#ai

AI is overhyped and I think investors are starting to catch on. I have yet to hear how the AI companies, (ChatGPT, Claude...etc....) are going to make back the money money being spent on datacenters,(100s of billion$). As far as I can tell there really doesn't seem to be a big demand since both Meta and Google are selling their comute to the AI firms rather than using it for their own needs. Also, there is now a race to the bottom on token pricing further exacerbating the issue of profits. I don't see the profits meeting the expenses or even coming close. So, How does this effect Corporate America's embrace of the tech?

After Danny Boy lays everyone off. He is going to bring his 500 cattle’s from Montana to work with AI Verizon

I recently spoke with my manager about my promotion, and was told I need to demonstrate more 'value' by filing patents. But honestly, what is the actual worth of these patents and whitepapers? It’s an open secret that people are just gaming the system with trivial filings just to climb the corporate ladder, and with AI in the mix, this flood of useless filings is only going to skyrocket. To make matters worse, it's common practice to just slap a manager's name on a bogus patent to buy favor and leverage it for a promotion. Can anyone name a single patent filed at Fidelity that has actually generated measurable business value? It feels like high-level performative work disguised as innovation. Why is management particularly in Indian corporate tech culture so obsessed with this metric?

Already used 45k :(

The street loves the “mass layoffs, benefit cuts, zero merit increases, have AI do everything” story. I wonder what the reaction will be a year or two from now?

https://fortune.com/2026/07/14/c-h-robinson-ai-success-secrets-dave-bozeman/

Others seeing this already... Managers running scared schmuck. There time has finally come to learn technology or retire.

And the stories just keep coming.

AK touted how he could eliminate jobs and replace them with AI. Well, now he stew in the aftermath.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ibm-ceo-arvind-krishna-has-nowhere-to-hide-from-ai-c9ff290f

The once-great tech giant’s place in the new tech cycle is in disarray

By: Tim Higgins | July 18, 2026 5:30 am ET

The problem for IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna is that things are going too fast and too slow—all at the same time—and he’s stuck in the middle. That’s a bad place to be in the AI revolution.

Krishna bet big on a hybrid-cloud approach in response to the rise of hyperscalers and has long sold investors on IBM’s role in quantum computing—a next-generation technology he says is three to five years away.

It’s hard to imagine IBM in three years, let alone five, if it has too many more days like this past week.

The stock dropped 25% Tuesday after IBM warned second-quarter results would be far worse than expected. This showed AI isn’t only jeopardizing IBM’s software business, it is making it harder to sell its legacy offerings in an IT market where the new technology is reprioritizing corporate spending away from Big Blue.

It’s the sort of bad dream terrifying plenty of CEOs these days as they try to navigate the revolution. While the biggest tech companies’ cloud businesses have helped position them to adapt to AI, many, like Krishna, find themselves trying to manage legacy businesses even as they struggle to keep pace with emerging, pure-play rivals.

It’s a familiar story that has repeatedly played out in other sectors during prior tech waves. Media, music and cars spring to mind. They all showed that a middle-ground strategy is tough to pull off. Many try, few thrive.

IBM’s current predicament is especially galling given it was once at the forefront of AI with Watson, a natural-language computer processing system that won “Jeopardy!” Big Blue squandered that lead, languished in the following years and today is far, far behind the likes of AI leaders such as Anthropic, which created leading model Claude and is chasing the kinds of corporate customers that once made IBM so dominant.

“IBM trading like Claude mu---red Watson,” Ken Wattana, founder of an AI agentic company called Conto, joked on X Tuesday.

The stock fell harder than it did in the 1987 Black Monday stock-market crash.

For a while, Krishna, an IBM lifer, seemed to be pulling off the middle-ground balancing act. He used his army of consultants to help clients navigate AI while positioning the company to milk its legacy mainframe and software businesses and to offer more tailored AI products.

He essentially bet that corporate clients running critical programs on their own mainframes purchased from IBM couldn’t or wouldn’t migrate to remote data centers offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Instead, Krishna believed his customers would jump at being able to straddle the two worlds. They would gain cloud-computing-like capabilities while keeping certain digital needs in-house. And IBM would be the bridge making this happen.

It was initially a hard sell to investors, but Krishna was well suited for it. There’s something almost statesmanlike about the executive. His manners, his dress, his demeanor.

He even managed to turn a potential liability—at 63 he is older by decades than the executives running emerging rivals—into a selling point. Those extra years, Krishna argued to me in an interview last summer, give him insight into how tech cycles work—the ups and the downs.

“AI is in the first innings,” he said then. “It’s still early to see how the game works out and how it goes along.”

Investors eventually came around. Before this past week, IBM shares had more than doubled since Krishna was named CEO in 2020. That growth pales in comparison with Apple, Alphabet and other tech giants. But it was encouraging to some investors given IBM’s struggles the prior decade.

And Krishna showed he could weather a storm.

In February, Anthropic announced the creation of an AI tool that can rewrite Cobol computer code into a modern language. This seemingly blew a hole in the moat around IBM’s legacy business and Krishna’s hybrid strategy. The stock had what would be its worst day in 25 years—until this week.

Krishna suggested the market had overreacted in February. “I actually think that we were hit in a way that was unfair,” he said on the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast weeks later.

His argument: Rival software companies were at risk to AI while the role of handling client databases and key business functions—presumably IBM’s role—would remain valuable in the years to come.

But he understood investors’ angst. “To give full credit to investors, they’re saying, ‘Look, I can’t decide today…who are the few who might benefit…If I can’t determine that, I’ll take the sector down and then over time that’ll determine itself based on the numbers that you print,’ ” Krishna said.

He was correct for a while. A pair of announcements about AI and quantum computing in May helped IBM shares not only recover from their February swoon, but reach new heights in June.

One of those announcements included IBM and the Commerce Department detailing plans to invest billions of dollars to help fund a quantum chip foundry. This would produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors.

IBM has spent decades working on the idea of quantum computing, getting increasingly more serious in the past 10 years. Krishna is targeting 2029 to deliver the first large-scale quantum computer. The technology uses quantum physics to perform calculations that today’s computers can’t even approach. The potential for discoveries in material science, healthcare and beyond are staggering.

Krishna has staked a lot of IBM’s future on the belief that quantum will unlock the same kind of growth potential that was seen with GPU chips. Those chips popularized by Nvidia have been at the heart of the new AI race, powering much of the advances and, in turn, making that tech company among the most valuable in the world.

But some believe the technology won’t be commercially viable for 10 years or more, far longer than Krishna is hoping.

In the meantime, investors are left with, in Krishna’s own words, “the numbers that you print.” Suddenly, for IBM and Krishna, there’s no middle ground in those.

We can replace Stankey for around 5k, and save the company $30 million+ per year. This doesn’t even include stock losses this dum--ss boomer has caused.

We give AI The Handmaid’s Tale, Elon’s annotated version of Mein Kampf, and tell it to always make the d-mbest decision possible. Abracadabra, we’ve replaced John Stankey and saved the company 30 mil a year.

Seeing all the panic about no raises this year and past cuts. Honestly im not worried about job security at all.
Were going hard on AI with AgentStack and that Autonomous Knowledge Platform. Leadership is putting the money where it counts to actually win instead of little bumps. Cloud numbers looking good and we got cash from the SAP settlement. Feels solid to me.
On a personal note this place reminds me of the strength in the LDS Church. The Mormon Church does such a great job building for the long term, focusing on preparation, self reliance and helping people. Their community is so strong and they invest smart in the future. Tithing, welfare programs and emphasis on education its all about thriving even when things get tough. Grateful for that example it keeps me positive here too. As it says in the Bible "therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself" (Matthew 6:34). And "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). That faith helps a lot.
Still bullish on my role and the roadmap. No need for everyone to freak out.
Anyone else at Teradata feeling the same?

Some employees are trying to learn AI on the job to future-proof their careers, but in practice, it isn’t being used effectively to resolve real bugs or drive actual development. There’s a gap between the push to adopt AI and its real, practical impact on day-to-day engineering work.

Why use AI .. apply human mind that is better to development more efficient than AI… human is always win ai just help on that nothing else

If everyone gets laid off, who’s left to develop the product and fix bugs? It’s already tough. Also, AI tools like Claude don’t reliably do what you ask.

I am so tired of this AI cr-p. Customers hate the customer service reps that are outside of the US and they make that clear every day! But now AI is covering up their voices. Their pitch changes every few moments and their voice goes fast then slow and changes from male to female and back. Outsourced reps spend minutes circling between saying “oh, by the way…., with this one”, and multiple phrases that make no sense over and over again. All our customers want is to have a comfortable conversation with someone they CAN relate to, someone that IS familiar and close to home. The company needs to respect customers and their needs by only offering native home speakers in the customer’s home language. If you are a global company then you have the ability to do that. There are plenty of US employees that don’t need to be RIFed and would love to have the position. Just like we send a lot of Spanish calls to MX, those customers should speak with someone that has no “gr---o” accent so it’s more comfortable for them. AI can detect the accent and place them with the correct dialect.

No one wants to hire you because, they have AI. AT&T doesn’t want to keep you because you don’t live in hub. What a bad thing to be a T employee.

The company has been using AI buzzwords and based on what we have seen internally, nothing has changed. RL uses pre scripted sentences and Sydney, HealthOS, data / information / insights (stop it), make it easy for members but all of the upside has been by cutting workforce or moving work at cheaper contract rates to vendors (nothing to do with AI), and all this has forced rest of the team to pick the load. I am sure there was waste - but attributing anything to AI or technological transformation is BIG overkill. There is nothing new, no real tech or AI strategy that has been shown since RL and gang came in. He just manages up at cost of real frontline workers. We see it every day.

There is nothing new, people are frustrated, new tech leaders are clueless and trying to figure out how to stay relevant by deliberately telling all things are broken, no respect for anyone with prior knowledge. I am sure in another 6 months to a year questions will be asked and leaders will blame each other. Front line managers and engineers / workforce is feeling the pressure and looking for leadership which does not exist. It’s a shame how the company is being run into ground.

A U.S. judge has refused to stop Meta Platforms from proceeding with layoffs affecting 26 employees. These workers claim the company used AI tools to unfairly target them for job cuts due to disabilities or medical leave. The judge stated the employees did not demonstrate irreparable harm to warrant an emergency injunction. Meta denies wrongdoing and asserts human decision-making in the layoff process. The company is in the midst of reducing its global workforce by approximately 10%.

Oakland, California

https://wkzo.com/2026/07/17/us-judge-wont-block-meta-from-laying-off-workers-who-filed-ai-discrimination-lawsuit/

Everyone's exhausted hearing the word AI. It's in every memo, every excuse for why headcount keeps shrinking. Fine. Let's actually use it, then. Not to write emails faster. To see the picture clearly.

We used it to pull profit numbers back to the year this company formed. Not a single loss year in over two decades.

We used it to compare executive pay against the exact years benefits got cut.

We used it to see that severance costs are often a fraction of what gets paid out in dividends in a matter of weeks.

We used it to understand who stock buybacks actually benefit, and it is not the person worried about their next paycheck.

We used it to recognize known corporate playbooks: titles structured to strip organizing rights, restructuring that lines up with headcount targets already decided.

We used it to confirm national union density has been eroding for seventy years, and we're living the tail end of it.

We used it to separate real savings from cost shifting, franchise conversions and rehire-at-a-lower-rate schemes that look like savings but are wage suppression with extra steps.

None of this required insider access. It's all public, buried under enough jargon that reading it feels like a second job.

So if they're going to hand us the tool and tell us to use it or get left behind, use it. Educate yourself on the company you actually work for. Don't take what they hand you in a rally with the claps and the p-m poms as the whole picture. Pull the numbers. Pull the board backgrounds. Pull the org chart changes. Do the research yourself, not because someone told you what to think, but because you finally can see it for yourself.

Once enough of us see the same picture, at the same time, the direction gets a lot less complicated.

There was a recent discussion in IBM's fall because of AI transformation. Do we have similar issues with Oracle ? more On-prem customers leaving Oracle because of Cloud adoption ? or we are able to successfully convert them ?

Has anyone achieved running out of capacity with any of the models? Today I just got a message that 5.6-Sol Ultra has run out of capacity. “Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model.” So what’s this mean for Oracle and the budget? lol Stocks aren’t looking good. Now we will have imposed limits on AI but also expected to change our entire SDLC over to agentic?

To me it sounds like the noose is slowly closing in on Oracles wallet.

One NM™

Interesting. Twenty years ago we watched many greedy 1% globalists in many company leadership launch “One ___” transformations.

Different logo. Different PowerPoint template. Same promise:

• Break down silos.
• Align the organization.
• Transform the culture.
• This time it’s different.

The only real update for 2026 seems to be replacing “Digital Transformation” with “AI Transformation.”

Somewhere, a McKinsey consultant dusted off the old “One Company” deck, asked ChatBot to modernize the buzzwords, swapped “cloud” for “AI,” and sent the invoice.

The cynic in me is waiting for Phase 2:

• Announce AI.
• Hire consultants.
• Reorganize org charts.
• Explain why “global talent strategy” is the future and replace employees with offshore sweatshops and indentured foreigners.
• Celebrate short-term cost savings.
• Wonder five years later where all the institutional knowledge went.

History doesn’t repeat itself—it just gets rebranded.

CDW has recently conducted layoffs as part of an organizational restructuring. The company stated these changes are intended to sharpen operating discipline and reinvest in high-growth opportunities. This move aligns with CDW's AI-first initiative, aiming to enhance efficiency and customer focus. The exact number of affected employees was not disclosed. Previous layoffs at CDW occurred in July of last year and in April 2023.

Vernon Hills, Illinois

https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2026/cdw-cuts-jobs-as-ai-cost-cutting-drive-takes-hold

https://www.crn.com/news/channel-news/2026/cdw-cuts-jobs-as-ai-cost-cutting-drive-takes-hold

Upcoming role changes and AI agents (which seem promising so far), including mandatory check-ins, are all on the horizon. What's everyone's consensus on this? 🤔

We have fiber and FWA. Why don’t we leverage AI coding tools and OSS Home automation aggregation products to build our own free single pane of glass product to control virtually any home IoT device??? That’s value. We likely all have home IoT devices. The built in home aggregate software that comes with Android and iOS is all hot garbage. It’s low hanging fruit for a company that aims to have an operating income of 25B by 2028. We could become the defacto home automation platform. It could be a freebee for our customers and a paid product for those that are not with us for one reason or another. If your answer is we can’t do this because we su-k. Well then we should probably solve that. Because this sounds pretty simple and easy if we can get out of our own way. If Dan can’t figure out how to bend the company into something that can pull an idea like this off. Then he isn’t doing anything besides cutting jobs. Thus Wall Street should analyze us down. This is a low cost value proposition that a company with profits north of 20B should easily be able to pursue with AI coding tools these days.

Our group seems to have a huge amount of money suddenly available and needing to be spent by EOY. Like… 100x what we spent on our most recent software implementation. Meanwhile other groups are still getting the “penny pinching” message I have heard most of my time here. And AI token costs are hitting. Anyone else confused?

Does anyone else feel that Leadership thinks we are a bunch of AI illiterates? AI is in its infancy right now, yes in a few years it will capable of replacing employees. But lets be honest, right now it has a lot of limitations.

Am I to understand we're getting yet another Pepsi person at Paradigm? In charge of MDR and AI Products? What the he-l does that even mean? We're just making up executive positions.

And yet another vendor that is friends with G-yatri doing some bad live podcast that he got paid god knows what to do?

More nepotism happening at Paradigm than the White House.

Maybe I'll look for work at Pepsi, seems to be the only place safe from G-yatri's friends at this point.

Oracle Stock Slides To 52-Week Low Amid AI Spending Fearshttps://www.investors.com/news/technology/oracle-stock-slump-open-ai/?src=A00220

Can't stop laughing !!

https://newsroom.intel.com/artificial-intelligence/intel-google-cloud-announce-collaboration-to-accelerate-intel-ai-enabled-enterprise-transformation

Does that mean intel going to cut more people ?

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-openai-bubble/#the-ai-bubble-is-an-openai-bubble-%E2%80%94-to-a-mortal-end

Now that I have your attention..,

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna tries to run a tight ship, but his legacy is famously marked by aggressive restructuring, massive stock plunges, and replacing human brains with AI.

Oh, Arvind Krishna sat in his chair,
With billions to make and a plan to prepare.
"Let’s fire some humans!" the CEO cried,"
And sweep our old mainframes all to the side!"

He gazed at the servers, the cloud, and the code,
While trimming the headcount along the dark road.
He aimed for the future with bright, shiny eyes,
But instead of a rocket, the stock took a dive!

He promised us Watson would cure every ill,
But the clients just yawned and refused the red pill.
When large deals all stalled at the end of the year,
He wrote us a letter confessing the fear:
“We failed to adapt, yes, we faltered quite fast,
And seventy billion just vanished at last!”

So here’s to the boss who replaced us with bots,
While hoarding his millions and tying in knots.
Just remember to breathe when your mainframe goes down,
And King Arvind smiles from his deep-learning crown.

UnitedHealth reported Q2 earnings this morning, and it’s worth looking beyond the headline. Digging in we see:

Highlights:

• Revenue: $111.6B (+14%)
• Adjusted EPS: $6.38, well above expectations
• Medical Loss Ratio: 86.7%, better than expected
• Raised full-year guidance
• Continued emphasis on improving the quality and profitability of the book of business, even if it means fewer members.

Official results:
https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/newsroom/2026/2026-07-16-uhg-reports-second-quarter-2026-results.html

The contrast with Centene couldn’t be much clearer. Both companies are dealing with membership pressure. The difference is that UnitedHealth is framing fewer members as a strategic choice in pursuit of a stronger operating model. Pricing, product decisions, analytics, AI, clinical execution, and disciplined growth all appear to be moving in the same direction.

Centene has spent the last year talking about Mission Simplify, reorganizations, buyouts, cost discipline, and a smaller organization. The stock has rebounded sharply from last year’s selloff, but that’s regained investor confidence… not necessarily proof the operating model has materially improved. It’s easy to look at the stock price this year vs. same time last year when it was in the dumpster.

The key takeaway and where the focus should be: Healthcare is no longer a game of who has the most members. It’s become who can generate the best outcomes with the members they have. With me so far?

Both companies will definitely end up serving fewer people. The difference is whether that’s the result of a stronger operating model… or simply a smaller organization. Both companies are getting smaller. UnitedHealth is treating it as a strategy. Centene is trying to convince investors it’s an opportunity.

And then there’s AI. UnitedHealth isn’t starting from scratch. While they’ve been embedding analytics and AI deeper into the operating model, Centene was very slow out of the blocks… and it has spent much of the last year restructuring, reducing costs, and trying to regain its footing. That’s a lot of ground to make up as AI becomes the next competitive battleground. Maybe they have the core competency internally, but I’ve never seen it, and you definitely can’t outsource it.

One of Centene’s guiding principles the past couple of years, “We do what’s right, not what’s easy.” The easy part was making the company smaller. The hard part is proving it became better.

The stage gets much bigger on the 27th. That’s where leadership has to show investors that Mission Simplify wasn’t just about reducing costs, but it’s resulted in a fundamentally stronger company. That’s what the market will be listening for. I’m not very optimistic they’ll pull it off.

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/