#white-collar · How AI Is Reshaping Work

Hays booked £905.5M in net fees, down 8% like-for-like. The split is where the information is: clients still want the work done, they just will not put the person on the payroll. The company answered by exiting 74 offices and selling six country businesses.

One in five US workers is weighing a move into a trade or manual job because of AI, and 3% say they are already in the middle of switching. The finding worth reading twice: the workers with the least confidence about AI are not the ones ignoring it.

Lowe's says Mylow has fielded roughly 25 million customer questions and that shoppers who use it convert at three times the rate of those who don't. Those 25 million questions used to be asked of the person standing in the aisle.

The first US state body chartered specifically around AI displacement opened its hearings on the back office. It named an occupation and a population, then set a deadline that lands a year behind the corporate timetables it is responding to.

Microdata from Korea's Economically Active Population Survey shows employment among 15-to-29-year-olds fell by 191,362 year on year in July. Information & communications alone accounted for 74,517 of that, the steepest single-month drop since the series became analyzable in 2014.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

Genpact posted $1.343B in Q2 revenue, up 7.1%, with employees down both sequentially and year over year. The CEO said the company is 「just getting started」 on headcount.