The AI&Work Chronicle

A class-action lawsuit filed January 20 in California names Eightfold AI as a defendant and alleges that the company scraped social media profiles, location data, internet activity, and tracking data on over one billion workers without their knowledge. Listen on Apple Podcasts Eightfold’s AI then generated “Match Scores” that ranked applicants from zero to five. Lower-ranked candidates were filter...

Klarna replaced approximately 700 customer service workers in 2024 with AI . Klarna is primarily known for its "buy now, pay later" business model. The company CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, trumpeted through every communications channel (including in-person conferences) the move as evidence that AI could perform at human-equivalent quality. By early 2026, the company reversed course by rehiring st...

UC Berkeley found that employees who embraced AI tools most enthusiastically did not work less. They worked more. The research team tracked workers at a 200-person technology firm over eight months, and published their findings in The Harvard Business Review. The AI tools made more work feel doable. So, workers did more. They expanded their to-do lists to fill every hour AI freed up, and then kept...

The tech sector has shed more than 100,000 workers in 2026 alone, running at roughly 864 job cuts per day as of early May. A separate analysis finds that 275,000 AI jobs sit open while laid-off workers lack the skills to fill them . Customer support, quality assurance, content moderation, and middle management roles are going. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta collectively plan to spend $725 bil...

The tech sector has shed more than 100,000 workers in 2026 alone, running at roughly 864 job cuts per day as of early May. A separate analysis finds that 275,000 AI jobs sit open while laid-off workers lack the skills to fill them . Customer support, quality assurance, content moderation, and middle management roles are going. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta collectively plan to spend $725 bil...

The week’s defining story arrived on May 8, when Cloudflare announced it was cutting 1,100 workers — roughly 20% of its workforce — on the same day it reported its best revenue quarter in its 16-year history. The company posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue, a 34% year-over-year increase. CEO Matthew Prince told investors that internal AI usage had risen more than 600% in three months and th...

The headline unemployment rate is 4.3%. Jobless claims hit their lowest level since 1969. By every standard measure, the American labor market is healthy. That is the story the statistics tell. The story underneath them is different. Economists have a term for the current condition: low-hire, low-fire. Truflation’s analysis, published this week , names it more precisely: a frozen labor market. Hir...

Graduation season has arrived, and the Class of 2026 is walking into the worst entry-level job market in four years . The unemployment rate for recent college graduates hit 5.7% in the fourth quarter of last year. Junior-level job postings fell 7% in 2025. Indeed’s Director of Economic Research Laura Ullrich confirmed this week that conditions have not improved: “We remain in a low-hire, low-fire...

On Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published one of the most explicit descriptions of AI-driven organizational redesign yet written by a public company executive. The company cut 700 employees, roughly 14% of its workforce, and eliminated all “pure managers” in favor of what Armstrong calls “player-coaches” who manage 15 or more direct reports while doing individual work alongside their teams...

A New York Times investigation published this week titled “Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass” documents something the AI industry has kept carefully managed: the people building these systems hold far bleaker views about what they will do to workers than their public statements suggest. Sources inside frontier AI labs told the reporter, Jasmine Sun, they expressed “more extreme...

Glassdoor’s Employee Confidence Index shows that the tech sector recorded the largest year-over-year drop in worker confidence of any industry in March, falling 6.8 percentage points to 47.2%. Less than half of tech workers now express confidence in their employment situation. Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao identified a dynamic that goes beyond the headline number. Fewer workers are quittin...

A new report from payroll platform Gusto finds that small businesses will hire roughly 974,000 new graduates aged 20 to 24 between April and September. The report defines small businesses as firms with one to 49 employees . The fastest-growing job titles at those firms fall into two categories that sit at opposite ends of the skills spectrum: founding engineers and AI engineers on one side, and fi...

Nvidia’s VP of Applied Deep Learning Bryan Catanzaro stated publicly that the cost of compute at his company now exceeds the cost of employees. Uber’s CTO told The Information that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget on token costs before the year reached its midpoint. The entire justification workers have been given for their displacement is that AI is cheaper and more efficient...

A Substack finance writer at Citrini Research published a speculative essay in February framed as a dispatch written from June 2028. It described an economy where aggressive AI adoption initially drove record corporate profits but ultimately hollowed out the American consumer base. The mechanism was what the author called “Ghost GDP” : economic output inflated by AI productivity that never circula...

Anthropic’s March 2026 research report, Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence , is the first major analysis of AI’s workforce effects built on actual usage data rather than theoretical projections. Previous studies estimated AI’s labor impact by asking what AI could theoretically do. Anthropic’s researchers asked a different question: what is AI actually doing in professiona...

Amazon announced a product today that makes the direction of AI and hiring about as explicit as it has ever been stated in public. Amazon hired roughly 250,000 seasonal workers last year with humans in the loop. This year will be different. The company launched Connect Talent , an agentic AI system that conducts voice job interviews around the clock, scores candidates on skills, and prepares recru...

The most revealing number in the technology industry this week came from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He disclosed at Google Cloud Next 2026 that 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and reviewed by human engineers. The figure was 50% last fall and 25% in October 2024. That trajectory — a tripling in eighteen months — matters more than the number itself. Google engineers are no longer pr...

Microsoft has done something in its 51-year history that it has never done before: offered its own employees a buyout to leave. The company announced last Thursday that roughly 8,750 U.S. workers — about 7% of its American workforce — are eligible for a voluntary retirement program . The offer targets employees at or below the senior director level whose combined age and years of service add up to...

Meta is logging employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and periodic screen snapshots to train AI agents, the company confirmed to staff in internal memos first reported by Reuters this week. The program is called the Model Capability Initiative. It runs on a list of work-related apps and websites and captures screen content for context. Meta’s stated purpose is to improve AI performance on specific...

The Connecticut Senate passed Senate Bill 5 on Tuesday by a vote of 32 to 4. The bill requires employers to notify workers when AI is used in hiring, promotion, or termination decisions. It prohibits employers from deploying AI tools that produce discriminatory outcomes. It funds an AI literacy program for workers and small businesses and creates a state regulatory sandbox where companies can test...

Gallup’s latest workforce survey , published this week, cited that half of all U.S. workers now use AI at work. Meanwhile, only 12% of workers say AI has fundamentally transformed how their organization actually operates. Workers are using AI tools individually, for their own tasks, in their own workflows. Their employers have not figured out how to translate that individual use into organizationa...

On the morning of March 31, 2026, tens of thousands of Oracle employees opened their email to find a five-line message from “Oracle Leadership.” It told them their role had been eliminated and that today was their last working day. System access cut off within minutes. No call from a manager. No meeting with HR. Just a brief email and a locked screen. The story spread across Reddit, LinkedIn, and...

Snap announced on April 15 that it will cut roughly 1,000 employees and cancel more than 300 open positions, reducing its global workforce by 16 percent. CEO Evan Spiegel told staff the company expects to save more than $500 million annually from the cuts. Snap’s stock rose on the news. The company said the savings will fund AI infrastructure investments. The news fits a market pattern: Snap’s sto...

The economists who understand technology best cannot agree on whether AI is the sixth act in a 250-year story of progress, or the first act of something history has no name for yet. It is the central fact of the labor market in 2026. On one side, Morgan Stanley published a careful analysis this week tracing five major innovation waves across 250 years. Chief U.S. Economist Michael Gapen is explici...

Two developments this week force a question that labor economists have mostly avoided: what happens when AI stops assisting human workers and starts replacing the judgment calls at the core of their jobs? The first development is a legal one; the second, a technology one. In the first instance, plaintiffs in the landmark case Mobley v. Workday, Inc. filed an amended complaint in late March 2026. T...