2026 · How AI Is Reshaping Work

On September 15 Adecco said it is putting Salesforce's Agentforce Coworker in front of 27,000 employees. Buried further down: agentic AI is already live in recruitment workflows in 10 countries carrying 50% of Adecco business revenues.

Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking on September 15, with Extended Thinking taking first place on Artificial Analysis' speech-to-speech index at 82.6. At the published per-minute rates, an hour of two-way audio runs about $1.38.

On September 15 the Financial Times reported KPMG UK will cut about 200 advisory roles, roughly 4% of the practice, with AI and cybersecurity specialists among those affected. A KPMG spokesperson cited 「low levels of attrition」 alongside a 3% drop in advisory revenue.

At Dreamforce '26 in San Francisco on September 15, Salesforce launched AIforce and said AI is going to replace the user interface. Workers update records and trigger workflows from Claude or Slack without opening Salesforce at all.

At Dreamforce on September 15, Siemens said an engagement agent and a qualification agent now handle its entire inbound funnel for 18,000 sellers. Still unshipped: Piper, which the release calls 「an AI SDR agent」.

Andon Labs opened Pion on September 14, a waitlisted platform for handing a business to persistent agents. The same week, a reporter walked into the company's own AI-run San Francisco shop and found no customers and $60,000 left of the original $100,000.

404 Media reported on September 14 that OpenAI has hundreds of contractors reading real ChatGPT conversations and rating the model's answers. One says the rate clears $50 an hour, the highest price yet disclosed for evaluation work.

Specific Labs published Real-SWE on September 13: ten tasks lifted from private production codebases it licensed from real companies, eight model-and-harness pairs, 640 scored rollouts. Fable 5.1 topped it at 38.8%. The floor was 16.2%.

State broadcaster CCTV carried a China Telecom Research Institute report on September 12: the country's AI industry is moving from competing on models to selling agents. The load-bearing figure is 80% — inference's share of China's compute market by 2029.

Kroger reported Q2 before the bell on September 11, cut its full-year sales outlook and left profit guidance untouched. Across a 47-minute call, nobody said AI, automation or self-checkout once.

On September 11 Business Insider reported that Meta has begun asking engineers inside Applied AI whether they want to lead teams again. Four months after the 4 a.m. email that took the layer out.

On September 11 Oracle raised this year's restructuring cost by $700M, most of it severance, for cuts it has not announced. About 92,000 of its staff sit outside the United States, where a planned redundancy runs on a clock the employer does not control.