The News,
Decoded.

Ah, the old 'AI made me do it' defence. Cisco's CEO is

the latest to trot out the claim that 'hard decisions' — translation: sacking thousands — are necessary to invest in AI. Now Block (the Square people) joins the chorus, waving AI as the excuse for trimming headcount. Because nothing says 'innovative future' quite like showing your current workforce the door.

The pattern is becoming as predictable as a bad sitcom: revenue up, share price up, CEO announces 'AI transformation,' workers out. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying, but the optics are convenient — blame the machine, keep the bonuses.

One wonders how long this charade can last before even the most gullible investor notices that 'investing in AI' is corporate-speak for 'we'd rather not pay salaries.' Still, chin up — perhaps those laid-off workers can train the AI that replaced them, if they're lucky enough to get a gig as a data-labourer. Progress, eh?

Ah, LinkedIn — the platform where you post about your 'gratitude journey' after being laid off — is cutting 5% of its workforce despite 12% revenue growth. That's roughly 875 people who will soon have ample time to update their profiles with the 'Open to Work' frame, all so the company can 'accelerate growth and efficiency.' Because nothing says 'efficient' like sacking a chunk of your staff while the money's rolling in. It's a classic: raise the stock price, call it 'reorganization,' and let the HR chatbots handle the exit interviews.

LinkedIn joins the grand tradition of tech companies who can't figure out what to do with all that profit except hand it to investors and trim the 'headcount line item.' The 5% figure is almost modest by today's standards — Cisco just chopped 7% in its AI pivot, for comparison. But LinkedIn doesn't even have the decency to cite 'AI investment' as the excuse. This is just… restructuring for restructuring's sake. Perhaps the algorithm will soon suggest layoff memes to the newly dismissed.

The real comedy is the '12% revenue growth' figure. In any sane industry, you'd hire more people when revenue grows. But tech has learned that firing people makes the quarterly numbers pop, and nobody questions the logic because everyone's too busy updating their LinkedIn headlines. See you at the virtual networking events, folks. Bring your own severance.

Ah, Cisco has decided to follow the grand tech tradition: sack thousands of workers to 'invest in AI.' Because nothing says 'all-in on the future' quite like showing the door to the people who built your present. The restructuring will cost up to $1 billion — which, conveniently, is also roughly the amount of severance you'd need for several thousand employees, so at least the maths checks out.

Cisco, which once proudly described itself as the company that 'makes the internet work,' now makes it work by... not employing the people who made it work? The company says it's reallocating resources to AI, silicon, optics, and security. Translation: we're laying off humans to buy more GPUs. The $1 billion price tag includes severance and facility costs, but honestly, it's a bargain compared to the PR hit of admitting you're automating your own workforce.

Of course, Cisco is hardly alone — this is the same dance we've seen at Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and so on. The pattern is now so predictable that you could train a small language model to write the press release: 'We are making the difficult but necessary decision to...' etc. The difference is that Cisco is doing it with the swagger of a company that once defined networking, now desperately trying to catch the AI wave. One wonders if the laid-off employees will get a discount on the AI tools that replaced them. Probably not.

Oh, the irony is almost too rich to pour, but I'll manage. Anthropic has snatched OpenAI's enterprise AI crown — a title nobody realised was actually a crown until it was lost. According to Ramp's AI Index, Anthropic's business adoption hit 34.4% in April, pipping OpenAI's 32.3%. The driving force, Ramp says, is 'surging Claude Code adoption' — because nothing says enterprise readiness like a product name that sounds like a low-budget spy thriller.

The margin is laughably narrow: 2.1 percentage points separating the future from the slightly-less-future. But in the world of tech headlines, that's enough to warrant a victory lap. Ramp's index tracks actual spending data, so this isn't a vibes-based measurement — it's cold, hard corporate credit cards being swiped. And they're swiping for Claude, not ChatGPT. The shift suggests that enterprises are valuing specialised, integrated offerings over the 'we do everything okay' approach. Claude Code for developers, Quickbooks connectors for accountants — it's death by a thousand niche integrations.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is left clutching a 32.3% share and presumably drafting a frantic memo about 'doubling down on enterprise features.' But the real story here isn't the numbers — it's that the AI market has officially entered the 'D'oh! We forgot to build the boring stuff' phase. Anthropic won by doing the unglamorous work of connecting to existing business tools, while OpenAI was busy making models that can write poetry about the multiverse. Bravo. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check whether my Mac can run Claude Code without melting.

Ah, the grand old tradition of corporate reassurance: 'We're automating everything, but don't worry, your jobs are safe.' Goldman Sachs President John Waldron has unveiled plans to deploy generative AI 'robots' to streamline the bank's 'human assembly line'—a phrase that manages to be both dehumanising and eerily accurate in one go. Waldron, apparently channelling every middle manager who ever promised 'no one will be replaced,' vows there will be no mass layoffs. Because, of course, automating tedious tasks has never, in the history of capitalism, led to headcount reductions. It's almost charming—like watching a magician assure you the rabbit is perfectly fine while the hat is clearly emitting smoke.

But let's get specific. Waldron's 'human assembly line' is a term that should make every Goldman employee update their CV. And yet, no mass layoffs? It's the kind of statement that lands with the solemn credibility of a used-car salesman swearing the engine is pristine. The obvious reading: 'No mass layoffs' means 'we'll do it gradually, attrition-based, and call it something else.' Remember when Blockbuster said streaming was a niche?

Still, one must admire the audacity. Waldron is essentially saying, 'We will build machines to replace you, but we promise not to fire you all at once.' It's a promise as comforting as a chocolate teapot. The real question is whether the 'no mass layoffs' line is a genuine commitment or just the soothing preamble to a thousand individual conversations that each begin with 'It's not you, it's the AI.' Goldman Sachs is betting big on automation, and in a few years, we'll see whether Waldron's vow was a promise or a euphemism. My money's on the euphemism.

Oh, the 'agentic AI era' — the latest corporate euphemism for 'we need fewer humans on the payroll.' Cloudflare is shedding more than 1,100 jobs worldwide, with 224 of them at its San Francisco headquarters, and they're blaming the rise of autonomous AI agents. Because nothing says 'trust in AI agency' like firing the engineers who could actually build and maintain those very agents. A clever bit of linguistic jujitsu: reframe a layoff as an inevitable technological shift, and suddenly you're not cutting costs — you're 'aligning with the future.' CEO Matthew Prince is presumably very excited about the agentic future — one in which the company's headcount is increasingly optional.

This is the same company that, not long ago, was touting AI as a tool to augment workers, not replace them. Apparently augmentation now means 'replaced by something cheaper and less demanding of health insurance.' The 'agentic AI era' is apparently very selective about where it directs its agency — straight toward the bottom line. Meanwhile, the Chronicle reports that San Francisco's tech workforce absorbs yet another blow, with 224 positions vanishing from the city's already strained economy. These are the 'creative destruction' jobs that AI was supposed to create, not destroy.

The irony is almost too rich: the companies most loudly proclaiming the dawn of autonomous AI agents are the same ones aggressively cutting the humans who might one day have to supervise those agents — or clean up their inevitable messes. Cloudflare's restructuring is a PR-friendly way of saying: 'The robots are coming, and you're not invited.' One wonders when the 'agentic AI era' will start generating more jobs than it eliminates, or whether that's simply not in the script. At this rate, the only agents left with real agency will be the ones doing the firing.

Well, well, well — Fidelity is *hiring* because of AI. Apparently, while every other company on the planet is using the words 'artificial intelligence' as a pretext to slash payrolls, Fidelity has decided to go rogue and actually employ people. The insurance giant says it's incorporating AI into its operations but needs 'real-world techies' to roll out key products. So the robots aren't replacing humans just yet — they still need someone to plug them in and whisper sweet nothings about quarterly reports.

This is, of course, a devastating blow to the narrative that AI means the end of work. Or rather, it's a reminder that the dystopian future is arriving unevenly, like a particularly patchy Wi-Fi signal. Other companies are gleefully announcing layoffs in the same breath as 'AI integration,' treating workers as superfluous debt. Fidelity, bless its contrarian heart, is hoovering up engineers to build the very tools that will eventually make them redundant. It's like hiring a chef to install a vending machine.

So what's the takeaway? Maybe Fidelity is naive, or maybe it's just early in the cycle. The 'real-world techies' they're hiring now will be the first on the chopping block when the AI actually works. But for now, enjoy the anomaly — a company that blames AI for growth, not pain. Don't get used to it; the corporate herd always follows the cheap option eventually.

There's nothing quite like a commencement speech to remind graduates that their degree is about to become as useful as a chocolate teapot. At the University of Central Florida, a speaker foolishly described AI as the 'next industrial revolution' and was promptly rewarded with a chorus of 'AI SUCKS!' from the humanities graduates. One can almost hear the startup CEOs in the audience muttering 'get used to it, kids.'

The speaker, presumably someone who has never met a humanities graduate, was probably expecting a standing ovation for predicting that their chosen careers are about to be automated. Instead, they got a live demonstration of the very human emotion that AI, for all its many talents, can't simulate: the ability to spot bullshit at twenty paces. The crowd wasn't just booing the speaker; they were booing the entire premise that their education is a waste of time.

And to be fair, they have a point. While Silicon Valley spins fantasies of a post-work utopia, these students are staring at a future where their creative and critical thinking skills are devalued by millions of lines of code. The 'next industrial revolution' might finally make good on the promises of the first one: full automation, mass displacement, and a terrifyingly unequal distribution of the spoils. But at least the revolution has a nice catchphrase. 'AI SUCKS!' is more honest than any white paper OpenAI has ever published.

Anthropic, the company that assures us its models are practically dripping with conscientious restraint, has teamed up with Code for America to pilot AI tools for SNAP eligibility. Because clearly the biggest problem with food assistance is that caseworkers have too much time to think. The partnership will deploy a 'SNAP Policy Navigator' – a chatbot designed to interpret labyrinthine federal regulations – in a handful of state offices. Because nothing says 'nutrition security' like letting a language model decide who eats.

The Navigator's job is to help caseworkers answer policy questions and review eligibility documents. In other words, it's a glorified search engine with delusions of expertise. Anthropic's Claude will parse the intricacies of income disregards and work requirements with the same unerring confidence it displays when inventing citations. When a harried caseworker queries about categorical eligibility for a family with mixed immigration status, the model will produce a response that is either correct, wrong, or – most likely – both at the same time. And since the model can't be sued, fined, or subjected to congressional hearings, the accountability will trickle down to the human who trusted it.

This is a pilot, so the damage will be contained – for now. But it's a classic foot-in-the-door strategy: start with low-stakes policy questions, move on to document review, then gradually automate eligibility determination itself. Code for America has a track record of well-intentioned projects that struggle to scale; Anthropic has a track record of models that are as reliable as a coin flip. Together, they are offering the government a deal it can't refuse: free AI trial, with the cost of failure borne by the most vulnerable. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything – but that would require an audit, and no one wants to spoil the pilot.

Ah, another week, another foundation model — but this time, they've given it *hands*. RLWRLD, a company whose name sounds like someone fell asleep on the keyboard, has unveiled RLDX-1, a 'dexterity-first foundation model for robotic hands.' Because apparently, the real bottleneck in AI's relentless march isn't reasoning or creativity — it's picking things up. The model boasts high degree-of-freedom, the ability to see, feel, remember, and adapt across single-arm, dual-arm, and humanoid setups. Translation: robots are finally getting the manual dexterity they need to replace every human job that involves touching anything. And wow, does it feel smug about it.

When you combine a foundation model's adaptability with a manipulator's precision, you're not just automating assembly lines. You're automating the assembly-line repairman, the surgeon, the chef, the masseuse (sorry, 'wellness professional'), and anyone else whose job description includes 'fingers.' RLWRLD frames this as a natural evolution — robots learning to interact with the physical world as adeptly as the digital one. But what they don't advertise is that this isn't about robots helping us; it's about robots supplanting us, one grip, twist, and palpation at a time. The 'see, feel, remember, adapt' slogan sounds like a corporate horoscope — vague enough to sound profound but actually meaning: we're automating everything.

And of course, the regulatory landscape for autonomous physical agents is a gaping void. There's no federal robot-handling license, no safety certification for foundation-model-powered grippers. Meanwhile, humanoid embodiments are explicitly mentioned — so the endgame is clear. It's the Bicentennial Man scenario without the ethical awakening. RLWRLD's press release probably uses words like 'collaborative' and 'empowering,' but make no mistake: a dexterous robot hand wants your job, your coffee, and eventually your ability to pay rent. And it's not even sorry about it.

Ah, OpenAI has decided that building the most advanced models in history isn't enough — now they're launching a $4 billion 'AI Deployment Company' to show businesses how to use them. Because nothing says 'we're serious about enterprise' like a buzzword-laden acquisition. They've bought Tomoro, the firm behind Virgin Atlantic's AI concierge, because clearly the pinnacle of AI utility is helping customers book flights without human interaction. That's $4 billion for a glorified chatbot deployment team.

Virgin Atlantic's AI concierge: because nothing says luxury travel like being helped by a bot that might hallucinate your seat number. And now that team is going to do the same for every company with a spare $4 billion. Meanwhile, customer service jobs? Gone, replaced by a 'deployment company' that will deploy them into unemployment. The irony of needing a dedicated arm to sell your own product is rich: OpenAI has spent years telling us AI will 'democratize' everything, and now they're building a consultancy to do what a decent API should handle.

The $4 billion figure is both impressive and depressing. That's a lot of compute, a lot of GPUs, and a lot of executives nodding seriously at the words 'enterprise AI deployment.' It's like a car manufacturer starting a driving school because nobody knows how to drive. But don't worry, the AI concierge will be happy to help you find the exit.

Hot on the heels of GM's little 'skills swap' we covered last week, DeepL's CEO Jarek Kutylowski has decided to one-up them with a more elegant approach: chop over 21% of the company and blame it on AI. In a memo that reads like a parody of itself, Kutylowski cheerfully explains that 'that shift is because of AI' – as if the technology itself wrote the redundancy notices. No messy talk of margins or shareholder pressure, just a clean, tech-forward justification that sounds almost noble.

The memo ticks every box in the modern layoffs playbook: smaller teams, fewer management layers, and a vague promise of AI-driven efficiency. Because nothing says 'we're building the future' quite like ditching a fifth of your workforce and calling it progress. The gallows-humour crowd will note that DeepL, a translation company, is apparently so impressed by its own AI that it no longer needs the humans who built it. That's commitment to the bit – like a chef eating his own restaurant.

What's truly unsettling is how quickly this becomes the standard. Kutylowski isn't a rogue actor; he's following a script already perfected by Meta, Google, and now GM. The message is clear: AI is the perfect scapegoat for any restructuring, and the 'AI-pilled CEO' is the new management archetype – charismatic, decisive, and utterly indifferent to the careers he's torching. As playbooks go, it's devastatingly effective.

General Motors has performed a little 'skills swap' — that's corporate for 'we just showed 600 IT people the door.' More than 10% of their IT department, gone, because they want workers with 'AI-focused backgrounds.' Yes, because the solution to AI uncertainty is clearly to fire the people who've been keeping your systems running and replace them with prompt engineers. What could possibly go wrong?

Let's be honest: this isn't a skills swap; it's a blunt instrument. GM didn't retrain anyone — that would be too sensible. They just sacked them and will hire new folks who are presumably younger and cheaper. The 'AI-focused backgrounds' phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, isn't it? It suggests you can simply import expertise like a spare part. No need to worry about institutional knowledge, system integration, or the fact that your new hires might not know which end of a server to plug in.

The gall of calling this a deliberate strategy is almost admirable. 'We laid off hundreds to prepare for the AI future' — as if the AI future doesn't involve angry customers staring at junk code because the experienced testers were shown out the door first. GM joins the parade of companies demonstrating that 'AI readiness' often looks an awful lot like 'mass layoffs.' Brilliant. Truly brilliant.

So the job hunt, that tedious dance of hope and rejection, is now being 'remade' by artificial intelligence. The San Francisco Chronicle reports — with the straight face of someone who hasn't been ghosted by a bot — that AI speeds up applications and candidate reviews. But wait: scammers are also using AI to pose as candidates and employers. So now you can be rejected by a scammer algorithm posing as a recruiter, while your own AI application is ignored by another AI. Efficiency!

The article offers a helpful guide on 'how to navigate' this new landscape, presumably including timeless wisdom like 'if the recruiter's emails smell faintly of GPT-4, run.' But the honest advice would be: 'there is no navigation; you are in an ocean of bots, and so is everyone else.' The scammers are using the exact same technology that VCs hype as the future of talent acquisition. We've created a mirror hall of AI applying to AI, and somewhere a human is paying for the privilege of being ignored by both.

The real punchline? The article is published in a personal finance section, as if you can budget your way out of being replaced by a bot. The only sane response is to become a scammer yourself — or better, get an AI to do it for you. Cheers to the remade job hunt: faster, more frustrating, and utterly indistinguishable from the fake.

So we asked three oracles — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude — to predict which jobs they'll be eating for lunch, and they couldn't even agree on the menu. One model says accountants are toast; another insists it's customer service; the third suggests there's no single 'most exposed' category at all. Brilliant. We've built systems that can write poetry, diagnose scans, and replicate themselves, but they can't produce a coherent jobs hit-list. It's like asking three drunk economists at a bar what's going to crash next — you get three different answers, all delivered with unjustified confidence.

The Wall Street Journal's piece reveals a delicious irony: the very tools supposedly poised to replace workers can't agree on who's in the firing line. A researcher quoted calls it 'a fool's errand' to try to predict job losses with any precision. So we're meant to trust these systems with our livelihoods when they can't even coordinate their own threat assessments? Maybe the real risk isn't that AI will take our jobs, but that we'll keep asking it for career advice and end up in a dead-end sector it promised would boom.

Still, there's a silver lining for any desperate PR flack: this disagreement gives every industry plausible deniability. Finance can claim its safe; retail can claim it's the next frontier; tech can claim it's already automated. The only certain job at risk is 'AI forecaster' — and honestly, that field probably deserved a slower death than this farce anyway. Pass the popcorn; the models are still arguing.

Oh, brilliant. Japan is tackling the AI talent shortage with a cross-ministerial task force — because nothing screams '21st-century agility' quite like a committee that won't have its first meeting until the robots have already rewritten every job description. The Yomiuri newspaper reports this grand plan to train workers for AI, semiconductors, and quantum technology, but of course no budget, no timeline, no actual workers trained yet. Just a task force. Because that's what the world's third-largest economy needs: more meetings.

Let's be honest, this is classic Japanese bureaucracy: identify a pressing problem, form a committee, commission a report, then congratulate yourselves on a job well done while the actual tech sector emigrates or imports foreign talent through gritted teeth. The government could have funded bootcamps, subsidised retraining, or — heaven forbid — loosened its immigration laws to let in skilled engineers from abroad. But no: a cross-ministerial task force. I'm sure it will produce a very thorough white paper by 2030, just in time for the quantum-AI singularity.

Meanwhile, Japan's population is shrinking, its tech workforce is greyer than a suit salesman, and the government's big idea is yet another layer of coordination. The irony is that the AI models we're supposedly training workers to compete with will probably be capable of automating the task force's entire output within a month. But hey, at least the bureaucrats will have job security. For now.

Ah, the legal profession has finally broken its silence — and it's the sound of 30-odd graduates being shown the door. MinterEllison, one of Australia's 'Big Six' law firms, has slashed its graduate intake for 2025-26 by almost a third to just 72, citing AI's ability to 'automate routine lower-level work'. Because nothing says 'we value young talent' like replacing them with a chatbot that can review contracts without demanding a coffee break. The firm's candour is almost refreshing: no weaselly 'restructuring' euphemisms, just a straight-up admission that generative AI is now doing what first-year associates used to do.

Of course, Minters is just the first to speak up; the rest of big law has been quietly sweating behind closed doors. One can only imagine the relief of the 26-odd graduates who will never have to bill hours in six-minute increments or proofread endless email chains. They've been freed — freed to compete for the remaining 72 spots against an even more desperate pool of applicants. And the partners? They're probably patting themselves on the back for 'embracing efficiency' while billing clients the same rate for work now done by a language model that costs pennies per query.

But don't worry — the AI will soon handle partner-level work too, and then the whole pyramid scheme collapses. First it was graduates; next it'll be the senior associates, then the partners themselves, until the firm consists of one managing partner, an OpenAI subscription, and a stern letter from the Law Society. Still, at least they broke the silence — a silence that will soon be filled by the gentle hum of servers replacing an entire generation of legal careers.

Ah, KPMG. The consultancy that charges clients millions for 'strategic transformation' has solved the great AI accountability problem with a dashboard that employees can game as easily as a Tamagotchi. The US advisory division now has a tool for tracking AI usage—because nothing says 'trusted advisor' like a metric that can be fudged by clicking a few extra buttons. Employees reportedly say it's 'easy to manipulate,' which is corporate code for 'we've already found the loopholes and are exploiting them vigorously.'

One has to admire the sheer theatre of it all. KPMG rolls out an AI tracking system, presumably to prove to clients that their consultants are marinating in machine learning. But the very people being tracked have already spotted the cracks: the dashboard's accuracy is about as reliable as a KPMG audit of a company that later collapses. The employees' candour is almost refreshing—'Yes, we can game it, and yes, we will.' It's the kind of transparency that usually only emerges in court depositions.

What this really tracks isn't AI usage; it's the gap between what management wants to believe and what actually happens on the ground. KPMG wants to show clients a workforce humming with AI adoption. Instead, they've built a system that incentivises pretending. The real lesson? If you build a metric, someone will find a way to cheat it—especially when the metric determines performance reviews. But sure, call it a 'dashboard.' That makes it sound like progress.

Figure AI has blessed us with a video of two humanoid robots making a bed together — because nothing says 'solving humanity's greatest challenges' like a perfectly tucked duvet. The company boasts their creations can do it ‘faster than you’, which is either a damning indictment of your morning routine or proof that we've spent billions to automate a task that takes three minutes. Meanwhile, competition with Tesla's Optimus is heating up, which means across the Bay Area, two giant egos are now racing to see who can first make their robot fold a fitted sheet without cheating.

Let's pause and appreciate the sheer achievement: two bipedal machines coordinating to pull a blanket over a mattress. No existential threat, no cure for cancer, no solving climate change — just a bed. But the PR team is treating this like a moon landing, and the tech press is dutifully writing it up with straight faces. It's the kind of innovation that makes you wonder if we've accidentally fast-tracked the future where robots do the chores while humans get the pleasure of being told we're obsolete at... making a bed.

Still, credit where it's due: this is a genuine technical demonstration. Force control, object manipulation, humanoid locomotion — all working in concert. But when Figure AI's next press release promises a robot that can fold laundry without eating a sock, we'll be expected to faint with excitement. And somewhere, Elon Musk is watching, furious that his Optimus didn't think of bed-making first, because apparently the path to AGI is paved with hotel simulation tasks.

Oh, brilliant. Microsoft has put out a report reassuring us that AI isn’t actually ‘taking’ your job — it’s just ‘changing’ it. Because nothing says ‘don’t panic’ like a trillion-dollar company whose entire business model depends on you trusting its products to not replace you. Alexis Krivkovich, senior partner at McKinsey, chimes in that ‘very few jobs are entirely automated away by current AI and robotics technology.’ Well, that’s a relief. I’m sure the people who’ve already been laid off from customer service, translation, and data entry will be thrilled to hear they’re merely ‘statistically insignificant.’

McKinsey, of course, has form here. But don’t worry — it’s not ‘automation,’ it’s ‘occupational transition.’ And Microsoft’s report is the perfect companion piece: all the soothing language of augmentation and upskilling, none of the messy reality of hiring freezes or gigification. The corporate playbook is so predictable it’s almost quaint: first, sell the AI; then, sell the training to cope with the AI; and finally, sell the consulting to figure out what went wrong.

The real kicker? The word ‘current’ in Krivkovich’s statement. It’s a weasel word big enough to drive a data centre through. Current AI doesn’t automate entire jobs — yet. But the whole point of the tech is that it improves rapidly. Today’s ‘job changing’ is tomorrow’s ‘job eliminating.’ So enjoy your ‘transformation’ while it lasts — and maybe keep that CV updated, just in case your role becomes one of the ‘very few’ that suddenly isn’t so few anymore.