach the AI systems that replaced their former colleagues. The job is the same conversation, at one remove, with a fraction of the original headcount.Gartner also projects that conversational AI will reduce contact center labor costs by $80 billion in 2026, even though only one in ten agent interactions will actually be automated this year. The savings come not primarily from firing staff but from AI absorbing repetitive, high-volume contacts that currently drive 30 to 45% annual staff turnover across the industry. Companies do not need to announce layoffs to shrink. They simply stop replacing people who leave.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time.The workers best positioned to survive this shift are those who have built genuine fluency with AI tools. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, surveying 20,000 knowledge workers across 10 countries, found that only 19% of AI users operate in what Microsoft calls the Frontier Zone, where individual capability and organizational support reinforce each other.Ten percent are in a state of blocked agency: workers with genuine AI skills trapped inside organizations that have not updated their processes or incentives to put those skills to use. Only 13% say their organization explicitly rewards reinventing work with AI.Meanwhile, Google announced Thursday a $50 million commitment to train more than 300,000 skilled trade workers across the U.S., directing funds through 14 labor unions and four trade associations. The investment targets the electricians, fiber technicians, welders, and HVAC specialists needed to build and maintain AI data centers.Meta announced a $115 million training program for skilled trade workers earlier this week. Anthropic committed $150 million to a national fellowship program. An estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs could go unfilled nationally by 2030. The Trump administration’s immigration policies have accelerated the shortage, with construction jobs bearing the heaviest impact of any sector. The companies building the infrastructure that replaces service workers cannot find enough people to build the buildings that house it.BUY NOW! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time.The most authoritative counterargument to the Forrester projections comes from the OECD’s June 2026 Economic Outlook, titled “Under Pressure.” The report found no signs of widespread labor displacement from AI at the industry level.Job vacancies in AI-exposed sectors grew faster than in other sectors. The primary constraint, the OECD argues, is a shortage of workers who can use AI rather than a surplus of workers it has replaced. Unemployment among workers aged 20 to 30 in AI-exposed roles, though, rose approximately 3 percentage points in 2025.The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The aggregate numbers look stable because experienced workers are absorbing more output per person. The entry door for young workers trying to build careers in AI-exposed fields is closing. The OECD finds no widespread displacement. What it finds instead is a generation trying to get their first foothold in a labor market that is quietly pulling the ladder up. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Amazon's new robot speaks and responds to orders; India's entry jobs collapsed 44% yoy; Japan embraces robots as it depopulates; South Africa hits 45% youth unemployment Artificial Immigrants arrive

Jun 1100:06:57Tap to summarize

On June 4, Amazon gathered journalists at a fulfillment center near London to introduce the next generation of its Proteus warehouse robot. The new model can roam freely across an entire facility and take instructions in plain conversational language. Workers tell it what it needs to do.It figures out the route, the timing, and the priority on its own. Amazon also announced a plan to invest more than €10 billion modernizing its European fulfillment network and add 25,000 jobs across the continent.At roughly the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo to staff acknowledging that AI will reduce the company’s total corporate workforce over the coming years. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” he wrote.Listen on Apple PodcastsAmazon has eliminated tens of thousands of corporate positions since late 2025. The London event was a showcase for the physical side of that same process. Robots that understand plain language do not need specialized software operators. The work of directing them moves from a trained technician to anyone on the floor, and then, eventually, to no one in particular.The workforce consequences of this pattern are already visible in India, where Amazon cut 12,000 jobs in April as it redirected spending toward AI infrastructure. India’s technology job market hit a 28-month low in June, with only 93,000 active openings recorded, down 14% from May and 17% from a year earlier.IT services, the sector that built India’s modern middle class, saw openings fall 31% year over year. Entry-level positions for workers with up to two years of experience dropped to 10,000 openings, a 44% annual decline. EY India’s technology sector leader summed up the shift plainly: revenue growth is now decoupled from headcount growth. Indian IT firms are expanding output without expanding staff.The same dynamic runs through Southeast Asia, where it lands on workers with far fewer protections. A McKinsey survey found that about two-thirds of major Southeast Asian companies have already fully adopted AI or are actively expanding its deployment.At the Semicon Southeast Asia 2026 conference in Kuala Lumpur, industry leaders described the automation trend as permanent. “There is no going back,” one speaker said. An estimated 40 million gig workers across the region face direct exposure to these shifts.A World Bank report urged governments to expand AI job training and strengthen support for displaced workers, while noting that many countries in the region still lack basic AI skills education in their school systems.Japan faces the same technology at the opposite end of the demographic spectrum. Japan has an estimated 1.3 million unfilled technology positions and a labor shortage so severe that companies are deploying robots primarily because there are not enough humans available to hire.A Reuters/Nikkei survey confirmed that labor shortages, not cost-cutting, are the primary force pushing Japanese firms toward AI and robotics adoption. Toyota, Mitsubishi Electric, and Honda are scaling physical AI systems as a workforce substitute rather than a workforce reduction. Japan is the only major economy in which AI deployment functions as a solution to a labor shortage rather than a cause of one.In Africa, the problem runs in yet another direction. At the 2026 Future of Jobs Summit in Sandton, South African business leaders and policymakers described an urgent collision between a worsening unemployment crisis and accelerating AI adoption.Youth unemployment among South Africans aged 15 to 34 stands at 45.8%. The jobs that AI is beginning to reach in South Africa never fully materialized for young workers there in the first place.A report published in Ghana this week argues that Africa’s real AI labor risk is not mass displacement but a failure to build skills fast enough. Youth unemployment among Ghanaians aged 15 to 35 already stands near 21%.The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that automation will displace 92 million jobs globally by 2030 while creating 170 million new roles. Those new roles, however, require advanced digital proficiency that most African workers currently have no path to acquire.The UN Economic Commission for Africa convened more than 200 participants earlier this year to examine whether AI will drive job creation or labor market disruption across the continent. The participants agreed that the benefits will not arrive automatically or reach workers evenly.In Europe, a new layer of worker-facing regulation took effect this week with almost no fanfare. The European Commission published a Code of Practice on marking and labelling AI-generated content on June 10. The Code directly affects content workers, journalists, and media professionals operating in EU markets.The week’s stories span four continents and describe four distinct versions of the same pressure: too many robots arriving too fast in some places, not enough workers available in others, and almost nowhere a legal structure prepared to manage either outcome.BUY NOW! Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI & Work Chronicle at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe

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Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs to fund the AI that replaced them; Ford quietly rehires the engineers AI couldn't; A judge says Workday can't hide behind its clients; Brussels delays AI hiring rules to 2027

Meta's spy tool leaks the secrets it pilfered from workers; Oracle fires 21,000, spends $70 billion on machines; firms slash hardest, gain nothing; AI shuts the door to opportunity before you knock

Meta retreats on worker surveillance; Gen Z told resistance is futile, yet still pushes back; the promotion ladder losing its middle rung; software engineers do AI's homework nightly, unpaid

Robinhood cuts 10% but won't say "AI"; half your day is now spent babysitting AI; put AI on the org chart and people stop checking its work; Colorado's AI law kicks off in 7 days and nobody's ready

Klarna rehires the staff it fired, as gig workers; skip AI and triple your layoff odds; Wix cuts 1,000 to fund AI; bosses call AI replacement "redesign"; Paytm hires 4,000 who speak AI

Meta spies on staff as morale craters; Walmart swears 2M jobs safe while thinning office; Microsoft warns AI to hollow communities, then ships Copilot; Nvidia boss poo-poos AI job replacement fears

The layoffs don't pay off, but they keep coming; India's call centers hire 17 in nine months; Anthropic funds research into smoothing its own labor disruption; "AI-first world" is code for a layoff

Wanting a human no longer protects customer service jobs; AI pays directors 62% more; India sheds 3,400 engineers off the books, senior roles down two in three; 1,115 fired daily, the AI-fluent stay

The AI/Labor Report — Friday, 12 June 2026

Amazon's new robot speaks and responds to orders; India's entry jobs collapsed 44% yoy; Japan embraces robots as it depopulates; South Africa hits 45% youth unemployment Artificial Immigrants arrive