#ai

Sprout Social is reducing its staff by approximately 20%, impacting around 260 employees. This decision stems from significant changes in the software industry driven by artificial intelligence. The company has recently focused on integrating AI into its social media management tools. This move aligns with a broader trend of tech companies restructuring due to AI advancements. The company expects to incur substantial pre-tax charges related to this workforce reduction.

Chicago, Illinois

https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/07/15/sprout-social-to-cut-260-jobs-as-ai-reshapes-software-industry-484641/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/14/meta-ai-mass-layoffs-lawsuit?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

This good…..

Cisco Systems Inc. President Jeetu Patel said artificial intelligence is likely to reshape the global workforce by creating more jobs than it eliminates

"I've been saying this for months, and the early data is beginning to support it. Five years from now, I believe AI will create more jobs than it eliminates,"

Is there one other person saying this? Certainly not CR with all the layoffs.

It seems lik all of the new A.I. revenue will be led by the on-shore non-AWS employees at all of the System Integrators/GSI's big and (Accenture, Deloitte, Kyndryl, IBM) that will delpy and embed/integrate onsite with the client workforce.

After the $130 all-time high, it has continued to fall and now is down for the past 1 month. How long will it stay above $100 until the street realizes Cisco is just rebranding the usual Switching orders as AI Infra? There’s no meaningful improvement in other BUs like Wireless or SBG - more than the traditional single digit growth.

I heard a rumor in November that management had no decision in the personnel that were fired and that it was all determined by AI. Can anyone with HR intel verify if that is true and how are layoffs being determined for the next round?

Given what's happened to spcx, smh, igv, smci, are we seeing the peeling off of the AI trade that now appears to have claimed ibm?

Lenovo has confirmed layoffs within its US-based XR business unit. The company is transitioning its strategy from business-focused XR to a more consumer-oriented approach centered on AI-enabled wearables. This shift will integrate XR efforts into Motorola, aiming for a unified personal AI experience across devices. Lenovo's move reflects a broader industry trend of disinvesting from traditional VR/AR towards smart glasses and AI integration. The company's XR investments have not yielded expected returns, prompting this strategic pivot.

USA

https://skarredghost.com/2026/07/13/lenovo-vr-layoffs/

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon revealed that artificial intelligence has led to significant job cuts in certain departments. While most affected employees were offered new roles within the company, Dimon acknowledged substantial reductions in specific areas. He stated that AI has already created huge efficiency gains, impacting job numbers. The bank is focusing on retraining its workforce for evolving roles. These changes reflect a shift in Dimon's previous stance on AI's impact on employment.

New York, New York

https://www.fastcompany.com/91573524/jamie-dimon-says-jpmorgan-has-slashed-40-of-jobs-in-some-departments-thanks-to-ai

And OpenAI has a TRILLION dollars of promised spend with various hyperscalers, Oracle being one of the biggest. This doesn't bode well for AI in general as it's an admission that it's just not that useful, we are NOT "curing cancer" and likely never will.

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora warned that token costs need to drop as much as 90% to promote large-scale artificial intelligence adoption.

“I think 54% is a good start,” Arora told CNBC’s Seema Mody on “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday, after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that the frontier lab’s latest model is 54% more token-efficient for agentic coding. “I think we probably need another turn at it.”

Arora said token efficiency needs to drop to as much as 20% over the next 12 months, and 90% by the following year.

Watch the Cisco Beat today...
They have rediscovered serious performance monitoring and evaluation and participation in the bullsh-t side of it is becoming mandatory. As a result they are moving it out of all the clunky tools they have today--into a new tool. Which is???

WEBEX!!

Yup, Webex. Likely so that they can use AI to run it all in the backend (which they own/control). So, from now on, you'll be effectively reporting to an AI tool that will evaluate your performance against the latest/greatest HR fashions.

Which means that next time they need to get rid of x'000 people they can ask AI for the list. Which is probably not good news for middle managers.

Over the past year, I’ve been keeping an eye on internal opportunities because my current role may be impacted any day now and definitely will be before the end of the year. One thing I’ve noticed is that I rarely see U.S.-based operational positions (BEC, Senior BEC, Leads, etc.). Most of the openings I come across appear to be in India, and U.S. operational postings seem few and far between almost extinct and obsolete.
Is anyone else seeing the same thing, or is it just the types of roles I’m searching for? I know these company believes several roles are replaceable by using AI instead.

I’m genuinely curious whether this is a broader trend or if Workday has limited/filter me out of internal roles.

For context, I’m not looking to debate whether I should stay with the company. I have my own reasons for wanting to pursue internal opportunities first. I’m mainly interested in whether others have observed the same hiring pattern.

Thank you for your time

Being constantly told to teach and utilise AI and clearly being told it soon will replace employees, why are employees not striking?

SpaceX popped it and now IBM and others will follow.

Who is next NVDA or CSCO?

Thomson Reuters is planning to reduce its workforce by up to 500 engineering positions. This move affects approximately 5.2% of its operations and technology unit employees. The company is increasing its use of artificial intelligence across its various business segments. A spokesperson stated that affected employees are being supported during this transition. Thomson Reuters also anticipates hiring over 250 net-new engineering roles globally in the next two years.

Toronto, Ontario

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4613381-thomson-reuters-to-cut-up-to-500-engineering-roles

Two established cybersecurity companies, Rapid7 and Snyk, have recently implemented job cuts as they navigate the evolving threat landscape. These reductions come as both organizations welcome new leadership focused on adapting to the rise of artificial intelligence. The industry faces pressure from AI-powered threats and the need to integrate AI for operational efficiency. Newer, AI-native competitors are emerging, challenging established players to innovate. These layoffs reflect a broader industry trend of adapting to technological advancements and market pressures.

Boston, MA

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/14/business/rapid7-layoffs-snyk-cybersecurity-jobs/

The most productive thing you can do today? Embrace JOMO. We’ve all been raised on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but in the corporate world, FOMO is just a polite term for a bottleneck.

If you feel the need to be in every 30-person meeting to "stay aligned," you aren't leading; you’re hovering. If you need to be CC'd on every email thread to "feel informed," you aren't empowering; you’re slowing the engine.

At Verizon, we are architecting an AI-enabled ecosystem to eliminate "the mundane". But tech alone won't give us speed. We need a cultural pivot from "Agreeable to Accountable".

JOMO - The Joy of Missing Out —is the ultimate leadership flex. * It’s the joy of trusting your team to take "Total Ownership" of the talent lifecycle without you in the room.

When we stop trying to be everywhere, we finally give our leaders the space to be innovative and quick. Speed doesn't come from more eyes on a project; it comes from fewer, more decisive ones.

Let’s stop rewarding "presence" and start rewarding "impact."
Who’s brave enough to decline that 4:00 PM "update" meeting and trust the team to handle it? That’s the BOLD standard.

#Leadership #JOMO

This will be a giant black (or brown in his case. . .) mark on the AK regime. Thankfully, there's no way they can keep AK in-charge for much longer after this historical disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ibm-shares-sink-18-on-earnings-warning-d115d564

Weakness in infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, as clients shifted spending to hardware and memory

By: Robbie Whelan and Robb M. Stewart |
Updated July 14, 2026 10:52 am ET

International Business Machines shares sank as much as 25% in morning trading after the company issued a profit warning citing a shift in customer spending from software to AI hardware and memory chips.

IBM said the performance of its software and infrastructure business fell short of expectations in the second quarter, and the company didn’t react quickly enough to changing market conditions. Tuesday’s share decline was the largest intraday percentage decrease for the company on record.

Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a letter to investors that the weakness in IBM’s infrastructure arm was worse than anticipated, driven by a shortfall in demand for the z17, the company’s flagship enterprise mainframe designed for the artificial intelligence age. The company expects infrastructure revenue to fall 7%, after previously anticipating a low-single-digit decline.

The rapid rise of AI caught makers of memory chips, especially the building blocks of high-bandwidth memory known as DRAM and the short-term flash memory known as NAND, off guard. That led to a capacity crunch that has pushed up prices on a wide variety of products—from laptops and gaming consoles to AI data-center servers—as much as 20% to 40% over a short period of time.

Big enterprise customers like banks—a core customer base for IBM—are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in chip prices because they buy an enormous amount of computing power from cloud companies to run in-house tools.

Consumer-facing companies are also feeling the crunch. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said price increases for its devices, including the iPhone, were unavoidable. “There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview.

IBM said it plans to report revenue of $17.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.93 a share for the June quarter. Both figures are short of analysts’ expectations of $17.9 billion and $3.01 a share.

Its pretax income margin is expected to have contracted 90 basis points, to 14.4%.

IBM is scheduled to release its official second-quarter figures next week.

Krishna said that in the past few weeks of June, clients shifted their quarterly capital expenditures toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases.

“While we anticipated some supply chain-related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization,” Krishna said.

“These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered,” Krishna said. He explained that IBM didn’t adapt and move quickly enough, and a number of large deals failed to close on the timelines expected.

“IBM got hit with a triple whammy,” Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne said in a note to clients Tuesday. “The AI buildout is concentrating capex in hardware like memory chips and diverting spend from software and services. Markets are going to punish legacy players showing signs of losing ground in the AI race.”

Bourne predicted that as more customers shift away from software as a service to more enterprise AI, investors could see more quarters like this one: “But I think it’s a disruption story, not necessarily an extinction one for legacy software companies. Spending patterns will shift from the present focus, and the vendors that adapt their products to the changing market will stay competitive.”

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ibm-sends-shockwave-through-tech-industry-ai-warning

Published: July 14, 2026 9:25am EDT

Seems like yes layoffs are coming at some point based on what Lanell is saying. A lot of language around "roles shifting" and that "decisions will be made as we learn more"

Between that and AI this company is really trying it's absolute hardest to run itself into the ground.

From Bloomberg (paywalled)

“You really don’t need the latest cutting-edge, incredibly expensive model to summarize an analyst report,” Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said on an analyst call Tuesday after the firm reported its second-quarter results. “So the idea is use the right model for the right purpose.”

bwahahahahahaha.

Charlie Scharf: oh yeah? Hold my beer while I tokenmaxx.

Twenty-six employees of Meta Platforms have filed a novel lawsuit accusing the tech giant of using AI-powered software that disproportionately targeted people with disabilities ‌or who took medical leave in selecting workers for mass layoffs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/meta-used-ai-target-workers-135207675.html

How can fiscam justify the push of AI now that the costs are becoming clearer?
Another cost to drive share price much lower!

Just make sure to use the proper pronouns.

😂

Something that executives probably are not telling you is their concern as to the unexpected costs by AI providers (vendors) for AI tokens.

AI is today actually more costly than human beings workforce performing the same tasks.

Now I know they have been telling you that their goal for AI is not to replace anyone but rather to assist them in their daily work to focus on higher learnt daily tasks. Well, that is simply an outright lie (or fabrication if I am to be more civil in my wording).

They most definitely want to replace you!

Unfortunately for them, they probably had to ramp up letting persons go before AI had “learned” everything simply because AI is costing large corporations way more monies than they anticipated. So, to keep stock prices up and shareholders happy, they have had to earlier than anticipated had to layoffs folks to offset tje high AI costs.

Notice nothing has been said yet about the true customers (aka the members) as to how things will affect them. That is because members are not even in the equation (the thinking mindset) of the executives, as to their decision making.

Over 2,600 companies have initiated layoff events impacting more than 230,000 employees in 2026. This trend, while significant, shows a 40% decrease compared to the same period in the previous year. Artificial intelligence is frequently cited as the primary reason for these workforce adjustments. However, some analyses suggest that cost-cutting and restructuring may be the underlying drivers. The technology sector has experienced the most substantial job cuts, though manufacturing, retail, and financial services have also seen reductions.

United States

https://eciks.org/13243-29978-employee-layoffs-2026-230000-workers

Many technology firms are implementing frequent workforce reductions, often termed "continuous tuning," as they navigate evolving business priorities and invest heavily in artificial intelligence. This trend, observed across major companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, signifies a shift from cyclical layoffs to a more persistent strategy. Companies cite the need to reallocate resources towards AI development and adapt to technological advancements as primary drivers for these adjustments. While some layoffs are attributed to post-pandemic restructuring, the increasing mention of AI alongside workforce cuts on corporate calls highlights its growing influence. Experts suggest this approach, driven by uncertainty and competitive pressures, is likely to become a norm in the tech industry.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-tech-companies-keep-doing-layoffs-ai-2026-7

I am just a T3 employee do I don't know who is going to be laid off. But I am super frustrated with the current messaging by upper management in all areas.

Design has become super important and we are hiring designers like crazy. This should not be the case because design is one of the areas where we need less people as AI has made prototyping easier.

Developers are super important and I hope they don't cut any. Not because I am a developer but because a conventional developer is not equivalent to an AI developer and almost no one gets this. As a tech company, we need more developers not less.

Development Managers is a really bad role now. This used to be a role consisting of developers who wanted to be managers as well. And they are supposed to be able to "develop" their reports from a technical perspective. But a majority of these new development managers from HPOM are not technical at all and don't understand the basics. We now have product owners, agile coaches and even retail managers and DEI coaches as development managers. SAP is increasing the number of development managers of poor quality with no added benefit.

We need more QA colleagues.

AI cannot replace support colleagues and we need to find a more sustainable way to deal with this.

And we probably should replace all executives with AI because they don't seem to do anything for the benefit of customers or stakeholders. They are too obsessed with getting their pensions.

Tokenmaxxing is the Silicon Valley trend of maximizing AI token consumption as a proxy for productivity.

Do you think we will see layoffs this year? Or is the only way out to quit? With all the work there is I can’t imagine there will be any layoffs. They’re even taking work from other locations and need to hire. Even AI is causing more work.

The office is already dead/empty. Curious if they'll sublet one or more of BR's 7 buildings in order to make it feel less like a ghost town? "Don't miss your friends and colleagues, you've got all these new ENERGIZED people to sit and discuss AI with!"

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the body overseeing the implementation of United States monetary policy, has announced the creation of five task forces intended to evaluate and improve the Fed's operations. In a press release, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh named the "external advisers" who will lead each task force, ranging from economics professors to AI investors and corporate executives—executives like Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who will preside over a task force on employment and productivity.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/us-federal-reserve-taps-xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-who-just-laid-off-3-200-employees-to-lead-task-force-on-jobs/

Our area executive has informed several managers that they can encourage employees to cut their hours to avoid layoffs, transitioning from full-time to part-time contracts. SAP HR has engaged McKinsey & Company to determine which employees will be let go, focusing primarily on full-time positions. By reducing hours, employees can sidestep impending layoffs, but the situation is more complex.

Area executives are pushing this strategy not just to save jobs but to illustrate that full-time employees are less favorable compared to part-time workers in the context of AI, which is expected to enhance productivity. While the desire to avoid layoffs is strong, there is a moral dilemma in participating in a scheme that seems designed to benefit only McKinsey and the executives, who stand to gain financially from the layoffs.

Previous layoffs at SAP cost the company €2.5 billion, with minimal savings as funds were redirected to executive bonuses, share buybacks, and AI expenses.

In Germany, refusing to accept reduced hours could jeopardize welfare benefits, complicating the decision further. The question remains: how will you respond if your manager suggests reducing your hours?

Honestly-the uncertainty of this company will greatly improve with new leadership who already know our clients, products and technology. I loved ML but I don’t think he had the tools to manage such a complex environment from a technology perspective. I never knew Dvy but was excited and petrified of her AI roll out plan, she was only here 6 months so not much time to make any meaningful changes. I’m glad we can now roll out AI with a little more thoughtful approach internally. I believe we finally have the right C suite in place -they are far from perfect, But having the understanding of internal Fiserv is a huge knowledge bonus! These guys now have the authority to make the necessary changes Fiserv clients have been looking for in breaking down silos within the company. Clients need to know that this is a really a good thing! Moving forward truly as one Fiserv! Finally!

On LTL they said something about a big AI announcement coming in September. Anyone know what it could be?

I’ve got a feeling that as AI invoked layoffs pick up, we will see a rise in white collar unions. Anyone here open to starting a trend here?

Lumen Technologies has confirmed significant layoffs impacting its Global Partner Solutions team. Approximately 90 employees were affected by these cuts, which occurred early this month. The company stated these changes are necessary to align its workforce with evolving business needs and strategic priorities. This marks the second major layoff for Lumen this year as it shifts focus towards network-as-a-service offerings. The company is prioritizing AI infrastructure and deemphasizing legacy products like voice services.

United States

https://www.channeldive.com/news/lumen-confirms-cuts-to-commercial-organization/824897/

The United States is experiencing a significant surge in tech industry layoffs, accounting for the vast majority of global job reductions. Oracle has emerged as the largest contributor, responsible for nearly 20% of all tech job cuts this year. Major companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are also implementing workforce reductions, often citing AI integration as a driving factor. These layoffs are part of a broader industry trend toward restructuring and optimizing operations for future growth. The phenomenon highlights a global recalibration within the tech sector, with the US at its epicenter.

United States

https://www.thehrdigest.com/tech-layoffs-in-2026-arent-slowing-down-us-remains-the-epicenter/

The downgrade reflects rising business risk and weaker cash flow driven by a massive, capital-intensive AI infrastructure buildout and high customer concentration (e.g., OpenAI). The rating outlook remains stable.

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/type/HTML/id/3592348