Meta is testing robots for data center maintenance, from swapping cables to restarting servers, raising questions about automation and IT staffing.
The post Meta Tests Robot Technicians: Inside Its Push to Automate Data Center Work appeared first on TechRepublic.
Meta is testing robots for data center maintenance, from swapping cables to restarting servers, raising questions about automation and IT staffing.
The post Meta Tests Robot Technicians: Inside Its Push to Automate Data Center Work appeared first on TechRepublic.
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Bill Gates argues some jobs should remain human as AI advances, proposing “Human Reserved” roles and new taxes intended to curb worker displacement.
The post Bill Gates Says Some Jobs Should Be Off-Limits to AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
Bill Gates argues some jobs should remain human as AI advances, proposing “Human Reserved” roles and new taxes intended to curb worker displacement.
The post Bill Gates Says Some Jobs Should Be Off-Limits to AI appeared first on TechRepublic.
Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta’s internal affairs.
Reuters’ report highlights the challenges organizations face when analyzing the best uses for AI and determining when the technology is a better fit for certain tasks than employees.
Meta confirmed to Reuters that the plan, reportedly codenamed Project OT (short for organization transformation), explored scenarios in which Meta reduced some team headcounts by 60 percent and that the plan called for two rounds of layoffs. Meta wouldn’t confirm which teams Project OT affected.
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For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.
The August 2026 edition of "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence" updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers ages 22 to 25 in the most "AI-exposed" occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.
Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.
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The Seattle region outranked New York, Austin, Boston and other tech hubs, trailing only the Bay Area, in an annual tech talent scorecard from commercial real estate firm CBRE that weighs factors such as tech worker concentration, wages, education levels and real estate costs.
You may have seen headlines this week that New York overtook the Bay Area for the first time in the CBRE rankings. That was based on a subset of the data: a straight head count in each market. New York’s 394,300 tech workers topped the Bay Area’s 375,730. Seattle ranks seventh on that specific list, with 213,010 tech workers across the region.
But in the broader scorecard, Seattle held onto the No. 2 spot (which it also occupied last year), thanks to the density of its tech workforce, one of the largest concentrations of AI talent in North America, and the second-highest tech wages on the continent.
The market-by-market workforce figures in the report run through 2025, so this year’s layoffs aren’t reflected in the rankings. CBRE does flag the trend nationally: the tech industry accounted for a record 31% of all U.S. job cuts through June, up from 13% for all of last year.
Some of the Seattle region’s specific strengths:
The AI workforce is deep. Seattle is home to 41,591 workers with AI skills, third most in North America, behind the Bay Area and New York. One in five of the region’s tech workers now has AI skills — a higher share than anywhere except the Bay Area.
Tech is a bigger part of the economy here. Tech jobs make up 10.2% of all employment in the metro area, among the top five markets and nearly double the 5.5% average across the 50 markets studied in the CBRE report.
Wages are in a tier of their own. Seattle’s average wage for tech workers at tech companies was $190,050 in 2024, second to the Bay Area’s $211,048, and nearly $50,000 above third-place Boston.
The workforce grew while the Bay Area’s shrank. Seattle added 24,590 tech jobs from 2022 to 2025, a 13.1% increase and the fifth-largest gain of any market. The Bay Area lost 23,900 jobs over the same time period.
However, the report also points to warning signs:
Many offices are sitting empty. The Seattle metro area’s office vacancy rate hit 28.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — the highest of the 50 markets in the report. That’s despite 1.9 million square feet leased by AI companies across the region since 2023, according to CBRE.
Costs are near the top. Seattle is the third-most-expensive place to run a 500-person tech company, at $73.9 million a year in wages and office rent, behind the Bay Area at $90.6 million and slightly behind New York, which edged Seattle by about $24,000.
Young workers are going elsewhere. Seattle’s 20-something population fell between 2019 and 2024, even as its share of 30-somethings grew to the highest of any market in the report. The region is drawing mid-career but not entry-level talent, which risks creating a thinner pipeline over time.
One counterweight to the pipeline concern: the University of Washington ranks fifth among U.S. universities for its AI program, according to CBRE’s analysis of U.S. News & World Report rankings — the only school outside the Bay Area, Boston and Pittsburgh in the top five.
Access the full CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report here.
The number of product research and development roles at Microsoft declined for the second straight year, according to the company’s annual regulatory filing, offering a new indication of how the tech giant is reshaping its workforce in the AI era.
Microsoft’s total headcount declined by 5,000 people to 223,000 as of June 30, according to its Form 10-K, filed with the SEC this week. It’s the first annual employment decline for Microsoft since 2016, when the company was writing off and winding down its Nokia smartphone business.
The trend is notable in part because, over the same time period, Microsoft’s revenue rose 18%, or $50.1 billion, to $331.8 billion — the largest one-year increase in the company’s history.
Here’s how the employment trends break down:
The numbers reflect the roughly 9,000 jobs Microsoft cut on July 2, 2025, two days into its fiscal year. They do not reflect the 4,800 cuts announced July 6 of this year — spanning sales, consulting and Xbox — or the thousands of U.S. employees who left in early July under the company’s first voluntary retirement program.
On the earnings call Wednesday, CFO Amy Hood confirmed that “total company headcount declined 2% year over year.” She linked a 10% increase in operating expenses to “continued investment in R&D compute capacity, talent, and data to support product development across the portfolio.”
AI coding tools — including Microsoft’s own GitHub Copilot — have become a standard part of how software is built at Microsoft and across the industry, reducing the number of people and the amount of time it takes to ship products, while often expanding the total scope of the work.
Microsoft has repeatedly declined to link its job cuts to AI. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said in a memo earlier this month that the roles being eliminated were not being directly replaced by AI, while acknowledging that “AI is changing how work gets done.”
Tech companies have been keeping a tighter rein on operating expenses, primarily through job cuts, in part to offset soaring capital expenses to support their AI infrastructure buildouts. Microsoft’s capex reached $41 billion in the June quarter alone.
Microsoft is also moving engineers out of product development and into customer-facing roles. The Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion initiative announced July 2, brings together more than 6,000 people to embed engineers inside customers building AI systems — a group drawn “primarily from Microsoft’s existing engineering and forward-deployed teams,” according to the company.
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