A monthly read on how AI and robots are reshaping work. Two series each month — AI replacements and robotics — distilled from the daily reporting on this site. Free.
Monthly Report Of 52,881 announced layoffs in August, Challenger tagged 3,462 to AI, down from first place for five straight months to fourth. Uber, Jaguar Land Rover and BMW all went after management first, and Salesforce priced its software by outcome instead of by head.
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Monthly Report Tesla builds several hundred Optimus a week and none of them does paid work. The same month, Agility's SEC filing priced a warehouse humanoid at $8,500 a month, and Dongfeng, Toyota and Samsung put dates on the factory floor. Output and paid work finally have separate numbers.
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Monthly Report Layoffs hit a two-year low and payrolls still went negative. Cisco posted a 30-year high in earnings per employee. Meta priced its May cut at $147,500 a head. The unit of account changed this month.
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Monthly Report Unitree turned over 85% of its float on listing day and the robot count never moved. The same month, Xiaomi put a humanoid success rate in its earnings release: 98.0%, at a named workstation. Both anchors were visible at once.
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Monthly Report Intel cut the division that just grew 59%. Amazon raised AI capex to $220B while trimming the team that builds its models. Proximity to the frontier stopped being a shield this month.
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Monthly Report Humanoid makers stampeded toward the public markets in July — Unitree's registration went effective, Agility locked its SPAC, Europe minted its first unicorn — while Tesla confirmed on its earnings call that verified Optimus production is still zero.
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Monthly Report In June, Oracle admitted in an SEC filing that AI cut 21,000 jobs — the one place where lying carries legal weight is where the company finally said it.
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Monthly Report By June, factories could build a humanoid an hour — but paying customers were still in the single digits. The month's funding total read like the market was already full.
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Monthly Report In May, PayPal wrote the template for fellow CFOs: turn AI replacement into a financial commitment.
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Monthly Report In May, Hyundai put the first hard number against a humanoid program — and pulled the whole sector out of demo reels into a real production schedule.
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