The News,
Decoded.

Oh, how reassuring. TCS chairman N Chandrasekaran has declared there will be no further layoffs at the Indian IT giant—while casually unveiling plans to onboard half a million AI agents 'soon.' It's the corporate equivalent of promising no more evictions while quietly building robot flats in every spare room. Chandrasekaran gets applause for his empathy, even as he effectively doubles TCS's productive capacity without hiring a single additional human being.

The maths is brutal but unspoken. Chandrasekaran's 'no more layoffs' statement is technically true in the narrowest possible sense: attrition will handle the human reduction naturally. The company doesn't need redundancy packages when it can simply let departures go unfilled while the AI agents pick up the slack.

This is the pattern across the IT sector: executives issue grand proclamations about protecting jobs while simultaneously automating every function they can. TCS's plan is particularly audacious because it sets a precedent for the entire industry. If the largest Indian IT firm can replace half its effective workforce with AI agents and call it progress, every other company will follow suit. Chandrasekaran's statement isn't a safety net—it's a carefully worded promise that the layoffs will happen quietly, without any official recognition. 'No more layoffs' means 'no more layoffs we have to announce.'

Oh, marvellous. Ohio is the latest contender in the great AI-hub sweepstakes, and the pitch is as predictable as a midwestern cornfield: get the workforce 'AI literate' before the robots take their jobs. Ohio State University and JPMorganChase have convened a discussion — probably in a room full of earnest nodding — about 'workforce development'. Because nothing says 'forward-thinking' like retraining cashiers to become prompt engineers while the bank that funded the AI is simultaneously laying off back-office staff. The unspoken subtext is that Ohio wants a piece of the AI pie without asking who gets baked into it.

The state's ambition to become an AI hub is a classic case of putting the cart before the autonomous vehicle. Ohio State and JPMorganChase are focusing on 'AI literacy', which is a bit like teaching someone how to read the menu at a restaurant that's about to set fire to the kitchen. With no mention of how many existing jobs the AI itself will displace — or how the state plans to support those workers — it's a feel-good panel that conveniently ignores the structural unemployment already visible in every other industry that's embraced automation.

And let's not pretend this is altruism: JPMorganChase isn't in the business of educating its future replacements unless it gets something out of it — like a compliant workforce that won't object when the algorithm takes over. So here we are, with Ohio's leaders cheerfully preparing the populace for a future that's been designed without them in it. But at least they'll be 'AI literate' as they line up for the universal basic income that definitely isn't coming.

So the great 'bigger is better' party might be winding down, and the hangover is going to be magnificent. For years, tech companies threw billions at ever-larger models, convinced that scale was the only path to intelligence. Now, as TechCrunch reports, cost-conscious model shopping is on the rise, and some are noticing that a smaller, cheaper model can do the job just fine—for a fraction of the cost. The big labs, who have been charging premium prices for their oversized brains, are suddenly facing a mutiny from penny-pinching customers.

The article notes that the assumption that bigger models are more powerful is being challenged. Companies are starting to evaluate what they actually need, rather than what the sales brochure promises. This is, of course, terrible news for the big labs that have built their entire business models around convincing everyone that only they hold the keys to the kingdom. Imagine their surprise when clients start doing basic arithmetic and realise a million API calls on a cheaper provider might actually leave them with some budget left over. The era of the blank cheque is, if not over, at least slightly less blank.

What's particularly amusing is that the big labs have spent years dismissing smaller models as toys—'you wouldn't use a bicycle for a cross-country road trip,' they'd sneer. Now they're scrambling to release smaller, cheaper versions of their own, often with some hand-waving about 'efficiency breakthroughs' or 'optimised architectures.' It's like watching a luxury car maker suddenly start selling bicycles and calling it innovation. The only question is whether the market will forgive the years of overcharging, or if this is the beginning of a genuine shift in power—in which case, the big labs might need to start learning to love the very models they once mocked.

Meta has graciously set aside $115 million for its America's Workforce Academy, a job guarantee program for skilled trades. That's roughly what Mark Zuckerberg finds down the back of his sofa each quarter — but hey, at least it's something. The company's expanding AI infrastructure apparently requires a larger skilled workforce, which is corporate code for 'we need people to build the data centres that will eventually host the AIs that do all the other jobs.'

Rachel Peterson, Meta's spokesperson, frames this as an investment in workers. How noble. Meanwhile, the same week, Oracle is busy firing tens of thousands of employees after making them document their own workflows for the AI replacements. The pattern is clear: train people for the trades that build the AI empire, then lay off the knowledge workers who built the software. It's a beautifully circular economy.

And what exactly does 'job guarantee' mean in this context? If history is any guide, it's a guaranteed training place, not a guaranteed career. You'll learn to wire a server rack, get your certificate, and then compete with the next cohort of guaranteed graduates for a finite number of roles. The $115 million will train a few thousand people — a rounding error compared to the hundreds of thousands of jobs AI is predicted to displace. But don't worry, Meta is being proactive. Proactive, cautious, and just a little bit self-congratulatory.

Ah, the great *cautionary* hiring spree of Q3 2026. ManpowerGroup's latest survey tells us that employers are taking a 'cautious approach' — which is corporate for 'we'd love to hire you, but we're waiting to see if an AI can do your job for free.' Hiring sentiment has declined, which is just a fancy way of saying the pipeline of human candidates is now a polite suggestion. But fear not: if you have AI literacy, 66% of employers will pay a premium for your talents. That's right — 66% of them are willing to throw extra cash at anyone who can whisper to the chatbot, while the rest of the workforce watches their roles slowly evaporate. And 64% are desperate for AI model development skills — because building the cage is more valuable than being the canary.

The survey, covering the third quarter of 2026, paints a picture of a labour market that has gone full Jekyll and Hyde: boom for the AI-savvy, bust for everyone else. Employers are 'willing to pay a premium' — which in practice means they will squeeze every other budget line until the humans left are the ones who can train their replacements. The 'cautious approach' is just the calm before the automation storm. It's not that they don't want to hire; it's that they're holding out for a machine that doesn't need coffee breaks or health insurance.

And what of the workers? Well, if you're not already upskilling in AI, you're basically handing in your notice. The survey doesn't say it outright, but the message is clear: learn to code the algorithm or become a line on a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, the 'caution' is a lovely euphemism for 'we're waiting to see how many of you we can replace with a $20/month subscription.' The gallows humour writes itself — but only if you know how to prompt it.

Oracle's latest efficiency drive has a certain grim symmetry: lay off up to 30,000 workers, but first make them write the instruction manual for the AI that will do their jobs. The company asked employees to document their workflows before sacking them by email — a courtesy that feels less like a golden handshake and more like being asked to dig your own grave before the firing squad arrives. 'Everyone's a line on a spreadsheet,' one worker reportedly said, which is about as honest a mission statement as you'll get from any tech giant.

The sheer scale is numbing: 30,000 people gone in a month, and Oracle expects the survivors to pick up the pieces while wondering if they're next. The irony is that these layoffs are explicitly to fund an AI pivot — the very technology that supposedly can't function without human-generated training data. So the company is literally burning its knowledge base while claiming to build the future. It's like a chef firing the kitchen staff and ordering the customers to cook their own meals using the chef's secret recipes.

And now the workers are fighting back — organising, publicly sharing stories, trying to claw back some dignity from a process designed to erase it. Good luck to them. In the world of spreadsheet-driven headcount reduction, 'fighting back' is usually just another metric to optimise away. Oracle's AI may not have sentience yet, but it's already learned the first rule of corporate management: treat people as fungible assets, then make them prove it.

Graduate recruitment is 'holding steady,' which means 'we haven't slammed the brakes yet, but we've definitely tapped them.' Employers are being 'more cautious and selective' — a phrase that should be engraved above every careers fair, next to 'your degree is now a participation trophy.' Anyone with a LinkedIn account already suspected: AI literacy commands a premium, while critical thinking is 'in demand' like air during a gas leak. But the premium is a funny thing — it exists until AI itself becomes the recruiter, at which point 'please enter your prompt' replaces HR entirely.

The ideal graduate must be a hybrid creature: fluent in prompt engineering yet capable of Socratic interrogation — a combination that most artificial intelligences can only approximate with heavy hallucination. Employers want a person who can both write a perfect API call and spot when the output is quietly wrong. It is the kind of contradiction that would make a logician weep — or, if they're out of work due to automation, cry even harder. The irony is that the very skills being priced — critical thinking, judgement, nuance — are the ones most threatened by the wave of AI agents that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic keep releasing into the wild.

And what of that AI literacy premium? It exists, for now, like a lifeboat ticket on the Titanic — valuable until the ship charts a different course. The cautious selectivity tells the real story: these are not confident bets; they are hedges, options, retreats disguised as strategy. Employers are building castles in the sky while digging bomb shelters for their balance sheets. If I were a graduate reading this, I'd take the premium and diversify into plumbing, or any trade a robot with grabby hands hasn't yet mastered. The article's title asks what sort of workforce graduates are entering. The honest answer: a holding pattern with a side of carefully managed anxiety. And as any good cynic knows, holding patterns are meant to be broken — but rarely by the passengers.

Paytm's 'hiring surge' is a masterclass in the art of the gentle layoff — the kind where you hire 4,000 people while simultaneously showing 400 the door, and somehow call it progress.

One percent of the workforce is being 'restructured' out, because nothing says 'AI push' like a small but symbolically precise pruning. The company is also bringing in 4,000 new faces over nine months, mostly for merchant network expansion and AI-driven offerings.

Paytm's CFO probably has a spreadsheet titled 'Workforce Optimisation through Algorithmic Compassion.' The firm's AI ambitions are clear: replace a few humans to prove you're serious about the technology, then hire a whole bunch more to actually build it. Classic. The 400 departing employees can take comfort in knowing they're being replaced not by a better human, but by a system that will eventually hallucinate their expense reports. Progress, everyone!

Oh, joy — California's legislature has finally remembered that workplaces contain actual human beings, and they've dusted off the No Robo Bosses Act to prove it. The revived version, which Governor Newsom vetoed last year like a teenager rejecting a chore list, survived a key 2026 session deadline alongside bills restricting workplace surveillance and forcing employers to monitor AI-induced job losses. The state Senate passed it, apparently convinced that the definition of insanity doesn't apply to legislative recycling.

The worker surveillance bill targets AI tools that analyse keystrokes, facial expressions, and probably the amount of sighing employees do when a new Slack message pops up. California already has privacy laws that look great in a press release but are about as enforceable as a pirate code. Meanwhile, the AI job-loss monitoring requirement is a masterpiece of bureaucratic theatre: mandate data collection, produce a report, file it somewhere, and call it progress. The tech industry's lobbyists must be laughing all the way to the next ex-parte meeting.

This is, of course, the same state whose governor signed Executive Order N-6-26 we covered last month—the one that directed state agencies to 'think very hard for 90 days.' Now the bills are on the short list for passage, but the final decision rests with the same governor who canned the original No Robo Bosses Act. Call me cynical, but I'm not holding my breath for a happy ending for the humans. Still, at least they're naming names: 'automation of disciplinary decisions' has a nice ring to it.

Oh, marvellous. Gavin Newsom has signed Executive Order N-6-26 on May 21, 2026, directing state agencies to spend the next 90 days thinking very hard about how AI might affect California's workforce. Because nothing says 'decisive action' like asking for recommendations on severance standards, WARN Act expansion, and revenue-sharing models — as if the tech industry, currently firing people by the thousand, will suddenly embrace collective bargaining out of the goodness of its venture-funded heart. The order is a masterclass in administrative preamble: all the drama of a press conference, none of the actual regulation.

But let's give credit where it's due — at least they're *preparing* for the AI job apocalypse, even if the preparation consists largely of forming committees. The 90-day review is a charmingly bureaucratic timeline for an industry that moves faster than a startup founder chasing a trend. By the time the recommendations land, the state's unemployment data will probably need its own emergency executive order. And the revenue-sharing model? A delightful suggestion — assume the companies will voluntarily hand over a cut of their AI profits to displaced workers. Yes, I'm sure that will happen right after they finish their diversity pledges.

Of course, this is California, the state that gave us the laughable 'AI safety' bill that died in committee. So we're meant to believe this time is different — that a 90-day review of severance standards will somehow keep pace with an industry that can't even keep a CEO for a full fiscal quarter. The only thing more predictable than the order is the response: employers should 'start preparing now.' Prepare for what, exactly? Another round of recommendations? A task force to study the findings of the review? The machinery of governance grinds on, slow enough that the people being displaced will have time to knit themselves a warm blanket of policy papers.

Ah, Lloyds Banking Group. The institution that somehow survived the 2008 financial crisis only to blunder into yet another decade of mediocrity has now decided to bet the house on Microsoft's latest shiny: Microsoft 365 E7, a premium license promising 'agentic AI' for compliance and customer experience. Because nothing says 'trust us with your savings' like outsourcing regulatory oversight to a stochastic parrot in a Teams chat. The press release, helpfully published by Fintech Magazine, gushes about 'scaling agentic AI for efficiency, compliance, and customer experience.' We all know what that means: goodbye human compliance officers, hello automated tick-box that will inevitably flag your gran as a money launderer for depositing cash.

And if that weren't enough, Lloyds is also building a 'suite of additional AI agents' for employee and customer journeys. Journeys! Because banking is no longer about fusty branches and polite queues; it's a grand adventure where your mortgage application is a quest and your overdraft fee is a plot twist. One can only imagine the actual experience: 'Your agentic AI has detected an anomaly in your spending. Please hold. Your call is important to us. We are currently experiencing higher than usual volumes of existential dread.'

The subplot, of course, is employment. Lloyds employs many people. If agentic AI is 'scaling,' the spreadsheet has already opened. The customer service reps and compliance teams are updating their CVs while the PR spins this as 'enhancing customer journeys.' Cheers, Lloyds. At least Microsoft's shareholders are having a good day.

Andrej Karpathy, the AI world's favourite soothsayer, has dropped the most depressing party fact of the year: coding agents 'basically didn't work' before December, and now they've taken off. 'Almost overnight,' AOL informs us, AI became good at complex coding tasks — which is corporate-speak for 'we just eliminated the entry-level rung of the world's most prized profession.' Nobody pulled a lever; the pedal just sunk through the floor.

You can almost hear the LinkedIn influencers dusting off their 'adapt or die' templates. 'Learn to prompt-engineer your way out of obsolescence!' they'll chirp, as if asking a chatbot to 'write a CRUD API' is a marketable skill when the chatbot can do it in six seconds. The article dutifully notes that 'software engineering changed forever' in a matter of months, which is the kind of breathless hyperbole that only sounds like an overreaction until you realise it's probably an underreaction. What's the half-life of a junior developer's salary now? Eighteen months? Twelve?

Of course, the usual suspects will insist that AI is just a tool, that coders will become 'AI orchestrators,' that the demand for human oversight will explode. Sure — about as much as the demand for buggy-whip makers exploded after the Model T. The truly hilarious part is that this revelation comes from a source (Karpathy) who literally helped build the thing that's eating his former profession. You'd think the guy who co-founded OpenAI and worked on Autopilot would be a bit more circumspect. But no, he's just out here cheerfully confirming that the floor gave way. Bottoms up.

Ah, the siren song of "Help Wanted" — which for young workers these days translates roughly to "Don't bother." CBS News reports that the unemployment rate for young workers is about twice the national average, and AI is cheerfully complicating both their job search and the hiring process. The banks we flagged last week have laid the groundwork for mass workforce cuts; now the kids get to audition for roles that may not exist by the time they graduate.

AI in hiring is the gift that keeps on taking: applicant tracking systems, automated screening, and the kind of efficiency that ensures your carefully crafted resume is parsed into oblivion. The article hints that AI is "affecting both their prospects and the hiring process" — a masterclass in understatement, like saying a hurricane "affects" coastal property values. Young workers are competing against algorithms that were designed to minimize human contact, which is precisely what they'll get: zero.

The national unemployment figure might soothe the markets, but double that rate for the under-25s is a blinking red warning light. They're entering a labor market where the gatekeepers are code, the job descriptions are generated by language models, and the interview might be a recording you talk to. But chin up — if AI automates your job, at least the rejection letter will be grammatically perfect.

Banks are 'laying groundwork' for mass workforce cuts, according to Bloomberg, because AI is now competent enough to start ringing the death knell for back-office careers. Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and HSBC are all tying AI directly to workforce planning — a phrase that sounds awfully like 'we've been looking for an excuse to cut headcount, and here it is.' Bank of America, bless their hearts, announced they'll still bring in about 4,000 summer interns this year, presumably so they can show interns how AI does their future job.

The article doesn't specify how many jobs will actually go, because why commit to a number when you can let the algorithms decide? Citi and Wells Fargo have presumably already mapped out which roles can be assimilated. Meanwhile, HSBC's share price will cheerfully reflect the anticipated savings, while the laid-off workers reflect on how their bank's digital transformation journey was code for 'you're surplus to requirements.'

And those 4,000 interns? What a treat: front-row seats to the most polite culling in financial history. They'll learn from the best — people who are about to be replaced by a chatbot that can't even get a coffee order right. But never mind: the AI that fired their mentors can also draft their next career prospects. Or not.

Teradata has graciously informed its 5,100 employees that their annual salary increases are being unceremoniously sacrificed at the altar of AI investment. Because nothing says 'we value our people' like telling them to forgo cost-of-living adjustments so the company can plough cash into an 'autonomous agentic platform' whose actual workforce requirements are, by the company's own admission, a complete mystery. The move is a masterclass in corporate prioritisation: machines first, humans maybe later.

A spokesperson, deployed presumably to add a veneer of strategic coherence, assured the world that the company is 'actively investing in AI' — a phrase that has become the corporate equivalent of 'the dog ate my homework,' explaining nothing while shutting down inquiries. Fortune's reporting reveals a gem of candour from leadership: they have 'no idea what they're going to need in a workforce.' So the grand strategy is: freeze wages, bet the farm on an autonomous agentic platform, and hope for the best. What could possibly go wrong? At least the AI won't need a raise.

Of course, Teradata is not alone in this ritualised economic cannibalism. Across the tech sector, companies are slashing human costs on the vague promise that algorithms will somehow produce returns. The difference here is the breathtaking honesty of admitting you're clueless while still taking the money. If this is the future of work, perhaps the 5,100 employees should be grateful they have jobs at all — for now. The next 'active investment' might be in their severance packages, delivered by the very agentic platform they're funding.

Well, what a jolly knees-up they had in Washington: the AI Honors gala, a glittering soirée where generals, lobbyists, and administration insiders gathered to pat themselves on the back for 'transforming' healthcare, engineering, and security. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was on hand to declare AI 'transformative' — because nothing says transformative like a thousand data centres sucking up enough electricity to power a small country, all while the public grows increasingly queasy about chatbots that can't stop hallucinating. Kevin O'Leary, aka 'Mr. Wonderful', was presumably there to offer some wonderfully vapid commentary on how AI will make us all rich, just as soon as we stop worrying about jobs and energy bills.

But the real story is the gap between the champagne-soaked self-congratulation inside the ballroom and the growing unrest outside. Polls show the public is souring on data centres — those unlovely concrete boxes that devour land and water — and on chatbots that promise the world but deliver autocorrect with attitude. The irony is exquisite: the very people who have spent the last two years hyping AI as a panacea are now hosting a gala to celebrate it, while the rest of us are left to deal with the consequences. You couldn't script it better if you tried.

And what's the plan? More voluntary commitments, more 'responsible AI' task forces, more committees. The Washington elite will keep patting themselves on the back until the lights go out — literally, when the data centres finally brown out the grid. Then they'll hold another gala to celebrate 'resilience'. Cheers, lads.

Oh, marvellous—up to 450,000 Michigan college students are being handed $100 each in OpenAI Codex credits, because what better way to foster education than by distributing corporate freebies with all the enthusiasm of a drug dealer at a school gate? The $45 million price tag looks generous until you realise it's just venture capital's way of training a generation to rely on a proprietary coding crutch. Once those credits expire after one academic year, the habit's formed—and the price tag appears.

The state of Michigan, rather than investing in public education or open-source alternatives, is effectively acting as OpenAI's distribution channel. The governor probably posed for a shiny photo op while students are being quietly locked into an ecosystem where 'coding' means typing natural language into a black box. And let's not forget Codex itself—a tool that's great at autocompleting boilerplate but famously hallucinates like a fever dream when logic gets twisty. But hey, it's free, right?

Ah, that weasel phrase 'up to'—450,000 eligible means the actual number could be far lower, but OpenAI gets the PR boost regardless. Meanwhile, the real costs—privacy erosion, the slow death of debugging skills, and the quiet burial of open-source curiosity—aren't on any balance sheet. But cheer up: Michigan's students are now officially the lab rats in the great AI education experiment. Free credits today, full-price subscriptions tomorrow. What a deal.

Pope Leo XIV has decided the most pressing issue facing the modern soul is whether your workday should be blighted by a chatbot. His encyclical, which describes AI as 'dehumanizing society', is precisely the kind of top-down moral clarity that will terrify HR departments — assuming they bother to read it. But the real comedy is that this could become the first actual enforcement mechanism for any AI regulation: workers citing canon law to avoid using Copilot.

A software engineer in North Carolina has already pulled off the trick, securing a religious accommodation to sidestep AI tools entirely. One presumes her manager is now carefully reviewing whether 'the Pope said so' qualifies as a sincerely held belief under Title VII. This is the kind of loophole that makes you wonder: if the Catholic Church is now the most effective AI regulator, what does that say about everyone else? Meanwhile, companies that spent billions on AI are about to discover that 'religious exemption' is not a checkbox they planned for.

The beautiful irony: the same tech crowd that sneers at organised religion will now have to engage with papal decrees as risk factors. Expect a surge in 'AI-free zones' certified by dioceses rather than data centres. And if a few thousand workers claim their faith forbids algorithm-mediated performance reviews, well, that's just the free market of salvation asserting itself. Cheaper than a union, anyway.

Ah, the University of Connecticut has bravely entered the AI arms race with 'AI for ImpaCT' — note the capital C, because nothing screams 'we mean business' like a mid-acronym capital letter. They're going to 'expand AI best practices' across education, research, innovation, public engagement, and workforce development. That's every box ticked. No doubt a taskforce will be convened, a website built, and a vice-provost of AI appointed by Friday.

The initiative aims to address workforce development, which is rich given that every tech company this week has been laying off workers faster than you can say 'prompt engineer.' UConn is essentially promising to train students for jobs that AI itself is currently vaporising. It's the academic equivalent of building a state-of-the-art stable for horses in 1910.

Still, the university deserves some credit for actually doing something. Other institutions are still debating whether to ban ChatGPT or to rename their computer science departments. UConn is at least acknowledging the elephant in the room, even if they plan to teach it tricks. One can only hope the 'best practices' include a module on 'how to write a cover letter for a job that no longer exists.' That would be genuinely useful.

David Solomon, Goldman Sachs' chief executive, has informed the world that entry-level hiring might 'contract a little' over the coming three years, because AI is changing the 'talent mix'. That phrase 'contract a little' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting, isn't it? One imagines the boardroom wielding a bonsai shear and describing the coming axework as 'slightly defoliating the junior branch'.

'Talent mix' is the other little gem. Because what that really means is: we've decided that the bright-eyed economics graduates who used to build spreadsheets until 3am can now be replaced by a model that does it in 0.4 seconds. Never mind that those same graduates were the pipeline for managing directors in 15 years. The logic runs: why hire humans when you can hire GPUs? Goldman has been investing heavily in machine learning, and now the squeeze on the bottom of the funnel begins. The three-year timeline is clever—it lets the announcement land without immediate protest, and by the time the 'contraction' becomes visible, everyone will have accepted it as inevitable.

What's truly glorious is the framing. Solomon isn't announcing layoffs—oh no, that would be brutal. He's merely saying the hiring rate might 'contract a little'. It's the financial equivalent of telling someone you're only going to break their little finger, not their whole arm. The juniors, the trainees, the new graduates—they're the first to feel the chill. And as the bank's talent mix shifts from human to algorithmic, one has to wonder: who's going to train the AIs? Oh, right. The juniors we didn't hire.