🎉 CEO replacing workers with AI

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Good Afternoon Party People! 🎉

Last week, we brought you good news. Non-competes are banned!

This week, our news isn’t as positive. Companies replacing workers with AI. Layoffs. Stuff that isn’t so fun.

But, we bring you ALL the news (good and bad) so that you can stay in the loop in your career.

And we have great memes are resources to make up for the bad news today!

Let’s have a PARTY!

PARTY PLAN 🎉

🤖 Meet the CEO replacing workers with AI…

✖️ Top productivity killer at work

✂️ Layoffs, layoffs, layoffs

And, of course, MEMES!

MEME OF THE DAY

AI

This CEO is Replacing Workers With AI

Oh no. Not another CEO cost-cutting by “hiring AI”.

The dystopian nightmare of all workers being replaced by robots is becoming more and more real.

IBM’s chief executive, Arvind Krishna, has been repositioning the company around AI and the cloud since 2020. Now, IBM’s stock is near an all-time high, and it may have to do with the CEO’s plan to replace as many workers with AI as possible.

In an interview last year, Krishna said he could see thousands “back office” roles like human resources replaced by AI.

He did add that he thinks AI will create more jobs than it replaces overall

(Just not as his company)

IBM has already reduced the number of employees working manual HR jobs from 700 to about 50.

This year, he announced plans to cut costs by $3 billion, in part by laying off thousands of workers that could be fully or nearly replaced by AI.

He’s not the first to claim that AI is replacing TONS of workers…

Klarna recently claimed that AI is doing the work of 700 employees.

IBM was one of the first major companies to invest in AI, so it’s not a surprise to see that they’re trying to get the most out of the technology they’ve built and invested in.

💡 In fact, IBM has been working on AI since as early as the 1950s!

However, their technology first started to garner lots of attention when their supercomputer beat Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings on live TV in 2011.

Simpler times.

JOB SEEKERS’ CORNER 🎉

WORKPLACE

This is KILLING Workplace Productivity

This could have been an email. No, seriously.

Meetings are the great destroyer of productivity.

Your boss yappin’. Your co-worker talking about their cat for 20 minutes. You unmute yourself at the end of the call just to say “Thanks, talk soon!”.

Excessive meetings are more than just an inconvenience, according to a study of 5,000 workers across four continents.

💡 According to Atlassian, meetings are a bigger drain on productivity than lack of motivation, unclear responsibilities and expectations, and other roadblocks. 

You hear that, managers?! Cut ‘em out!

Nearly 4 out of every 5 workers surveyed said they’re expected to attend so many meetings that it’s hard to get work done. 77% said meetings usually result in a follow up or “check-in” meeting.

Meetings…to discuss meetings…that call for more meetings.

And more than half the workers said they leave meetings without even having a clear idea of what to do next!

Half of all workers surveyed said they regularly work overtime to make up for time spent in meetings.

Workers reported that the more effective meetings stick to a strict agenda. Most said all the goals of a 30-minute meeting could be accomplished in half the time. If a company requires workers to attend 30-minute daily meetings, that’s 130 hours a year, most likely wasted! Multiplied by every employee at the company, that’s a ton of time and productivity that the company is costing itself.

💡 Atlassian says the best trick for employees losing time spent in meetings is to block time on their calendars for everything.

Rather than just blocking time for appointments, meetings, etc., it’s shown to boost productivity by blocking time for things like “deep work” and responding to messages.

A similar study in 2022 by project management firm Asana pointed out the productivity drain caused by excessive notifications.

In other words, let your workers cook!

LAYOFFS

Here We Are Again…

Meta is reportedly “gearing up for more layoffs.” Google is undergoing another round of “large scale” layoffs that may affect thousands of employees in finance, business operations, and more.

(They will also be offshoring roles in India, Mexico, and Ireland)

And in a major development, according to reports emerging online, Google has allegedly fired its entire to Python team.

(Python is a highly sophisticated, general-purpose programming language)

Below is the latest in layoffs, per MacroEdge:

• Roughly 73,000 Oregonians are now working part-time jobs because their hours have been cut or because they want a full-time job but haven’t been able to find one, a figure that has more than tripled in the last two years, per the Oregon Employment Department.

• American Electric Power will be offering severance packages to up to 7,400 of its 16,800 employees starting next week.

• In the first quarter of 2024, 622 CEOs announced their departures, the highest quarterly total on record. It is up 49% from the 418 exits in the first quarter of last year. (Does this count as layoffs? 🤣)

• Cirque Du Soleil is laying off hundreds of employees in Nevada. (Looks like the world is enough of a circus, people don’t want to go to shows!)

• Southwest Airlines will shed around 2,000 employees globally as part of a cost cutting drive.

• Whirlpool is cutting over 1,000 jobs in the United States.

• Solar giant Sunpower will cut 1,000 jobs which is about 30% of their total workforce.

• State Street, the largest custodian bank in the world, is gearing up for layoffs that will reportedly begin as soon as this week.

• Jeep maker Stellantis is planning to lay off a substantial number of workers at its U.S. factories in the coming months to deal with a rapidly changing global auto market.

• Fisker is reportedly laying off around 500 employees as its cash reserves dwindle.

• Lumen Technologies is reportedly laying off 660 employees.

• Bankrupt retailer Express will shed around 2,660 employees and shutter 95 stores nationwide.

• Layoffs under Swiss banking giant UBS's cost-cutting program will take place in five waves this year starting in June, with around 30k-35k employees affected in total.

Rough week.

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