How AI Is Reshaping Work

Dentsu will close 70 to 80 international legal entities this fiscal year and 50 to 80 more by FY2028, taking Global HQ costs down about 30% and routing part of the savings into AI and data technology. The plan names no layoff figure.

Applied Materials reported its fastest sequential revenue growth ever on August 13: $9.1B, up 25% year over year. On the same call, the CEO credited AI with scaling revenue faster than headcount and the CFO said the company added more than 1,500 people, every one of them in manufacturing or field support.

Globant reported $614.4M in Q2 on August 13, against $614.2M a year earlier, with 2,673 fewer employees. Same revenue, fewer people, and gross margin went the wrong way: 33.9% against 35.4%.

IBM named an OpenAI partnership on August 13. The headline is GPT-5.6 inside IBM Consulting Advantage. The load-bearing sentence is that thousands of IBM consultants will sit for OpenAI Partner Network certifications.

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab released a revised Canaries in the Coal Mine paper on August 12. Workers 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now sit about 19% below their less-exposed peers. The revision names a mechanism for the first time: the jobs falling are the ones built on written-down knowledge.

Cisco closed fiscal 2026 on August 12 with Q4 revenue of $17.3B, up 18%, and GAAP net income up 51%. CFO Mark Patterson said the year set 30-year highs in revenue, non-GAAP operating margin and earnings per employee. Cisco cut roughly 4,000 people three months ago.

An internal document says Oracle wants some teams cut by double digits before September 1, weeks after the company disclosed it had already eliminated 21,000 jobs and named AI as a cause.

On August 11 Spotify said it will label AI-generated artist identities. Labeling is the headline. Cutting those profiles out of recommendations is the policy.

Rapid7 packaged a 12% workforce reduction into the same August 10 filing as a profitable Q2. Three months earlier the company said GPT-5.5 in its Agentic SOC had cut false-positive queue times by 25%.

The BLS reported a 23,000-job decline for July with unemployment at 4.1%. Two days earlier Challenger counted the fewest announced cuts in two years. Both are accurate, and the gap between them sits on the hiring side.

On the August 7 Q2 call, Scripps CEO Adam Symson gave analysts the year-to-date number: 432 positions eliminated plus 126 open roles pulled. The same day the company booked a $1.2B net loss and the shares climbed more than 20%.

The Wall Street Journal reported August 7 that ad measurement firm VideoAmp cut roughly 20% of staff, calling AI 「a major platform shift」. Sources put the count at 50 to 60 people, including the chief technology officer.