The AI&Work Chronicle

Microsoft opens its fiscal year with nearly 5,000 layoffs Microsoft 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...

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 writing Oracle cut about 21,000 jobs over the past year. The number matters, and so does where it came from. The company adm...

Cognizant trims as India’s IT engine cools India’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...

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 h...

Steady jobs are quietly turning into gig work Let 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...

Meta’s AI team is close to a revolt Let 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 Bos...

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 Podcast...

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...

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%...

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...

GitLab reported revenue of $264 million last quarter, up 23% year over year. It beat analyst expectations. Then it laid off 350 people. The company calls its restructuring GitLab Act 2 , a repositioning for what it describes as the “agentic era” of software development, in which autonomous AI agents handle coding, reviewing, deploying, and maintaining software under human oversight. The savings fr...

Uber had a busy week. On June 3, the company cut 23% of its People and Places division . The division covers human resources, recruiting, workplace facilities, and corporate culture. The official explanation was organizational complexity and overlapping responsibilities. The company was careful to say artificial intelligence played no role in the decision. Days earlier, Uber’s chief technology off...

Graduation season arrived this year with an unusual tradition. Commencement speakers who mention artificial intelligence keep getting booed. The students are not being dramatic. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates hit 5.6% in the first quarter of 2026 , the highest level in a decade outside the pandemic spike. The national unemployment rate is 4.3%. Recent graduates are now doing wo...

The headline number from this morning’s government jobs report deserves a closer look before anyone feels too good about it. The economy added 172,000 jobs in May. Wall Street expected 80,000. The unemployment rate held at 4.3%. On paper, this is a strong labor market doing exactly what a strong labor market is supposed to do. On the same day that report landed, Challenger, Gray & Christmas publis...

Something interesting is happening in corporate America, and it is the kind of thing that does not show up in the quarterly earnings calls where executives explain, with considerable confidence, that AI is transforming their organizations. Workers are not using the AI tools their companies bought. Listen on Apple Podcasts A Fortune report drawing on a 2025 Gallup survey found that 49% of American...

The government published two labor market readings this week, and they tell the same contradictory story they have been telling all year. The BLS JOLTS report released Tuesday showed 7.6 million job openings in April, a jump of 730,000 from March. Hiring fell to 5.1 million, and the hiring rate dropped to 3.2%. Companies are posting positions they are filling more slowly, more selectively, or in s...

A translator in Brighton, England has watched her corporate press release work disappear. A London cinematographer is retraining as an outdoor instructor for minimum wage. These are not Americans, but the pattern behind their situations is the same one reshaping the U.S. labor market. A Morgan Stanley report published in late May found that British companies that adopted AI cut their workforces by...

The Jobs That Quietly Disappear A Yale analysis finds that the biggest labor market impact of agentic AI will not appear in layoff data. It will instead appear in opportunities that quietly disappear before anyone notices. Entry-level roles that companies stop posting. Hiring pipelines that close without explanation. First jobs that never get created. The researchers describe the average firm’s re...

The Middle Class Is the Target The International Monetary Fund does not typically frame its research in personal terms. Its January 2026 “Staff Discussion Note” on AI and new job creation does. The IMF finds that in regions with higher demand for AI-related skills, employment levels are 3.6% lower in occupations that are highly exposed to AI but offer limited scope for human-AI complementarity. Th...

The Man Who Runs Microsoft’s AI Division Just Put a Countdown on Your Job On Tuesday, Sam Altman spoke to executives in Sydney and said the jobs apocalypse was overblown. On Wednesday, the man who runs Microsoft’s AI division contradicted him directly. Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times that most white-collar professional tasks will be fully automated by AI within 12 to 18 months. He named...

The Degree That Was Supposed to Protect You For most of the past three decades, the standard advice to American workers was direct: get a college degree, move into knowledge work, and stay ahead of the automation wave. That advice produced a generation of workers who did exactly what they were told. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York now reports that the unemployment rate for recent college grad...

The Man Who Built the Fear of AI Is Now Walking It Back OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this morning AI boom had produced no “jobs apocalypse.” He was speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney. He said he had expected more entry-level white-collar jobs to be gone by now. He said his intuitions were “just off.” He said he was “delighted to be wrong.” Altman is the perso...

A Bank CEO Called His Employees “Lower-Value Human Capital.” Then He Apologized. Then He Explained That He Was Right. On Tuesday, May 19, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters stood before investors at a briefing in Hong Kong and described his bank’s plan to cut nearly 8,000 jobs by 2030. The framing he chose was precise. Winters said the cuts were not cost-cutting but rather “replacing in some case...

In Today’s News Meta Fired 8,000 People Yesterday, From 4am Onward Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Tries To Sell The Wonders Of AI Pew Research Says Most Americans Dislike The Idea Of AI Upwork Cuts A Quarter Of Its Human Labor S&P 500 Employed Fewer Staff In 2025 Than In 2016 Pharma On A Layoff Spree Meta Layoffs Yesterday morning, Meta began executing the largest single-day workforce reduction in its histor...

Eight Thousand Jobs Disappear at Meta Tomorrow. Federal Data Shows the Pattern Runs Far Deeper. Wednesday morning, Meta begins cutting roughly 8,000 employees , or 10 percent of its global workforce. The company is also cancelling plans to fill 6,000 open roles it had already posted. That is 14,000 fewer jobs at a single company in a single week. Meta has signaled more rounds are coming in the sec...